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Book Reviews by Manish Thakur

Research paper thumbnail of BOOK REVIEW

Research paper thumbnail of Farmer Suicides The Burden of Local Narratives

Papers by Manish Thakur

Research paper thumbnail of Betwixt agency and accountability: re-visioning street-level bureaucrats

Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance

This paper presents a critical assessment of the much-discussed tension between bureaucratic acco... more This paper presents a critical assessment of the much-discussed tension between bureaucratic accountability and the contextual discretion of ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (i.e. front-line public sector workers). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper outlines the implications of the exercise of agency by street-level bureaucrats in everyday settings. It also looks at the challenges this agency engenders: loss of accountability and divergence from stated policy goals. The paper underlines the need for future research on institutional structures and organisational cultures around street-level bureaucracy. It suggests possible lines of enquiry to steer the debate in new, and hopefully productive, directions.

Research paper thumbnail of The Community Development Block and India's development discourse

Theory, Policy, Practice

The purpose of this draft paper is to trace the appearance and disappearance of the Community Dev... more The purpose of this draft paper is to trace the appearance and disappearance of the Community Development Block in the development discourse of India. I shall try to show that the Community Development Block, (or more colloquially ‘Block’) was an important element in the development discourse and policy making of independent India but over time its discursive significance got reduced although it continued to remain significant for the practical purpose of implementation of development programmes. I conclude by examining why the Block disappeared from development discourse of India after a certain point in time.

Research paper thumbnail of Privileging critique

Sociology and Management Education

Research paper thumbnail of Meandering pathways

Sociology and Management Education

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review: Roland Lardinois (translated from the French by Renuka George). 2013. Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France in the 19th–20th Centuries

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Research paper thumbnail of Sociological traditions

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2014

Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in cour... more Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in courses relating to the growth and development of sociology in India. Most, if not all, may find names such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, the ‘three Ms’ as T.N. Madan (2013: 3) calls them in his recently edited volume entitled Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921–1975),1 somehow familiar. This familiarity, though, does not presuppose any serious understanding on their part of the substantive works of the Lucknow sociologists. Preliminary ideas about Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work in the field of social ecology, or D.P. Mukerji’s stress on the study of tradition, or D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work among tribes, or A.K. Saran’s repartee to Louis Dumont, is all that one can generally expect. Given the general amnesia surrounding the works of the pioneers at Lucknow, Madan’s volume is a noteworthy contribution to the recent attempts at retrieving

Research paper thumbnail of Khek Gee Lim, F., 2008, Imagining the Good Life: Negotiating Culture and Development in Nepal Himalaya, Leiden: Brill, xiv + 234 pp., ISBN 9789004167872, EUR 79

Comparative Sociology, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Studying Bureaucracy in Post-Colonial India: The Normative and the Quotidian

This article presents a critical assessment of the new wave of anthropological scholarship on bur... more This article presents a critical assessment of the new wave of anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and its relevance in India. Dealing primarily with everyday bureaucratic practices, and their entanglements with local hierarchies of power, status and wealth, such studies underline the contingent and contextual nature of the enterprise of ‘state-making’. Moreover, they direct our attention away from the normative, formal-institutional configurations of state power to the quotidian workings of the state through its materiality and discursive representations at multiple loci of state–citizen interface in post-colonial India that are invariably orchestrated bureaucratically. While bringing out the implications of this change in theoretical, methodological and substantive focus for our understandings of the interrelated ideas of state and citizenship, the article concludes by outlining a few possible trajectories for further scholarly engagement so far as studies of bureaucracy in...

Research paper thumbnail of The ‘Economic’ in Indian Sociology: Genealogies, Disjunctions and Agenda

Sociological Bulletin, 2021

A cursory glance at the century-old history of Indian sociology reveals its relative under-engage... more A cursory glance at the century-old history of Indian sociology reveals its relative under-engagement with economic phenomena and processes. Although the ‘economic’ did get studied under the influence of agrarian and village studies, and certain apparently economic themes such as industry and labour did attract scholarly attention from some sociologists, we notice the absence of a sustained and robust academic tradition of sociological studies of the economy in India. There appears to have been an intellectual division of labour, where the study of economic issues was ceded to economists whereas sociologists remained jubilant with their studies of primordial institutions. This study attempts to locate this persistent disjunction between the social and the economic from the perspective of the disciplinary history. Of necessity, this calls for an examination of the relationship between sociology and economics, and the way it unfolded in post-independence India. To this end, this study...

