"Winner of the ICA Outstanding Book Award, International Communication Association" "Winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize, Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing of the General Anthropology Division, and the Society for the Anthropology of Work" Lilly Irani is associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is a cofounder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon. Twitter @gleemie
A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations.
Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others-craftspeople, workers, and activists-as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.
With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all. "... profoundly comparative with important theoretical implications. This book certainly needs to be read carefully and very widely." "Brilliant ethnography."---Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Asian Journal of Social Science "Chasing Innovation challenges dominant discourses and practices enacted in the name of innovation in contemporary India. Irani is an exemplary scholar who combines original research with careful attention to a range of relevant literature. Written with sophistication, nuance, critical insight, and compassion, this book will be a significant contribution across multiple fields."-Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University "A fascinating piece of scholarship on a critically important topic, this book addresses the rise of entrepreneurship in India as a new model of development. Irani captures the characteristics of the entrepreneurial citizen while taking care to show the enduring power of older developmental imaginaries and social hierarchies. This exemplary ethnographic portrait of twenty-first-century entrepreneurialism is sure to have a wide and varied readership."-Ajantha Subramanian, Harvard University "This is a brilliant, incisive ethnography of the culture of entrepreneurial citizens, and of the belief that clever design and disruptive technology can solve poverty by harnessing the 'fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.'"-Vijayendra Rao, World Bank
