Coding Culture, July Boys - PREVIEW

Purchase: http://www.der.org/films/coding-culture.html
July Boys: New Global Players
This video focuses on a small 'startup' company in Bangalore that designs and produces software products for cellular service providers in Europe and the U.S. Turning the tables on the usual outsourcing story, July Systems has leveraged U.S.-based venture capital and Indian technical expertise to break into the latest high-tech markets.

The film explores the creation of a Silicon Valley-style work culture within this 'cross-border' company that has one leg in Bangalore and the other in Santa Clara, California. It also highlights the emergence of new kinds of identities (global, transnational, cosmopolitan) that incorporate and transcend pre-existing identities such as the national and the regional. But the narratives of the film's characters reveal a tension between their assumed global subjectivity and their nationalist pride in July's achievements as a company founded and run by Indians that makes 'cutting edge products' for the global market.

The series of three ethnographic films, Coding Culture, explores the cultures of outsourced work and the moulding of a new workforce to cater to this global high-tech services industry. Each of the three films focuses on a single company, representing one of the major types of software company found in Bangalore: a medium-sized Indian-owned company software services company; the offshore software development centre of a U.S.-based IT company; and a small cross-border startup company that produces its own software products and markets them to global customers.

a video by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upodhya
distributed by Documentary Educational Resources

Category:

Education

Tags:

• India
• technology
• software
• outsourcing
• corporation
• documentary
• globalization
• anthropology
• film