Abstract
<p>The article reconstructs the formal core of Kazakhstan’s IT field through a series of empirical studies within the Digital Class research programme. Instead of treating the field as a sector composed of “IT companies plus IT workers”, it is analysed as the overlap of three maps: a formal OKED-based contour, an upper layer concentrated by taxpayer-level payment weight, and the regimes through which technical competence becomes publicly and professionally legible.The main findings are as follows. The formal contour includes approximately 32.5 thousand active entities selected by a fixed set of IT-related OKED codes. Almost half of the contour consists of individual entrepreneurs, while software development as a single OKED code accounts for about 40 percent of the contour. Payment weight is highly concentrated: a narrow upper layer - less than 1 percent of the contour - accounts for roughly two thirds of the aggregate payment trace, whereas about 44 percent of entities show no significant trace in the latest annual slice. Substantive classification of the upper layer shows that software production is only part of it, alongside enterprise implementation, embedded IT in non-software organizations, state digital infrastructure, and educational or symbolic layers. The article therefore argues that economic weight and public visibility are substantially decoupled. The data support claims about formal structure, payment-weight concentration and public readability; they do not support claims about revenue, profit, turnover, workforce size, influence, control or actual social mobility outcomes.</p>