Introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work and organizations in India


E D I T O R I A L

Introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work
and organizations in India

Devi Vijay

Published online: 21 May 2019

� Indian Institute of Management Calcutta 2019

This special issue of Decision examines the changing

nature of work and organizations in India. In 1991,

under the mandate of the World Bank and the

International Monetary Fund, as one of the ‘‘locomo-

tives of the South’’ (Brazil, India, China, and South

Africa), India introduced the structural adjustment

program (Prashad 2013: 28), ushering in an era of

neoliberal structural changes marked by intensifying

globalization, financialization, and privatization (Har-

vey 2019). Undeniably, the primary beneficiaries of

India’s liberalization have been the new middle class

and the business and financial elite (Crabtree 2018;

Fernandes and Heller 2006). Visibly, today we have

Alexas in our living rooms, e-commerce deliveries at

our doorsteps, shopping malls with designer labels,

and convenient flight connections to Instagram-wor-

thy selfie spots anywhere in the world. Moreover, this

epochal shift has also been characterized by the

creation of new Indians, with new dreams, passions,

and aspirations, and new subjectivities (Gooptu 2013).

As academics in premier management institutions, we

see our students increasingly join the global manage-

rial elite, while we frequently train and consult with

multinational corporate powerhouses, and are incen-

tivized to converse in international, typically Euro-

centric, research spaces.

However, as Australian documentary film-maker

and journalist John Pilger noted (Pilger 2016: 36),

‘‘‘Global economy’ is a modern Orwellian term.’’

Often suppressed, barely concealed, under these very

structural adjustment programs is the globalization of

poverty and precariousness. Moreover, while its

ideological tenet of economic growth is and could be

one means of poverty reduction, neoliberal India is

marked by increased material inequality, elite income

consolidation (Chancel and Piketty 2017), and radical

asymmetries in the distribution of power and wealth

(Parry 2014). As of 2017, India’s capitalist story stars

101 billionaires whose wealth increased ten times over

a decade, while 93% of the workforce is employed in

the informal sector, with an 18% increase in informal

sector participation over a decade (Himanshu 2018).

The percentage of women working in private house-

holds has doubled in the twenty-first century, and 84%

(in urban areas) earn less than minimum wages (Ray

and Qayum 2009). Aptly, Barbara Harriss-White

(2014: 388) observes, ‘‘While it cannot be denied that

capitalism creates wealth, Indian capitalism also

pauperizes its workforce.’’

In this context, and consistent with wider global

patterns, there have been dramatic transformations in

labor markets, local economies, work arrangements,

and organizational practices (Gooptu 2013; Harriss-

White 2014). Steadily, discourse of management,

markets, and finance permeate basic, essential services

such as health (Chakravarthi et al. 2017), housing

D. Vijay (&)
Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, India

e-mail: devivijay@iimcal.ac.in

123

Decision (June 2019) 46(2):93–97

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40622-019-00216-7

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s40622-019-00216-7&domain=pdf
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40622-019-00216-7


(Chattaraj et al. 2017), and education (Varman et al.

2011). Further, this discourse materializes as labor

market flexibility and work intensification (Bathini

and Kandathil 2019), labor casualization, informal-

ization (Harriss-White 2014), contractualization, and

sharp distinctions between secure and insecure wage

labor (Parry 2013). Certain forms of state protection-

ism that prevailed with the welfare state have not only

been hollowed out with increased privatization but

have arguably constructed new forms of corporate-

state nexus that dispossess and dehumanize some of

the most vulnerable citizenry (Varman and Vijay

2018).

