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Skilled immigration from India has proceeded in three waves—the period of “brain drain,” followed by a sharp increase in the influx of Indian immigrants in the form of “body-shopping” for the IT industry in the 1990s, and finally, the current trend of outsourcing of business processes to India and the shift from permanent to temporary, short-term assignment migration. It is important to understand the three-layered stages of migration because it is the context in which entrepreneurship as a form of immigrant adaptation arose.
Following Portes, Guarnizo, and Lan-dolt’s (1999) efforts to establish transnationalism as an “emergent social field,” particularly within the context of immigrant entrepreneurship, Indian immigrant business activity is viewed as a process (a) that involves a significant proportion of persons in the relevant universe; (b) where the activities of interest are not fleeting or exceptional, but now possess certain stability and resilience over time; and (c) the content of these activities is not captured by some preexisting concept, making the invention of a new term redundant. Specifically, two surveys on Indian professional immigrants, conducted more than a decade apart, highlight the shift in adaptation of Indian immigrants from an interest in professional mobility within established corporate settings to an increasing desire to engage in self-employment practices. Furthermore, these business practices are occurring within the context of the global software industry, making the activities of Indian software entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley a transnational phenomenon, thus underlining the fact that the term “brain drain” is indeed now redundant, and the phenomenon in question is better captured by the term “transnational entrepreneurship.”
Chapter 4, “Global Ethnography: Methods and Sites of Research,” details the research design: choice of field sites, the study population, selection of participants, the utilization of semistructured interviews and observations, and lastly, a discussion on interpretation and analysis of findings.