The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life by Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey (review)

The Great Indian Phone Book is Tolstoyan in its breadth even though it starts off answering simple questions, such as: What led to the spread of mobile telephony in India and what are the effects? The narrative weaves in the story of 1.2 billion people and their 900 million phones (in 2012) and explores the “relationships and networks that grow from mobile phones.” The ecosystem Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey describe brings in insights from many social sciences, cultural studies, and technology. The book follows in the best traditions of work in science, technology, and society (STS) studies.

The chief theoretical contribution here is the focus on the network effects that enabled the diffusion of mobile telephony in India. Thus, cheap mobile phones “took off” in India as much through the painstaking grassroots network where hundreds and thousands of retailers learned to sell airtime and phones as through the millions of consumers who learned to adapt them to their everyday lives. Politics, business, and society intersect and overlap in this network. However, in this network effect, technology does not have life outside of the sociopolitical ecosystem that the authors aptly outline.

The second theoretical mooring is the “disruptive potential” of technology (p. 14). But unlike hopeful optimists hailing back to Joseph Schumpeter, the distributional effects the authors describe are both negative and positive. Mobile technology affords lower-caste Dalit in the state of Uttar Pradesh the opportunity to achieve political voice, but it also enables Hindu nationalism in other parts of the country. It enables small businesses to connect with consumers and customers, but it also replicates and reinforces hierarchies in other circumstances.

Mobile phones expand social networks but they also reinstitute social stratifications, such as when Indian mothers-in-law surveil or curtail the telephone use of their daughters-in-law. The authors also provide details on the way that mobile phones enable pornography, crime, political and social scandals, corruption, surveillance, terror, and espionage. In another example, they revisit the now famous story of Kerala fishermen who were able to get better prices for their fish with market price searches. The authors demonstrate empirically how over time the advantages must be contextualized in existing social and class circumstances: “[T]he mobile phone improved some conditions; it did not reorder society” (p. 121).

The learning effects that the authors describe are a remarkable contribution to technology studies. All the actors, good or bad, and empowered or disempowered, learn in the Indian mobile telephony ecosystem. Shopkeepers learn to sell airtime, local entrepreneurs learn to repair phones and compete against established business institutions, husbands learn to include or exclude wives from conversations, and states learn to seek further rents from licenses. The various hierarchies of the Indian social and political environment are all there: caste, religion, gender, sexuality, and forms of authority. Mobile telephony touches on all of them. but in some cases the hierarchies are re-instituted and in others they are weakened. These stories are fascinating, but through their intersections and intertextuality they tell a larger story about network effects.

Methodologically, the richly textured and multi-sited ethnographic research provides fascinating details of the Indian mobile phone ecosystem at various levels from the local to the regional, global, and comparative. However, this is all done within the framework of network effects and their distributional consequences. This makes Doron and Jeffrey’s framework portable. Other scholars will find much of interest here for conducting similar inquiries elsewhere.

For a book that covers many grounds, it may be somewhat unfair to pinpoint political economy as one area that does not get enough coverage. There are many political economy empirical insights in the book, from the history of authority going back to the Mughal days to its slow unraveling in the present, and the evolving but...