Nokia’s presence in the Sriperumbudur SEZ, at any rate, owed to the then ruling DMK’s (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) courtship of the Finnish phone manufacturer, and its success in outbidding other Indian states vying for Nokia business with quite unparalleled monetary and infrastructural incentives. The headiness of that political victory is not to be discounted, for Nokia’s component manufacturers soon joined the SEZ, and Nokia was held up as a symbol of industrialization in Tamil Nadu: along with Hyundai and Saint-Gobain Glass, one of ‘the three pillars of Sriperumbudur.’ The government’s objectives, per the 2006 SEZ act, included the generation of economic activity, employment creation, and infrastructure development. To this end, too, the DMK’s Vallthu Kattuvom Thittam or the ‘We Live’ recruitment scheme aided Nokia’s own initiatives to identify new employees. Companies in the SEZ had been improbably classified as ‘public utilities,’ ostensibly in order to ensure promised infrastructural incentives like water and continuous electricity supply – services glaringly unavailable and not-promised to local communities – but also specifically to ‘curb labor indiscipline’ within the SEZ. The very terms of the arrangement with Nokia, then, specified both the need for employment creation and for labor to be controlled in a terrific concession to the company’s ultimate authority in managing its workers. The needs and rights of workers were concealed by the very eagerness of the neoliberal state to assert its prowess.

The SEZ’s protection from ‘labor indiscipline’ began to give way in 2009, however, to emerging details of Nokia’s heavy reliance on contract labor in every possible non-manufacturing job (contract labor is banned in the manufacturing sector), the resulting job insecurity, several issues over low wages–and later, serious risks to worker safety in the face of Nokia’s much-vaunted world-class safety systems. In the negotiations for a new set of political arrangements to protect workers, once again the government was involved: the LPF (Labor Progressive Foundation) which negotiated on behalf of workers in 2009 is politically attached to the DMK. Union leaders now explicitly invoked not so much the formal terms of agreement, but their underlying spirit: Nokia’s ‘mission’ as the government presented it and as even Union leaders understood it was as much to make money as to create and later to assure jobs to several thousands of unemployed youth who comprised the ruling party’s electoral base. In exchange for the almost unconscionable monetary incentives and other allowances made for Nokia, which sapped the state of some Rs. 645 crores (roughly $117 million) and returned poor profits besides, it was then the company’s moral obligation to live up to its promises rather than, as one community activist put it, ‘shed[ing] more and more of their responsibilities and expect[ing] the government to house, feed, bathe and deliver the workers to them!’ The status of work shifts therefore from an exuberant celebration of the state’s capability to deliver promising foreign MNC jobs to its electorate, and later to a political insistence on labor as a set of social relationships that demand reciprocity. Either way, it remains at base a political arrangement with the state.

There are then two ideas of work which present themselves: work-as-consumption and work-as-political arrangement. Each is discrete, a means of navigating towards some more-or-less attractive ‘horizon of hope‘; each is a combination of ‘norms, dispositions, practices, and histories [which] frame the good life as a landscape of discernible ends’; each mode of work then gestures to ‘practical paths to the achievement of these ends’ (Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, 292). But these forms of work are not equal. They link imaginations with material realities in entirely different ways, and they exist uneasily together: here cooperative, there antagonistic. The young men and women who everyday donned white anti-electrostatic aprons and shoe covers at the Nokia factory in Sriperumbudur came from impoverished and rural socio-economic backgrounds with only uneven access to state resources and benefits, and work futures framed only by the possibilities of development. For them, work at the Nokia plant was inherently a political arrangement brokered by the state—but one which made room for the MNC to deliver both the material and symbolic things the developmentalist state had failed to provide: prestige, recognition, consumer goods, better access to medical care, better capacities to help family, even water and food. The state in this way represented a failed aspirational framework, as much as it made political arrangements for structures of consumption to manifest. When those, too, failed in the end, the open link between what futures could be imagined and what presents could be materially procured was broken, too.

Political arrangements exist in there here and now, not on some far-future horizon. One does not participate in a union-organized strike or petition the nearest low-level government bureaucrat for access to housing or healthcare or building maintenance because of what the future ultimately might deliver, but in search of immediate certainties, solutions to pressing needs. Elections are coming to Pondicherry this May, for instance, and we see the carts with political party pennant-tagged consumer goods making rounds through the neighbourhoods: a blender or a pressure cooker for your support and my moral obligation to act as political broker. It appears at times that in such a world there is no fantasy future, only a sort of nearish-term pragmatics and transactional calculus, the basic infrastructure on which capacities to aspire might be built.

My last post in this series will be a bit of an experiment in writing and thinking, connecting the fantasies that do circulate with the pragmatics and realities of these local environments.