While these transformations are consistent with

wider global patterns, there are uneven geographies of

globalization. Two specificities of neoliberal norma-

tivity in India are worth noting. First, these structural

transformations are layered over social vectors of

caste, gender, and religion (Chatterji et al. 2019;

Teltumbde 2018). Second, our imaginations of pro-

gress and modernity remain colonized by Western

capitalist discourse. The West holds considerable

symbolic power in our education system and in the

production and practice of scientific knowledge in the

Indian context. Accordingly, mainstream management

theories developed in the West become the ‘‘dominant

lens through which Indian scholars interpret their

context’’ (Vijay and Varman 2018: 15). But the frame

of this dominant lens does not merely exhibit a reality,

rather it ‘‘actively participates in a strategy of

containment, selectively producing and enforcing

what will count as reality… always throwing some-
thing away, always keeping something out, always de-

realizing and de-legitimating alternative versions of

reality’’ (Butler 2016: xiii). Such dominant frames can

and must then be disrupted in order to construct an

alternative imagination.

Thus, our aim in this special issue has been to create

spaces for perspectives that are less heard in main-

stream academic conversations. This collection of four

research articles, one speak-out essay, and one virtual

roundtable examines a range of contemporary issues

pertaining to domestic workers’ employment condi-

tions, national security labor, academic labor, climate-

change-induced agrarian distress and digital labor

platforms, and the MeToo movement. On occasion,

the authors speak from their disciplines—here, man-

agement studies, sociology, public policy, and anthro-

pology; on occasion, they traverse multiple

disciplines. Theoretically, they foreground challenges

of collective action, organizational dissent, precarity

of neoliberal labor, migration, and the possibilities of

solidarities. All, however, share certain common

themes outlined below, and many of the writings shed

any pretence of impartiality. As Freire eloquently

stated (Freire 1998: 22),

My abhorrence of neoliberalism helps to explain

my legitimate anger when I speak of the

injustices to which the ragpickers among human-

ity are condemned. It also explains my total lack

of interest in any pretension of impartiality. I am

not impartial or objective; not a fixed observer of

facts and happenings… And this does not
necessarily mean that the observer’s position is

erroneous. It is an error when one becomes

dogmatic about one’s point of view and ignores

the fact that, even if one is certain about his or

her point of view, it does not mean that one’s

position is always ethically grounded.

Taken as a whole then, these articles raise ethically

grounded concerns and provide insights into three

broad themes: (a) the nature of precarity in neoliberal

regimes, (b) the jarring silences and ellipses that

prevail, and (c) resistance, dissent and collective

action in such contexts.

Nature of precarity in neoliberal regimes

To say that life is precarious is to apprehend that a

viable life depends not simply on an individual’s drive

to live but fundamentally on social and political

conditions (Butler 2016). Lives can be rendered

precarious, by treating them as lesser beings and

denying them the possibilities of recognition (Butler

2004). Precarious lives can be expunged or violated,

without ever being grieved.

Precariousness surfaces as a common thread across

all articles, with some contributors explicitly engaging

with it theoretically. Rajnish Rai’s autoethnography

here reveals the precarity a state official encounters

when he seeks to engage in a critical discourse with the

State on national security labor conditions. The

neoliberal state wields sovereign power, ‘‘an unac-

countable operation of power’’ (Butler 2004: xv), once

the dissenting subject uncloaks spectacles. The

sovereign power can now make life and death

94 Decision (June 2019) 46(2):93–97

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decisions bound by no constitutional constraints. More

than the particularism of India’s majoritarian nation-

alism, it is helpful to remember the marginalization of

dissent beyond the immediate national context. Such

marginalization of the dissenting subject is reminis-

cent of the targeting of Julian Assange or Chelsea

Manning—such actors are denounced and stigmatized

not because they engaged in violent acts, but because

they exposed them. As Rai poignantly notes, ‘‘today,

conscience itself has become a precarious entity.’’

Srinath Jagannathan and Premalatha Packirisamy

engage with the vulnerabilities of academic labor

which manifests in contractual positions, individual-

izing academic environments, and de-intellectualized

research and teaching commitments. Importantly, they

delineate how academic precarity is mediated by caste

and gender relations. In a similar vein, Priyanshu

Gupta and Vivek Nair, in their speak-out essay, lament

the vulnerability of doctoral students in contemporary

neoliberal universities that benchmark themselves

against accreditations, journal rankings, and impact

metrics. Together, the two articles interrogate the

intersection of organization of knowledge in the

university and the production of disposable labor.