Research paper thumbnail of Dalit politics and the Indian State: Changing landscape, emerging agendas

Social Change, 2004

The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond ... more The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond the pale of the agency of the modernising State and firmly place it in the arena of global civil society, and the frequent appeal to the United Nations or the international human rights bodies to pressurise and morally coerce the Indian State, is part of the new dalit political tactics. This dampens the formation of a critical dalit consciousness by altering the flow of discontent from the State towards an incipient global civil society. Downgrading those struggles which are political / economic in nature or seek to capture State power, the new dalit activism tries to hegemonise the entire dalit movement.

Research paper thumbnail of Review: Adrian Holliday (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: …, 2008

Review: Adrian Holliday (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research.

Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Indigenous Social Science: Invoking a Lucknow Sociologist

Society and Culture in South Asia

A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a character... more A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a characteristic feature of the growth and development of social sciences in postcolonial societies. Indian sociologists, in particular, have frequently turned their critical gaze on the ethnocentrism of the Western social sciences. In fact, there have been extreme responses on the issue—from the impossibility of an Indian sociology to the calls for an Indian ethno-sociology. At the core of such responses is the contestation over one's approach and orientation to Western modernity. Against this backdrop, the present paper selectively invokes Radhakamal Mukerjee's axial concerns and analytical thematics with a view to demonstrate the general contour of a long-raging debate on the indigeneity question in Indian sociology.

Research paper thumbnail of Global Discourses and Local Mobilisations: The Case of ‘Barh Mukti Abhiyan’

Sociological Bulletin, 2009

Research paper thumbnail of The Changing Rural-agrarian Dominance: A Conceptual Excursus

Sociological Bulletin, 2017

Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical invest... more Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical investigation of rural-agrarian dominance in the context of the fundamental transformation of the ‘village’ from the spatial habitat of the traditionally ‘dominant’ to the ‘waiting room’ for the aspiring and the despairing. 1 Against the backdrop of the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an unrewarding profession and the village as the dark underbelly of a shining India, it underlines the need to revisit the conventional political economy models of rural-agrarian dominance. We argue that the triad of caste, land and political power does not exhaust the emergent constituents of rural-agrarian dominance. The aspirational surge towards middle-classisation, even among the village dominants, has unleashed forces and processes whose ramifications have to be meticulously thought through. The three-class dominant social coalition model prevalent in the political economy literature largely fails to...

Research paper thumbnail of Dalit politics and the Indian State : Changing landscape, emerging agendas

Social Change, 2004

The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond ... more The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond the pale of the agency of the modernising State and firmly place it in the arena of global civil society, and the frequent appeal to the United Nations or the international human rights bodies to pressurise and morally coerce the Indian State, is part of the new dalit political tactics. This dampens the formation of a critical dalit consciousness by altering the flow of discontent from the State towards an incipient global civil society. Downgrading those struggles which are political / economic in nature or seek to capture State power, the new dalit activism tries to hegemonise the entire dalit movement.

Research paper thumbnail of Democracy, Pluralism and the Religious Minorities: The Muslim Question in India

Research paper thumbnail of The State of Management Education in India: Trajectories and Pathways

Management Education in India, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Carol Upadhya: Reengineering India: work, capital and class in an offshore economy

Research paper thumbnail of BOOK REVIEW

Research paper thumbnail of Farmer Suicides The Burden of Local Narratives

Research paper thumbnail of Betwixt agency and accountability: re-visioning street-level bureaucrats

Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance

This paper presents a critical assessment of the much-discussed tension between bureaucratic acco... more This paper presents a critical assessment of the much-discussed tension between bureaucratic accountability and the contextual discretion of ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (i.e. front-line public sector workers). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper outlines the implications of the exercise of agency by street-level bureaucrats in everyday settings. It also looks at the challenges this agency engenders: loss of accountability and divergence from stated policy goals. The paper underlines the need for future research on institutional structures and organisational cultures around street-level bureaucracy. It suggests possible lines of enquiry to steer the debate in new, and hopefully productive, directions.

Research paper thumbnail of The Community Development Block and India's development discourse

Theory, Policy, Practice

The purpose of this draft paper is to trace the appearance and disappearance of the Community Dev... more The purpose of this draft paper is to trace the appearance and disappearance of the Community Development Block in the development discourse of India. I shall try to show that the Community Development Block, (or more colloquially ‘Block’) was an important element in the development discourse and policy making of independent India but over time its discursive significance got reduced although it continued to remain significant for the practical purpose of implementation of development programmes. I conclude by examining why the Block disappeared from development discourse of India after a certain point in time.

