
Chasing Innovation
Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
Lilly Irani(Author)
Princeton University Press
Published on 12. March 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-0-691-17514-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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" "... profoundly comparative with important theoretical implications. This book certainly needs to be read carefully and very widely." * American Journal of Sociology * "Brilliant ethnography."---Elliott Prasse-Freeman, Asian Journal of Social Science ??????? "[Chasing Innovation] paints a rich portrait of design and development in postcolonial India."---Arafaat A. Valiani, Journal of Asian StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New Jersey
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
10 b/w illus.
Dimensions
Height: 259 mm
Width: 154 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
527 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-691-17514-0 (9780691175140)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2019
1st Edition
Princeton University Press
from
€137.95
Available for download
Person
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