Abstract
Chasing Innovation is a multi-level ethnographic study on the shifts that have occurred within the discourses of entrepreneurialism, citizenship and innovation. It scrutinises the varied wavelengths of poverty through the prism of nation-building in order to argue for an observation of the diffused value that lies dormant within it. Crucial to this approach towards understanding poverty as a dormant source of value is the politico-economic framework of entrepreneurial citizenship (p. 2), where capital is infused with an entrepreneurial ethos, and the promises articulated by its advocates are largely engaged with by its middle-class stakeholders. Through the discursive modifications that it makes, entrepreneurial citizenship offers speculative citizens an avenue to utilise their agency and capital, albeit at the cost of subsuming enduring social movements. The matter of social welfare is shifted away from the gaze of the nation state and into the hands of unelected entrepreneurs, who are presented with little-to-no accountability towards the citizens that they intend to serve.
As a result, the tensions between the numerous perspectives on the development of India become negotiable through a process of social construction; entrepreneurship is laid bare and heralded as accessible, and the mantle of innovation casts a shadow upon the intricacies of caste, class and gender-based relations (p. 4). To better elucidate upon the changing nature of the social inequalities created by these forms of stratification, Lilly Irani draws upon varied bodies of literature. Economic sociology, economic anthropology, and science and technology studies (STS) provide a vantage point for observing networks of enterprises and their respective agents, while studies on design lend a critical view to the material nature of those networks and the inter-subjective spaces that exist between the interactions that occur on them (p. 4). Concurrently, the book yields to the domains of feminist studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies through a historical analysis of the nation state’s ability to organise and assemble social hierarchies, where a corresponding series of negotiations emerges from the juxtaposition of citizens’ imaginaries against the embellished ideals of nationhood. The book is about far more than merely questioning a set of rigid philosophical beliefs, as it presents an array of disjunctions both within and between the different forms of governance, while focusing upon the necessity of decolonising the ethnographic method. Furthermore, it calls into question the prerequisites for the very ability to innovate and the epistemological formations that make those prerequisites known.
Chasing Innovation also offers a crash course in India’s economic history, with the purpose of showing why development must be further democratised, and how it could be achieved by dismantling the divisive standpoints that emerge at the intersection where political sensationalism, corporate apathy, institutional rigidity and academic exceptionalism meet each other. The (seemingly) immutable nature of the views that are borne by these paradigms is positioned as the reason for which the entrepreneurial ethos is an absolute necessity. Its Foucauldian characteristics enable it to move past ideological differences that stand to eviscerate the promises of inclusivity and innovation, which are never fully conveyed by the ideology of ‘moving up the value chain’ (p. 85). Irani makes a deep dive into the delivery of this ethos through a discussion on education, where entrepreneurial narratives are criticised for prioritising the acts of ‘heroic’ individuals over the strength of collective alliances (p. 78), and entrepreneurial citizenship is represented as a model that is limited despite being Gandhian and cosmopolitan at the same time. Notions of selfhood are intentionally aligned with patterns of interpersonal communication (p. 100) in order to measure an individual’s capacity to exercise free will and, by extension, to make it possible to examine the price of doing so. Here, Irani’s experiences at the studio DevDesign and the case study of a hackathon provide compelling insights into how professionals work towards fostering connections with their respective ecosystems, and how they hope that their efforts would integrate them into a larger narrative of social change. The limitations of entrepreneurial citizenship become obvious here, as the narratives reveal as to how these efforts capitalise upon invisible forms of labour that were not intended to be compatible with models of inclusive growth (p. 140).
As Irani pivots the discourse towards human-centred design, the micro-political nature of the entrepreneurial ethos (p. 169) would come across as essential to the method of utilising empathy to push past socio-economic barriers and create a sense of accountability. Here, the very definition of innovation comes into question, as do the institutional linkages that exist on account of it. The culturally and economically mediated history of technology is then examined for the constraints that numerous forms of exploitation have imposed upon acts of creativity; Irani steers the reader through its myriad layers using a range of postcolonial arguments, the ideology of jugaad innovation and the materiality of the humble lota (a curved metallic vessel that is typically used to hold water), aside from other cultural artefacts, and the questions of authenticity that remain tied to them.
The methodological notes entrenched within the manuscript are dispersed and spread out across its chapters, perhaps as an allusion to what Irani had meant about the embedded nature of value within the structures of poverty. Beyond the initial fieldwork that Irani had engaged in as a participant-observer at DevDesign for fourteen months (p. 18), an additional eight years went into the production of this longitudinal study. It traces the contours of knowledge production in postcolonial India, alongside the evolution of the aforementioned discourses. Nuanced analyses of historical documents and policy recommendations (from institutions such as the World Bank) appear alongside critiques of popular films within its chapters—the result of commitments and efforts made in the direction of employing mixed methods to speak to a wide audience of both generalists and specialists alike. The modality of Irani’s approach subjugates a problematic binary that is inherent within many ethnographies—that of being a ‘native’ versus being an ‘outsider’—neither of which are claimed in this study (p. 20). This fluid, decolonial approach engenders a true sense of ‘openness’, one which largely dismantles the difficulties posed by the problem of exclusion, and the perimeter beyond which the lived realities of marginality are all too real. Keeping that in mind, Irani does, of course, admit to certain limitations that appear in the guise of ethnographic refusals that were put forth by lower-level office staff at DevDesign (p. 21). The restrictions imposed by these boundaries are addressed through a broader look at the implications that design research and design thinking have for the idea of inclusive growth (p. 39), in a way that would seem akin to some form of imputation. This is further bolstered by an articulation of certain processes through which the pedagogy of innovation (p. 50) might effectively bridge the gaps between what the nation offers as visions of entrepreneurial success, and the veracities that are known to the civil society.
Aside from the profound implications that it bears for the ethnographic method, and the contributions that it makes to STS, feminist studies, postcolonial studies and research on labour, Chasing Innovation fulfils the promise of instilling an awareness of a sociopolitical zeitgeist. It subtly instrumentalises hope and cautions its readers against reductionist stances on development, while staying clear of anthropological interventions that might inaccurately interpret the essence of socially conscious entrepreneurial practices. In looking beyond its own temporal margins, the book seeds achievable visions of decolonised futures that can be deconstructed into actions that would serve the civil society in the present—a roadmap, if you will, of what inclusive development might mean to Indians in the years to come. My humble opinion on the way by which it was written stands in opposition to what was expressed by Roy (2019): Chasing Innovation is likely to be perceived as readable by anyone who makes an acquaintance with the vocabulary of interdisciplinary work; it is far from being jargon-heavy. The riveting ethnographic accounts and socio-historical analyses presented by the text sift through complex life experiences and symbolic interactionist structures by elaborating upon what might not seem too obvious, and impressionistically conveying what need not be made all too obvious. It is, in short, radical, reflexive and revelatory.