[Some parts of this post are part of a longer argument developed for an essay soon to appear in the journal ephemera special issue on the “Consumption of Work and the Work of Consumption,” and are presented here in modified form with grateful thanks. A much earlier version of this and the previous post were presented in a 2014 SCA panel on “Finding, Organizing, and Liberating work” organized by Melissa Cefkin. Grateful thanks to Melissa for the initial prompt to write, and to Ilana Gershon for much encouragement along the way.]

As I suggested in my last post, however, it’s unclear whose futures these are. Only a few forecasts are ever localized for India, but global enthusiasm reverberates disproportionately and faith in the capacity of technology to widen work futures is immensely strong. While it is true that some younger office crowds in the big Indian metros can contemplate and even demand flex-futures shot through with millennial whimsy, bare laboring realities still exert themselves, and forcefully. The contrasts are especially hard to ignore in India, where, all around is also ‘work’ of a very different sort: running in parallel to the more prized but no less regimented office work, there is casual work, self-employment (a category which includes street vendors and domestic workers among others), un- or semi-skilled labor, daily-wage labor on construction sites, agricultural labor that leads nowhere and is seasonal besides, factory work, service work, specialized artisanal work that has long since been downgraded to manual labor and more—all of it low-wage, and apparently bereft of any real possibility of reinvention.

Or is it? I’d like to consider the case of the Nokia manufacturing plant, which operated from the Sriperumbudur SEZ near Chennai from 2005-2014—and to use that as a context from which to consider how forms of work, increasingly imbricated with forms of consumption, strengthen what Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire” and set the parameters for the imagination of the good life among the poor in the near-term.

Nokia began operations in Sriperumbudur’s SEZ in 2005. The Finnish phone giant soon employed 8,000 people from in and around the area, and supported 20,000 more in component manufacturing companies tightly clustered around: Aspocomp, Perlos, Salcomp, Foxconn, Flextronics, Sanmina-SCI, Laird and Wintek. Many of these employees were first generation industrial workers from agricultural backgrounds, who were just out of school or had even quit their educations to jump on the Nokia bandwagon, enthusiastic about the reputations of foreign companies as ‘good employers’ who would pay high salaries with solid benefits. Nine years later, as of April 2014, a just-completed acquisition by Microsoft reduced the plant to contract-status—thanks in no small measure to an extended battle with the Indian and Tamil Nadu governments over taxation revenues. Just before May Day 2014, the news was that 6,000 employees had been offered a voluntary retirement scheme, and all others a mandatory retirement option.

There are two configurations of work that are discernible from the Nokia case, one at first more visible than the other: work as consumption, and work as a political arrangement. I’ll consider the first here, and the second in my next post.

Do any sort of google search on the Nokia factory, and you’ll come upon the exuberance of the early years. Particularly telling is how the presence of trousers, cutlery, camera phones, televisions, shops selling fruits (more expensive than vegetables), and these days “pencil pants” (the local equivalent of “skinny” jeans) marked critical stages of development. For those who had thrown their lot in with Nokia, these were the very signs of India’s promised prosperous future, now finally filtering down to lower castes, and rural and lower-income communities, just like they had for other groups with the BPO boom. Here at last was the right brand to buy into: Nokia, known locally as the brand that dominated the mobile market until even the late 2000s; Nokia, the brand which released a series of low-cost dual-SIM phones for the India/Asia market starting in 2011—named “Asha,” which is Sanskrit for hope. In interviews done by the Nokia India Employee Union for a documentary called “Dis-connecting People” made and released on Mayday 2014, respondents talk about their ability to purchase other services like healthcare, or defray marriage costs on the strengths of their salaries. They speak repeatedly about the job reducing hardships [kashtam], and delivering the accoutrements of a middle-class life. The company’s culture was “open, transparent, performance- and development-focused,” one official cited traits not easily found in other manufacturing companies. It conducted large recruitment drives in neighboring villages, actively promoting the Nokia brand, pushing prospective employees to understand quality in terms of brand recognition and trust. The company hired more women than men; it bussed its employees from nearby villages to production facilities, distributed glass engraved awards to high-performers, provided lunches and free camera phones, celebrated the company’s founding anniversary in a huge celebration each year, and conferred the pride of high volume production to its growing workforce in purple embossed handsets with the words “500 million [handsets manufactured], 5 years.” It was not long before Nokia employment became a status symbol with intimately local significance, enough to distinguish families from each-other based on who had a Nokia employee, and who didn’t.

