Abstract
The chapter draws on a study of software professionals in Bangalore to sketch the cultural orientations and social identity of India’s ‘new middle class’, especially in terms of consumption patterns and lifestyles. It also poses questions about the environmental consciousness of this class through an examination of the globalisation of the city through the agency of IT corporates. By tracing the connections among globalisation, consumption, middle class identity, and political and cultural transformations in the city within the specific context of the software outsourcing industry, the chapter probes the specificities of middle class environmentalism in India and explicates its limitations and possibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper draws on a study of the Indian information technology and IT enabled services (IT/ITES) workforce in India and abroad that was carried out by A.R. Vasavi and me along with a research team at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, during 2004–2006 (Upadhya & Vasavi, 2006). The research project was funded by the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development, the Netherlands, and was carried out in collaboration with Peter van der Veer of the University of Utrecht. Research methods included formal and informal interviews with a large number of IT and ITES employees and managers and their family members, and with others connected with the industry, as well as observations of informal interactions at workplaces and outside. As with the entire project and all my writing from it, the ideas in this paper are as much Vasavi’s as my own and as usual I thank her for her comments, although I retain sole responsibility for any errors. I also thank the organisers and participants in the “Globalizing Lifestyles” workshop at Bremen for their helpful responses.
- 2.
The category of the “middle class” is very slippery in the Indian (or any) context (Deshpande, 2003), and in this paper I do not discuss the problems of definition and identification of this class, which have been debated sufficiently by other scholars. For the present purpose, I understand “middle class” as an economic, political and social category defined primarily in terms of occupation, education, and income/property and with a specific cultural orientation. Most important for the present discussion is the hegemonic position of the urban middle classes in contemporary India.
- 3.
The survey was designed to cover employees of different types of software companies, from large Indian services companies to multinationals to small companies. The final sample size of 132 employees of eight companies was much less than the target of 500, due to difficulties in getting permission to conduct interviews. The selection of respondents in each company was supposed to be by stratified random sampling based on the demographics of the workforce, but the sampling was not exact nor did we have control over the selection of respondents. Given the small sample size and inadequate sampling, the results of this survey should be regarded as indicative rather than representative of IT professionals as a whole. This discussion also draws on the narratives collected through a large number of unstructured interviews.
- 4.
The refrigerator is probably the consumer durable found most commonly in Indian middle class households, but in this sample many did not report refrigerators as an item they personally owned because they were unmarried men or women living in rented accommodation or with their parents.
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Upadhya, C. (2009). India’s ‘New Middle Class’ and the Globalising City: Software Professionals in Bangalore, India. In: Meier, L., Lange, H. (eds) The New Middle Classes. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9938-0_14
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