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Enterprise culture, neoliberalization, and cable television at the last-mile: A case-study of local cable operators in Mumbai.
- Source :
- Geoforum; Mar2024, Vol. 150, pN.PAG-N.PAG, 1p
- Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- This paper centers last-mile distribution networks of cable television as a prism to analyze the political-economic, socio-spatial, and subjective transformations brought about by neoliberal reforms in India. I provide an on-ground perspective of enterprise culture and entrepreneurial citizenship based on an ethnography of Mumbai-based last-mile distributors of cable television also called cablewallahs. In the wake of their disempowerment in the television distribution value-chain, cablewallahs represent themselves as entrepreneurs at the core of India's digital economy. I combine insights from enterprise culture scholarship, television studies and anthropologies of masculinity, to shed light on this enactment in the paper. I demonstrate that cablewallahs configure their citizenship as 'entrepreneurial' by aspiring to middle-class valorised notions of respectability and civic duty and sustaining their last-mile networks through intimate knowledge of clientele, networks of male conviviality and vernacular solidarities. I argue that in Mumbai, entrepreneurial citizenship emerges as a useful gendered subjective disposition for navigating socio-economic marginalization and subjective-material changes in neighbourhood identity brought about by neoliberalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00167185
- Volume :
- 150
- Database :
- Supplemental Index
- Journal :
- Geoforum
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 176433399
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.103973