These two writings join a global chorus from aca-

demics, who contest the marketization of higher

education (Parker 2014).

While there remains a need for caution and

deliberation in bringing together very heterogeneous

groups into the analytical category of precariousness,

these studies record the different scales and socioeco-

nomic contexts within which variations of precarity

manifest (see also Schierup and Jorgensen 2016).

Undeniably, neoliberalism creates precariousness

across classes, exemplified by our shared vulnerability

to climate change and perpetual war. Moreover, as

Byung-chul Han (2017: 5) notes, ‘‘Today, everyone is

an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enter-

prise… Even class struggle has transformed into an
inner struggle against oneself.’’ Yet some populations

are more subject to heightened precarity and violence

than others.

Rajesh Joseph, Balmurli Natrajan, and Roshni

Lobo attend to domestic workers—India’s second

largest informal workforce—who are bound to the

institution of domestic servitude that constitutes the

bedrock of upper and middle-class existence. Rising

urban middle- and upper-class incomes, coupled with

normalized cultural markers of employing ‘‘servants’’

or ‘‘maids’’ accompany a rise in domestic work

activities in India. Joseph and colleagues document

domestic workers’ precarity enmeshed in debt and

obligations, and foreground the unique challenges of

organizing workers who work in middle-class

homes—a pivotal site of reproduction of labor rela-

tions. The authors provide sharp insights into the

difficulty of recognizing domestic servants as ‘‘work-

ers’’; these are precarious subjects who are not quite

recognizable or intelligible as subjects.

Migration is a key mechanism by which capitalism

structures precarity. Capitalism supports migration in

the name of personal liberty and human rights (Streeck

2016). Yet, the breakdown of community networks,

and economic instability, renders a docile workforce,

grateful for employment, conscripted into contracts

that do not guarantee minimum wages and employ-

ment protections, hesitant to mobilize collectively,

thus lacking political capacity (Streeck 2016). Surie

and Sharma connect the dots between climate-change-

induced migration and digital labor markets, in their

account of how Ola and Uber provide short-term

adaptive solutions to migrant farmers.

Sanjana Pegu’s virtual roundtable curates the

experiences of five women activists on their work

with the feminist movement, and gender-based vio-

lence. Pegu sheds light on the significance of MeToo

movement in India, and the specific precarities

confronting those at higher risk of gender-based

violence in Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi communities,

and regions such as the northeastern states marked by

long histories of conflict and militarization. Pegu’s

dialogue interrogates the act of resistance in the recent

#MeToo movement to ask what politically can be

made of assault and violence, besides calls for

vengeance and humiliation. Sanjana, serving as an

interlocutor here, reflects on the silences on working-

class sexual harassment, and the implications of the

caste-capitalist-patriarchy nexus.

Silences, erasures and magic

Precariousness is normalized in several ways. First,

there is the appropriation of the media and academia—

two institutions with abundant resources to critically

examine this new social order. Both have played vital

roles in extolling India’s ambitions as it muscles its

way to becoming a global superpower, and have been

Decision (June 2019) 46(2):93–97 95

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complicit in reproducing hegemonic discourses, either

by explicitly aligning with dominant frames, or

through silence. Pointing to the machinations of

mainstream media, Pegu delineates how media

engages in upper-class narratives of sexual violence,

silencing the working classes and other marginalized

voices. Similarly, Jagannathan and Packirisamy, and

Gupta and Nair describe the shrinking, alienating

spaces for critical engagement in academia.

A second key way by which precariousness is

normalized is by depriving individuals of institutional

support and collective solidarities. Coping with pre-

carity then must be resolved through self-help, opti-

mism, and enterprise. Both articles on academic labor,

and the roundtable on the MeToo movement, surface

these tensions confronted by individuals who must

resort to improvised responses and stop gap solutions,

in the absence of collectives. In this milieu, collective

action is perceived as useless. Suppression of resis-

tance then dons two guises. First, resistors are

disparaged: Those who resist, or form collectives,

are non-productive, like the ‘‘excuseniks’’ who

protested the Iraq invasion, or ‘‘anti-national’’ or

irrational if you challenge majoritarian rhetoric.

