Скачать или смотреть Social Cohesion, Information Diffusion, and Technological Progress..by Anant Kamath

A talk by Anant Kamath - faculty, Azim Premji University, as part of Faculty Seminar,at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.
October 29, 2014.

About the Topic:
This study applies the concepts of social capital and embeddedness, as well as homophily, in understanding learning and information diffusion in a low-technology cluster. It studies how social cohesion can be an obstacle to economic and technological progress. We work towards understanding an embeddedness–homophily connection with the support of a case of the decline of a formerly dominant handloom weavers’ community in southern Kerala -- the Saliyars. We build the evidence that the Saliyars’ networks were characterised by ‘homophilous-embeddedness’, which, we show, has been relayed and reinforced across generations. Due to this attribute, the Saliyars are placed as an example that counters the standard line in the literature that community cohesion has been historically congruent to technological progress and knowledge diffusion in handloom in India. This study also promotes an economic-sociology understanding of technological progress and learning -- an area that is still nascent.

About the Speaker:
Anant Kamath completed his PhD in the Economics and Policy Studies of Technological Change at the United Nations University / MERIT (UNU-MERIT), Maastricht, The Netherlands, in 2013. Prior to this, he studied economics and social science in India for his MPhil at the Centre for Development Studies (Trivandrum), for MSc at the Madras School of Economics (Madras) and for B.A. at St. Joseph’s College (Bangalore). He also spent a year as Visiting Researcher at the Department of Sociology of the University of Georgia, United States. His current research interest is on the social construction of innovation, learning, and technological progress. He has various peer-reviewed publications to his credit in this field, and his book on this theme, based on his doctoral research and published by Routledge (UK), is due to release in early 2015.