Success, Market, Ethics

Abstract

The global success of the Information Technology (IT) industry in India is narrated as an unprecedented episode. The rhetoric of success, however, is neither limited to economics nor the IT industry alone. In their collaboration with middle class non-governmental organizations (NGO) it has generated a parallel ethico-political narrative on the failure of the state to alleviate India from the disgrace of a developing country. Drawing on ethnographic work I conducted with IT professionals and their partner NGOs in Bangalore in this article I argue that the ethico-political narrative has initiated two emergent ways of recasting the state and citizenship: first, it has established the indispensable value of the market; second, the IT corporate governance model now offers a blueprint for reforming public governance and citizenship in contemporary India. This dual process, I contend, are crucial ways to understand how the amorphous ideas of neoliberalization are concretely shifting the notion of the nation state from a socialist redistributive model to one based on the market.