I work to develop theoretical tools necessary for understanding how people who are engaged in the same skilled occupation but are spread around the globe maintain ties, synchronize practices and share knowledge. Using the field of software development as my main case, I ask how cultural identities, geographic distances, differences of language, national boundaries and geopolitical tensions are negotiated in the face of increasingly “global” knowledge and technology. I ask how “global” technology, practices and culture are made to work in specific “local” places, and how such work overtime transforms the local social structure, synchronizing it with worldwide models (Meyer et al 1997). In seeking to uncover labor that goes into making technology appear naturally global and universal, I approach fundamental questions about the nature of “globalization.” I believe that my work will help us better understand the relations between knowledge, culture and space in the modern world.

I pursue those questions through interviews and extended participant observation, mixing face-to-face and “virtual” ethnography, focusing on people engaged in a particular occupation in particular places. I look at the rapidly expanding technical world of software development and I start my investigation from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a place where the software world has arrived only recently and where the “tracks” along which technical knowledge moves (Latour 1988) are still new and salient. Through extended fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro (involving participant observation and over a hundred interviews), as well as continued virtual engagement with projects based there, I seek to understand the developers’ simultaneous engagement with two different cultures: the local culture of their city and the global technical culture of software development. I also observe how they reconcile two different logics of material production: one that characterizes the global software development and calls, at least in theory, for perfect meritocracy based on technical skill, and the local business logic that stresses personal relationships and jeitinho – the art of bending the rules. Looking at how global software culture is made to work today in a particular place at its geographic periphery, combined with a historical look at how computer industry arrived to Brazil, allows me to show how such culture spreads in space, enrolling new territories and actors. It also makes it possible to show how the “international” and “global” nature of this culture is constructed through the work of actors who take up the task of making it fit in a new social context.

I use my fieldwork to engage with sociological literature on globalization and technical work, developing the concept of “worlds of practice,” by extending Strauss’ (1978) “social worlds” with specific elements of “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger 1991, Orr 1996), “networks of practice” (Brown & Duguid 2001), “occupational communities” (Van Maanen & Barley 1984), and “professions” (Abbot 1988), and relying on Becker (e.g., 1953) for the understanding of the process through which an individual enters such worlds. The notion of “worlds of practice” stresses the role of practice and identity, but also seeks to capture the relationship between practice and space, looking at how particular practices fit with the local social structure, which, following Giddens (1979), I treat as a resource that members use in structuring interactions. I incorporate the idea of reflexive use of foreign social structure and follow Anderson (1991) and Appadurai (1996) in stressing the role of national and global imagination. Looking at the interaction between global practices and local structure helps us not only understand some of the difficulties of re-embedding foreign practice, but also how different worlds of practice reinforce each other as they conquer new territories.

Looking at how technical knowledge is disembedded and reimbedded within the larger world of practice, I consider specific uses of information technology in reproduction of professional communities at a world scale. I expect that my work will contribute to the information science research agenda.

Having started by looking at software developers working in a particular physical place, I am now shifting my research in a somewhat new direction, taking as a point of departure a particular software project that I investigated during my fieldwork – a programming language called Lua, developed at one of Rio’s universities. Lua is niche programming language, with a small but active community of users, mostly residing outside Brazil. Lua’s mailing list uses English and all books written about the language, including those by its author, so far were in English. Brazilians who want to learn Lua must order one of those book from the United States (or pick it up in person at the author’s office), and be ready to read it in English. Lua thus occupies an interesting boundary position, being peripheral in the world of global software development, yet strangely foreign in the land where it was born. This boundary position has made Lua invaluable to my analysis, as it brought into clear focus many of the contradictions inherent in peripheral involvement in a global technical culture. The Lua mailing list in particular provides an arena in which global software culture is negotiated. It also defines a new kind of “place” which has strong ties to some of the physical places with which I have gained embodied familiarity (Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco Bay Area), allowing me to combine “virtual” and real ethnography. I again approach Lua as a participant observer, a leader of a small open-source project to which several members of the Lua community have contributed1 and a recognized “regular” on the Lua list.

In my later work I want to continue looking at how software communities are constructed as placeless and international, focusing more narrowly on open source communities (which, I find, present the paradoxes of globalization in their most clear form) and comparing such communities across a range of places. I want to start with an ethnographic study of one or two projects now based in the United States, in order to be able to compare a project based at the periphery with those started at the center. I then want to look in a similar way at projects based in other peripheral locations, such as Russia, India and China, and perhaps an in-between place like Japan.

References

Abbott, A. 1988. The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Becker, H. 1953. “Becoming a marihuana user.” American Journal of Sociology 59, no. 3 (November): 235-242.

Brown, J.S. & P. Duguid. 2000. Social life of information. Boston, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, B. 1988. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lave, J. & E. Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Meyer, J., J. Boli, G. Thomas, & F. Ramirez (1997) “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (July): 144–81.

Orr, J. 1996. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Strauss, A. 1978. “A social world perspective.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 1:119-128.

Van Maanen, J. and S. Barley. 1984. “Occupational communities: Culture and control in organizations.” Research in Organizational Behavior, 6:287-365.