Abstract
<p>This article reconstructs the formal core of Kazakhstan's IT field from a cumulative series of empirical pilots conducted within the Digital Class research programme. Instead of treating the field as an ordinary sector made up of IT firms plus IT workers, the article reconstructs it through three partially independent maps: the formal contour defined by official economic activity codes (OKED), the upper layer identified by taxpayer-level aggregate payment trace, and the regimes through which technical production becomes publicly and professionally legible. The analysis uses taxpayer-level aggregate payment traces as a proxy for relative payment weight. These traces are used only as shares and concentration indicators; no absolute payment amounts or entity-level payment tables are published. The article's main findings are as follows. First, the formal contour contains approximately 32,500 active entities selected through a fixed set of IT-related OKED codes. By count, the contour is more than half individual entrepreneurs, while software development as a single code accounts for roughly 40 percent of the contour. Second, payment weight is highly concentrated: a narrow upper layer of fewer than one percent of entities accounts for roughly two thirds of the aggregate payment trace, while about 44 percent of entities show no significant annual trace in the latest yearly slice. Third, manual classification of the upper layer shows that software production is only one component of the formal upper contour, alongside enterprise implementation, embedded IT functions in non-software organizations, state digital infrastructure and educational-symbolic actors. Finally, economic weight and public visibility are substantially decoupled. The article therefore treats the digital class not as a directly measurable population, but as a field object that becomes observable only through disciplined layering of formal, payment, production-boundary and visibility evidence. The data support claims about formal structure, payment concentration and public legibility. They do not support claims about revenue, profit, turnover, employment, influence, control, hidden networks or actual social mobility.</p>