If all that wasn’t enough, the phone manufacturing company acted as a service delivery platform for its workers, enabling or providing services as families couldn’t and government wouldn’t. Remarking on the fact that the Tamil Nadu government provided water, electricity and other facilities to the MNCs but not to local communities: ‘I think it balances out because we get employment opportunities,’ one Foxconn employee, Sathiya, is quoted in a feature in the South China Morning Post (January 22, 2012). Nokia, along with the other component manufacturing companies clustered in the SEZ, represented a work-around, if not to clean water and sanitation, then at least to the products and services that a salary could buy, and the prestige of working for a recognized global brand.

In all these quotidian ways, Nokia lived up to worker expectations of how a ‘big company,’ at that a foreign MNC like Nokia, would operate in liberalized India, and actively nurtured employee identification as simultaneously producers and consumers of its product. In so doing, it refigured what workers were able to consume: that is, not just what their wages enabled, but the idea of the ‘good brand’ that Nokia represented, the brand in whose image workers constituted themselves, by which they marked their own material progress, claimed the value of their work, and charted their futures.

In exchange for such new-world visions of affluence, Nokia bought over the old-world loyalties of its employees who then counted themselves in so many kin-metaphors as members of the extended ‘Nokia family’–for whom they sacrificed to the point of trading in their employment futures, and who in turn supported their very real extended families. When the factory closed, many workers found themselves with no employment future to speak of, having dedicated themselves to the one company and one skill set for years in an environment which privileges “freshers,” In seeking job security and assurance in the wake of the Microsoft merger and the uncertain future of the plant, these workers invoke also the relationships of moral obligation, responsibility, and patronage that a patriarch in traditional Indian society or the welfare state could be held to provide. Except that there is no patriarch or (functioning) welfare state here. There is just the good brand: Nokia one day, and Microsoft the next.

It may well be, as Ghassan Hage has argued, that “capitalism hegemonises the ideological content of hope so it becomes almost universally equated with dreams of better-paid jobs, better life-styles, more commodities, etc.” and that the “power of these hopes is such that most people will live their lives believing in the possibility of upward social mobility without actually experiencing it” (13-14). The Nokia case bears poignant testimony to this insight, no doubt, and to the ironies replete in capitalist forms of hoping. At the same time, the fact these very hopes frame one sort of capacity to aspire against a historical context that seemed to deny entirely the value of material progress necessarily I think counters any too-easy critique, and balances some of our more typical academic cynicisms (a theme I’ll pick up a bit more in my final post in this series).

My next post will round off discussion of the Nokia factory case, by examining what political arrangements are made with the state precisely to deliver such capacities to aspire.

[Some parts of this post are part of a longer argument developed for an essay soon to appear in the journal ephemera special issue on the “Consumption of Work and the Work of Consumption,” and are presented here in modified form with grateful thanks. A much earlier version of this and the coming post were presented in a 2014 SCA panel on “Finding, Organizing, and Liberating work” organized by Melissa Cefkin. Grateful thanks to Melissa for the initial prompt to write, and to Ilana Gershon for much encouragement along the way.]

For a few years now, I’ve been working in the space of future imagining—seeking out trends and rationales by which to extrapolate them or use them as jumping-off points as provocations to business, taking inspiration from start-up tech’s drive to search out uncommon solutions to common problems, setting sights on far-off horizons, and generally learning to ask “what if” and wish “if I could..” with impunity.

At first, I found all this quite strange. Wasn’t it more important to be grounded in the present, and to tease out the histories that had produced our presents—and, at most, could produce our foreseeable futures? This is what I had trained myself to do all these years anyway, and what I seemed still to be training my students to do. Contextualizing, explaining cultural forms or dynamics, tracking the social lives of things—this was work much more rooted in the present, with a strong sense of the past that informed and birthed it, than in any future-oriented approach. Of course, such approaches weren’t by themselves anything new. In some form or other, they have been mainstays of disciplines like economics, finance, design and planning, or the environmental sciences, not to speak of political, literary, and religious imaginings—but, far as I could tell, not anthropology. We might have looked to such imaginings as great research material, but only insofar as it led us right back into the configurations of the present. I thought back to the responses of a good many of my colleagues to the Future Studies program we’d once had at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, the first of its kind at the time: the future isn’t here, so how on earth could you study it? (For that and other reasons, the program folded eventually and moved in a fashion to UH’s main campus under the charge of Peter Bishop. It exists still as a graduate program in “Foresight”).

Past-ness mattered and was core to the sort of analysis we routinely undertook. It was, it still is, as Appadurai has said, in the closing essay to a collection of already-published papers entitled The future as cultural fact, that “[i]n one way or another, anthropology remains preoccupied with the logic of reproduction, the force of custom, the dynamics of memory, the persistence of habitus, the glacial movement of the everyday, and the cunning of tradition in the social life of even the most modern movements and communities, such as those of scientists, refugees, migrants, evangelists, and movie icons” (285).

