It will become: Modern India and the labor of aspiration
Item
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Title
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It will become: Modern India and the labor of aspiration
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:02d2aff90464:11927
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identifier
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12588
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Creator
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Inglis, Patrick,
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Contributor
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Stanley Aronowitz
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Labor relations | Ethnic studies | Economic development | India | Social mobility | Urban studies
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Abstract
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This study combines political economy and twenty-two months of fieldwork to understand the limits of social mobility for poor and working class people in modern India. Despite more than two decades of economic liberalization, access to quality education, well paying jobs, and high standards of living, remain largely tied to class and caste advantages. Main informants include lower class golf caddies and middle and upper middle class members at golf clubs in Bangalore, India's "Silicon Valley." The study shows that members, many of them entrepreneurs, white-collar professionals, and civil servants, simultaneously educate the caddies in the rhetoric of bootstrap capitalism, on the one hand, and also foreclose opportunities to assert their independence, on the other: first, by refusing the caddies control over their labor process; and, second, paying them insufficient wages ({dollar}1-2 a round) that keep them dependent on additional handouts to cover health care, children's school fees, and other household expenses. The result is a form of social, economic, and cultural exchange that encourages servility and reinforces existing inequalities. The study underscores the limits of trickle-down-economics as a means to development---absent effective industrial policy and jobs programs, as well as adequate investments in health care, education, and basic social services, these caddies, and others of similarly impoverished backgrounds, have little choice but to seek out relationships of this sort, and even then, chances at social mobility are slim.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
