Corporations through the looking glasses: for an ethnography of the global

During a three year investigation in the Research & Development Department of a multinational corporation in Bangalore, I investigated the interplay between processes of knowledge and technology transfer, massive investments in infrastructures, and the modified political and social equilibrium in the receiving context. The patterns of global expansion drawn by the US-based corporation in India retrace the trajectories of British colonial power. The corporation is described as capable of shaping the present economic scenario, as well as triggering processes of historical identification and claim. The corporation’s major transformative actions affect the imaginaries of work, increase productivity and promote provisional empowerment of the local workforce; but they also bring about diffused social resistance and indirectly foster strategies of appropriation. Two examples of “appropriated technology” are described, representing the material translation of local demands into the corporate terms of technology, and presented by the corporation as innovations developed to respond to green requirements and new environmental standards. This ambiguity and intentional misunderstanding constitutes the fabric of the ongoing complex relations between the corporation and the “emerging” contexts of its expansion.