CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Emőke Gondos |
|---|---|
| Title | 'This job saved me': The Subjectivity and Imaginary of Cluj IT |
| Summary | The post-socialist cities are excellent targets for digital services outsourcing since they can provide cheap labor without great cultural and geographical distance from Western European companies. The municipality of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, has been tapping into this fact, building an image of a European and ‘smart’ city to be attractive for foreign direct investment. The IT sector is thus made into the poster child of both the country’s and the city’s government. The average wage of a person working in the IT service sector in Romania is twice as much as the national average wage, making the industry rank the highest in the country (‘Câștigul Salarial Mediu Lunar’ 2022). Represented by 22 thousand people (Petrovici and Mare 2020, 51), the IT sector of Cluj-Napoca is especially large and dominant, both from an economic and a social point of view. Through presenting my empirical material collected by conducting semi-structured life-history interviews with professional converts to IT, I show the imaginary that is driving a flow of highly educated professionals towards changing their careers to IT. In my thesis, I argue that technological solutionism (Morozov 2013), zombie socialism (Chelcea and Druţǎ 2016), and the myth of the middle class (Weiss 2019) are together creating the ‘myth of IT’, which is forming neoliberal subjectivities and depoliticizing collective struggles. |
| Supervisor | Zentai, Violetta; Markkula, Johanna |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/gondos_emoke.pdf |
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