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0 The Wrong Place Why would you come from California to Rio de Janeiro to study software developers ? The question was asked in a friendly tone, with just a touch of suspicion . It would not send blood rushing through my veins if not for the place where it was asked. I was stooping in front of a small window, in the midst of explaining to a US consular officer why a Russian citizen born in Vladivostok would be seeking an American visa in Rio de Janeiro, at nearly the exact opposite side of the world from where I was supposed to be applying for it. I was in the wrong place, and a good explanation was due, lest my personal world should suddenly become far from flat. Saying that I had come to Brazil to study software developers was a sure way to raise eyebrows further.1 I will try to show in this book that we have much to gain from looking at software development in this somewhat unlikely place, and more generally , from looking at high-tech work in “wrong” places. By doing so, we can learn a lot about place and its persisting importance in today’s “knowledge economy.” For over a decade, popular authors have declared that place will soon become unimportant for human activities, as people increasingly gain the ability to communicate and collaborate over distance (Cairncross 1997; Friedman 2006). In the age of the Internet, they have argued, where you are does not matter. Others have countered such claims, pointing out that the world might actually be becoming more “spiky,” with a small number of places growing in importance as centers of global activities (Florida 2008). Picking the city to live and work in, they say, may be your life’s most important decision. If you are in the wrong place, pack your bags quickly and move! And some people do exactly that. For decades, places like Silicon Valley have attracted (and continue to attract) people from all over the world. Eighteen years ago, I myself left a provincial Russian city for Palo Alto. Most people stay close to where they were born, however. This book is about those people, the work they do, and their role in globalization. 2 Chapter 0 My story and analysis challenge both views outlined earlier. I argue that we should neither declare “the death of distance” nor fix our gaze on a handful of “spikes.” Instead, we must look at globalization as an active process arising from the combined efforts of many people around the world working daily to defy space, building individual connections to remote places in pursuit of global dreams. To understand globalization we must look closely at such people: at their goals, their struggles, their failures, and their successes. We must pay attention to how their efforts reduce or increase differences between places. And we must look in the wrong places. Practice and Place The book looks at people who inhabit simultaneously two different contexts . One of those contexts is defined geographically—a metropolitan area in southeastern Brazil, consisting of the city of Rio de Janeiro that is home to around six million people known as Cariocas, and the adjacent municipalities inhabited by an equal number of Fluminenses, many of whom commute to Rio de Janeiro for work. The other context is an instance of what I call worlds of practice—systems of activities comprised of people, ideas, and material objects, linked simultaneously by shared meanings and joint projects. Such worlds vary in scale, but many of them are global, connecting people and objects spread around the planet. The world of software development is global in this sense, inhabited by around ten million people who are spread far and wide. I argue in this book that global worlds of practice are the key constitutive elements of globalization. In other words, to understand globalization we must look at not just the technologies that enable global communication, nor the structures of global governance. Rather, we must investigate the global “worlds” that form around specific systems of human activity, noting how globalization projects occurring within such systems reinforce each other and produce the overall experience of globalization. The world of software development makes an interesting context for a study of globalization because it exemplifies its paradoxes like no other field. Software development is often seen as a quintessential example of “knowledge work,” a global profession, freed from the constraints of geography by the immaterial nature of its inputs...

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