A. Aneesh

Global Labor: Algocratic Modes of Organization*

This study investigates a practice that allows workers based in India to work online on projects for corporations in the United States, representing a new mode of labor integration. In the absence of direct bureaucratic control across continents, the question arises how this rapidly growing labor practice is organized. The riddle of organizational governance is solved through an analysis of software programming schemes, which are presented as the key to organizing globally dispersed labor through data servers. This labor integration through programming code is distinguished from two other systems of organization—bureaucracy and the market—while bringing out the salient features of each system in terms of its ruling principle: bureaucracy (legal-rational), the market (price), and algocracy (programming or algorithm). The logic of algocratic systems is explored methodically to analyze global work.

Epilogue: The Global Horizon for Technoscience:

This special issue, in a sense, is an engagement with the global. But how do we define what is global? One way to approach the global is to follow Ong and Collier’s lead and understand global phenomena as ‘abstractable, mobile, and dynamic’ forms (Ong & Collier, 2005). Their articulations in specific situations produce what they called global assemblages. The articles in this volume show a clear affinity to this framework. But this epilogue is guided by a different curiosity. Is there another sense of the global also available in this volume? These articles hint at an additional understanding of the global, in my view, as something more than a form or quality of phenomena. They harbour, in a diffused way, a notion of the global as a horizon of observation. While there is no explicit discussion of this understanding of the global in the articles, its traces can be found scattered throughout this special issue. First, let me explain their affinity to the framework of global forms. In her article in this issue, Anna Agathangelou introduces the idea of bio-financialisation. She analyses the use of DNA-based forensics to identify missing persons in war and conflict zones. This DNA-based technology is a global form in Ong and Collier’s sense, and its connection with bodies and finance allows a new kind of biofinancial evaluation to emerge. The focus shifts from the valuation of life in terms of family and suffering to the selling, collecting and assessment of biological materials. Similarly, Matthew McCarthy’s article presents a global form of the artificial intelligence (AI) systems, whose entanglement in diverse knowledge bases, interests, networks and actors produces a global techno assemblage. In Saskia Sassen’s article as well, one can extract the global form of high finance, which seems to have

‘Relocating Global Assemblages’: An Interview with Saskia Sassen

Aneesh Aneesh (AA): As you know the notion of assemblage has received a variety of interpretations in the last two decades. Science and technology studies follow a variant of the concept that mostly eschews the virtual and celebrates the actual, emphasising the hybridity and heterogeneity of elements in actornetworks. Earlier, in the works of Deleuze and Guattari, virtual/actual dimensions of becoming, difference and emergence—such as the emergent assemblage (agencement) of the wasp and orchid—acquire significance. You have yourself produced a prominent version of the idea in your work. I wonder if you could elaborate on your contribution to this growing theoretical field.

Emerging Scripts of Global Speech

As work regimes become global, social communication increasingly occurs across locations far apart. In the absence of a common national, ethnic, or organizational culture across continents, what makes communication possible among social worlds technologically integrated in real time? Taking India’s global call centers as the focus of analysis, this article attempts to solve the riddle of communication by showing how transnational business practices rely on the transmutation of cultural communication into global communication through the processes of neutralization and mimesis. Neutralization refers to attempts at pruning unwanted cultural particulars, whereas mimesis refers to simulating desired cultural elements.