DEMOCRACY AND INFORMATION : A CASE STUDY OF NEW LOCAL GOVERNACE STRUCTURES IN BANGALORE

The phenomenon of rapid urbanization is posing challenges to planners in developing countries. As it becomes harder and harder for planners to disentangle the global from the local, it is increasingly recognized that without a solid local base, city governments will not have the strength that is needed to navigate global circuits. This social integration requires democratized political mechanisms based on administrative decentralization and the participation of citizens in municipal management. Our paper focuses on the role of information in the democratic process looking at a case study of new local governance structures in Bangalore. The city has become a focal point for software development regionally and globally.Such regional and global interconnections are taking place simultaneously with a number of local level initiatives aimed at encouraging democratic decisionmaking via legislation and by introducing new local governance structures.     

Cluster life cycle and diaspora effects: Evidence from the Indian IT cluster in Bangalore

The role of local clusters has been of interest to scholars and policymakers in international business alike. Research found that clusters enable a region to develop faster compared to dispersed economic activity, based mainly on a local concentration of competing and cooperating firms and sophisticated domestic demand. Locating in a cluster has certain benefits for firms stemming from pooling of human capital and supporting institutions varying by industry and international specialization.In this paper, we extend the local view of clusters and emphasize the complementary role of non-local linkages, in particular diasporas, illustrating our model employing the case of the evolution of the Bangalore IT cluster. The novelty of our paper lies in its longitudinal character. We are thereby able to identify how the roles of local and non-local networks differ across life-cycle phases; moreover, we find that diasporas can trigger or accelerate local development. We discuss implications for managers and policy makers.     

Trusting Strangers: Work Relationships in Four High-Tech Communities

For the last ten years, anthropologists have been studying work, family and technology in Silicon Valley. Using intensive observation and ethnographic interviews, we have investigated the daily life of people in Silicon Valley in an ecosystem of research endeavours we have dubbed the Silicon Valley Cultures Project, supported by grants by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as through partnerships with the Institute for the Future. The latter collaborated to conduct ethnographic interviews on the details of work and technologically mediated communications in Bangalore, India, Dublin, Ireland, and the Taipei-Hsinchu corridor in Taiwan, revealing the complexities of global interconnections in families and workplaces. These projects have explored the penetration of work, technology and global interconnections into the daily lives of the people. We used a comparative approach, a multisite research design, to yield different research questions. Cross-site analysis allows us to see that differing social and technical infrastructures shape the way trust is built and maintained. Locating research sites in different locations also emphasizes the problematic nature of technologically-mediated relationships, since networks built at a distance and maintained virtually have risks that locally constructed networks do not. Workers in Silicon places are simultaneously inwardly-focused and embedded in a local context and connected to global economic and communications nodes. Interdependent high-tech work, often using technologically-mediated communication, requires a high degree of trust. The cultural construction of 'trust', and the culturally situated negotiation of trust relationships need to be explored in this context. High-tech knowledge work is done by networks of interdependent global workers that must share information, act under a severe time constraint, and establish effective relationships at a distance. The management of interpersonal and organizational expectations that is embodied in the concept 'trust' is an example of how locally constructed cultural realities are enacted on a global stage.