Second, any form of dissent, to capitalist expansion,

to war, or toxicity, is equated with dissent to

‘‘progress,’’ ‘‘development,’’ and growth, indeed dis-

sent to national sovereignty itself. The public sphere is

then ‘‘constituted in part by what cannot be said, and

what cannot be shown,’’ and only some subjects

appear as viable actors (Butler 2004: xvii).

A third insidious normalization of precariousness

today is by distractions and spectacles. Rai points to

the State’s magic rituals, by which spectacles to

confound the citizenry are staged. Indeed, economists

Prabhat Patnaik and Amartya Sen, speaking at a recent

session at the World Leaders Forum, Columbia

University, noted that magic appeared to be a key

element producing distractions and falsehoods, as

ubiquitous in Indian polity today (The Wire 2019).

In the process, all violence is shrouded and

normalized. Thus, verses from revolutionary poet

Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘‘Lahu Ka Suragh’’ (Trace of

Blood)
1

resonate louder today, as he laments,

Kahin nahin hai kahin bhi nahi lahu ka suragh

(Nowhere, nowhere is any trace of the blood)

…Kisi to bahr-e sama’ at na waqt tha na dimagh
(None had the ability to listen, nor the time, nor

the patience)

Na muddaı́ na shahadat hisaab paak hua… (No
plaintiff stepped forward, no one bore witness,

and so the account was closed)

Resistance, dissent and collective action

Yet, every once in a while, Faiz’s plaintiff steps up,

unmasks the shroud that conceals bloodstains, and

refuses to close the account. Rajnish Rai’s autoethnog-

raphy is one such endeavor. Rai reveals to us through

his exercise of autoethnography, how introspection,

writing letters, indeed, writing self, become political

acts. While the State here creates a spectacle by

mobilizing fear, that others (sometimes Muslims,

sometimes Naxals, sometimes separatists, always the

marginalized), will inflict harm on the nation, Rai

mobilizes his vulnerability to write, deliberate, ques-

tion, and dissent, and in doing so, performs a singular

act of courage that exposes the State’s spectacle. In a

similar vein, Jagannathan and Packirisamy, leverage

the autoethnography to write the personal into the

political.

Joseph, Natrajan, and Lobo trace domestic work-

ers’ collectivization in Bangalore. They meticulously

record the processes of formation of ‘‘labor NGO,’’

and the ‘‘place’’ for organizing the union. As much as

apartment complexes introduce new forms of surveil-

lance, and cordon off organizing, organizers reframe

the apartment as a factory gate, as a place of

organizing for workers’ rights. Domestic workers,

increasingly conscious of their rights, demanding

minimum wages and bonus (instead of gifts), remind

us of the long histories of solidaristic struggles that

have alternative world-making possibilities. As Chris-

tina Thomas Dhanraj, one of Sanjana’s respondents,

exhorts, ‘‘Marginalised women in India have been

organising, mobilising, and working on the ground for

a very long time…How about joining us, instead of
‘including’ us?’’

1
Translation from Anthems of Resistance, by Mir and Mir

(2016).

96 Decision (June 2019) 46(2):93–97

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Conclusion

The articles curated in this special issue bear witness to

changing nature of work and organization in India.

They do so, through both theoretical and methodolog-

ical contributions. They also leave us with new

directions and unanswered questions for work and

organizations studies. In these moments of heightened

vulnerability and precariousness, what forms does

political deliberation take? Within deeply individual-

izing structures, how do we find common ground and

forge collectives? What new methodologies and social

theories can we turn to? How do we construct an

alternative imagination? This special issue has sought

to open up debates, to unconceal deeper transforma-

tions, and to rupture silences in the world around us.

The point, however, is to change it.

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https://thewire.in/politics/amartya-sen-prabhat-patnaik-elections-2019-bjp-modi

	Introduction to the special issue: changing nature of work and organizations in India
	Nature of precarity in neoliberal regimes
	Silences, erasures and magic
	Resistance, dissent and collective action
	Conclusion
	References