And yet, here was “the future” all around me, a veritable font of inspiration and a very real cultural horizon: in trend reports, in business forecasts, in strategic planning, in improbable prototypes, in design thinking, in the new-found faith in what Evgeny Morozov has disparagingly called “technological solutionism,” and in the apparently widespread conviction that science fiction will become science fact.

Although I didn’t read Appadurai’s essay until somewhat later, two sets of questions emerged. The first grappled with perplexity: what was I doing, an anthropologist amongst future-seekers? (Not everyone was a trained futurist, but many had some conception of the future on their horizons, and some compulsion to drive towards it). Okay, we could go ahead and treat futurisms as modernist ideologies, yet more objects subject to routine analytical assessments. But that struck me as insufficient–and already done aplenty. What would it do to my own disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological practice, did I even want to work with (toward?) a techno-modern future populated by humanoid bots and pixelated humans? Or did what Jane Guyer dubs “fantasy futurisms” just not matter as much as closer horizons? [Cultural Anthropology‘s recent Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen offers inspiration for addressing such questions—but that’s a story for later.]

The second set of questions were more reflective of conventional anthropological critique, but no less important: whose futures were these? All I had to do was look out of my window or walk down a Pondicherry street—posh apartments lining one side and a market and government tenements lining the other—to wonder what connections the diverse groups with whom I share this little city would have, if any, with conceptions of trans-humanism or hyperloops or blockchains. Autonomous driving cars when we could barely speak of dignity and human autonomy? How did any of that matter to any of us? Or: how are futures that aren’t ours in any near-term or straightforward sense still making us?

I don’t mean to posit Pondicherry as some little backwater town that exists so far behind, on a developmental continuum, cities like Hong Kong or Frankfurt or our old home base, Houston. But, if the future is already here and only unevenly distributed, as William Gibson so famously observed, then here I was in a place and within a disciplinary framework that made its presences just that much harder to discern. I was quite sure that only a small percentage of my fellow Pondicherry residents would ever have been asked where their future horizons lay or of what they were made. [Although a futurism of a very different sort is core to the Auroville project, and has been transformative.] What would it mean to think of them, of us, as future-makers? How far could our gazes travel?

Appadurai provides something of a roadmap: “We need to construct an understanding of the future by examining the interactions between three notable human preoccupations that shape the future as a cultural fact[:] … imagination, anticipation, and aspiration.” (286). His earlier work, Modernity at Large, dealt with imagination as constitutive of modern subjectivity. An earlier chapter argues that one way to converge with the future-oriented logics of development would be to strengthen the “capacity to aspire,” so that the poor could find their own routes to contest and alter the conditions of their own poverty. Risk, speculation, or what he covers with the term “anticipation,” has received much more attention in the literature on neoliberal capital, market processes, and monetary forms. But what we lack still are ways to triangulate the three, particularly amongst populations which “may be said to function in the condition of ‘bare life'” (298). We need to get much more into the rich cultural spaces at the intersection what he calls the ethics of probability (counting, accounting, quantitative, and measured approaches to risk taking and risk management) and the ethics of possibility: “those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that increase the horizons of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater equity in what I have called the capacity to aspire…” (295).

This is a quick and cursory summary, and I cannot claim to take on so large a project as Appadurai formulates in a few short blogging bursts. What I can ask, however, is this: on what pegs might, say, the fishing communities living across from us hang their aspirations or their conceptions of “the good life”? For a culture always so busy differentiating itself from itself, where would I find overlaps and divergences? Perhaps then it would be possible to push through to emergent forms of “indigenous futurism whose temporality lies in the (non)endurant hereish.”  I’m looking for nothing more or less than pinhole vistas—be these bits and pieces of technology or the idea of “SMARTness” or the organization of work itself—everyday practices that open out to future-scapes, however unexpected or mundane. Part of the argument I wish to feel my way through is obliquely a response to Jane Guyer’s argument on macroeconomic and religious discourses having “evacuated” the near future and replaced it with far more ultimate imaginaries. I want to say that, at least for the urban poor, the temporal frame of the near future is anything but evacuated—the percolation of economic ideas and the preponderance of religious discourses notwithstanding. Rather, it is often the only future that really exists.

My next posts focus largely on work, which would appear a sure-fire mechanism to think the future among poorer communities. I’ll examine the case of the Nokia phone manufacturing plant based in Sriperumbudur, not far from me though closer to Chennai, a place known alternatingly for its SEZ (Special Economic Zone) and ‘hi-tec’ hub, and for its memorial to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, assassinated there in 1991. I’ll be using that context to consider how configurations of work via consumption and politics establish parameters for the capacity to aspire.

After that, who can say what the future holds?