Abstract
AbstractIn Dalian Software Park, China's centre for IT‐enabled outsourcing and offshore services, knowledge workers find themselves on the ‘assembly line’ of information processing, carrying out highly routinized, de‐skilled, and poorly paid work for which they are vastly overqualified. Following the recent attention to culture and personhood in studies of global capitalism, I argue that these knowledge workers are motivated by two forms of cosmopolitanism: corporate cosmopolitanism, the capacity to reconcile the supra‐territorial values of ‘global’ corporate culture with local values; and nationalist cosmopolitanism, whereby individual workers see the performance of cultural openness as a way of contributing to China's national project of modernization. As well as providing a rare account of cosmopolitanism in the workplace, this article demonstrates the significance of cosmopolitanism for the global economy. The pursuit of cosmopolitanism creates a productive friction between individual projects of self‐making, corporate projects of disciplining labour, as well as national projects of pursuing modernity and development.
Highlights
Dalian Software Park (DLSP) is one of the many information technology (IT) hubs that have been set up in China in the last twenty years as part of a concerted effort to shift China’s economy ‘up the value chain’, away from a reliance on manufacturing, towards industries driven by science and innovation
I examine cosmopolitanisms, plural, that are being produced in DLSP, where we find almost half of the enterprises are foreign companies
Chinese knowledge workers pursue individual projects of becoming cosmopolitan which are informed by the national project of modernization that is being promoted by the Chinese state
Summary
In Dalian Software Park, China’s centre for IT-enabled outsourcing and offshore services, knowledge workers find themselves on the ‘assembly line’ of information processing, carrying out highly routinized, de-skilled, and poorly paid work for which they are vastly overqualified. As Smitha Radhakrishnan has argued, knowledge workers in the Global South are trained to perform ‘appropriate difference’, whereby local culture is homogenized and essentialized into a generic set of values deemed ‘palatable to Western cosmopolitan culture’. Terming such processes ‘cultural streamlining’, Radhakrishnan shows how the idealized IT professional in Bangalore is at once ‘global’ and ‘Indian’ (2011: 5). I show how Chinese knowledge workers are trained to become reflexive subjects who are able to reconcile Chinese traditions with Western corporate values and perform a curated ‘Chineseness’, an appropriate difference The aim of such corporate initiatives is to produce a sensibility of corporate cosmopolitanism. Chinese middle-class professionals seek to distance themselves from the manufacturing proletariat, and by extension allusions to an old, industrial China, via consumption practices that delineate a global, high-tech identity which, through its particular ethical code, indexes their value and loyalty to the nation
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