Research paper thumbnail of Privileging critique

Sociology and Management Education

Research paper thumbnail of Meandering pathways

Sociology and Management Education

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review: Roland Lardinois (translated from the French by Renuka George). 2013. Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France in the 19th–20th Centuries

Contributions to Indian Sociology

Research paper thumbnail of Sociological traditions

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2014

Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in cour... more Students of sociology are likely to come across synoptic accounts of the ‘Lucknow School’ in courses relating to the growth and development of sociology in India. Most, if not all, may find names such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, D.P. Mukerji and D.N. Majumdar, the ‘three Ms’ as T.N. Madan (2013: 3) calls them in his recently edited volume entitled Sociology at the University of Lucknow: The First Half Century (1921–1975),1 somehow familiar. This familiarity, though, does not presuppose any serious understanding on their part of the substantive works of the Lucknow sociologists. Preliminary ideas about Radhakamal Mukerjee’s work in the field of social ecology, or D.P. Mukerji’s stress on the study of tradition, or D.N. Majumdar’s ethnographic work among tribes, or A.K. Saran’s repartee to Louis Dumont, is all that one can generally expect. Given the general amnesia surrounding the works of the pioneers at Lucknow, Madan’s volume is a noteworthy contribution to the recent attempts at retrieving

Research paper thumbnail of Khek Gee Lim, F., 2008, Imagining the Good Life: Negotiating Culture and Development in Nepal Himalaya, Leiden: Brill, xiv + 234 pp., ISBN 9789004167872, EUR 79

Comparative Sociology, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of Studying Bureaucracy in Post-Colonial India: The Normative and the Quotidian

This article presents a critical assessment of the new wave of anthropological scholarship on bur... more This article presents a critical assessment of the new wave of anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and its relevance in India. Dealing primarily with everyday bureaucratic practices, and their entanglements with local hierarchies of power, status and wealth, such studies underline the contingent and contextual nature of the enterprise of ‘state-making’. Moreover, they direct our attention away from the normative, formal-institutional configurations of state power to the quotidian workings of the state through its materiality and discursive representations at multiple loci of state–citizen interface in post-colonial India that are invariably orchestrated bureaucratically. While bringing out the implications of this change in theoretical, methodological and substantive focus for our understandings of the interrelated ideas of state and citizenship, the article concludes by outlining a few possible trajectories for further scholarly engagement so far as studies of bureaucracy in...

Research paper thumbnail of The ‘Economic’ in Indian Sociology: Genealogies, Disjunctions and Agenda

Sociological Bulletin, 2021

A cursory glance at the century-old history of Indian sociology reveals its relative under-engage... more A cursory glance at the century-old history of Indian sociology reveals its relative under-engagement with economic phenomena and processes. Although the ‘economic’ did get studied under the influence of agrarian and village studies, and certain apparently economic themes such as industry and labour did attract scholarly attention from some sociologists, we notice the absence of a sustained and robust academic tradition of sociological studies of the economy in India. There appears to have been an intellectual division of labour, where the study of economic issues was ceded to economists whereas sociologists remained jubilant with their studies of primordial institutions. This study attempts to locate this persistent disjunction between the social and the economic from the perspective of the disciplinary history. Of necessity, this calls for an examination of the relationship between sociology and economics, and the way it unfolded in post-independence India. To this end, this study...

Research paper thumbnail of Dalit politics and the Indian State: Changing landscape, emerging agendas

Social Change, 2004

The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond ... more The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond the pale of the agency of the modernising State and firmly place it in the arena of global civil society, and the frequent appeal to the United Nations or the international human rights bodies to pressurise and morally coerce the Indian State, is part of the new dalit political tactics. This dampens the formation of a critical dalit consciousness by altering the flow of discontent from the State towards an incipient global civil society. Downgrading those struggles which are political / economic in nature or seek to capture State power, the new dalit activism tries to hegemonise the entire dalit movement.

Research paper thumbnail of Review: Adrian Holliday (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: …, 2008

Review: Adrian Holliday (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research.

Research paper thumbnail of The Politics of Indigenous Social Science: Invoking a Lucknow Sociologist

Society and Culture in South Asia

A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a character... more A deep sense of ambivalence towards the Western social scientific categories has been a characteristic feature of the growth and development of social sciences in postcolonial societies. Indian sociologists, in particular, have frequently turned their critical gaze on the ethnocentrism of the Western social sciences. In fact, there have been extreme responses on the issue—from the impossibility of an Indian sociology to the calls for an Indian ethno-sociology. At the core of such responses is the contestation over one's approach and orientation to Western modernity. Against this backdrop, the present paper selectively invokes Radhakamal Mukerjee's axial concerns and analytical thematics with a view to demonstrate the general contour of a long-raging debate on the indigeneity question in Indian sociology.

Research paper thumbnail of Global Discourses and Local Mobilisations: The Case of ‘Barh Mukti Abhiyan’

Sociological Bulletin, 2009

Research paper thumbnail of The Changing Rural-agrarian Dominance: A Conceptual Excursus

Sociological Bulletin, 2017

Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical invest... more Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical investigation of rural-agrarian dominance in the context of the fundamental transformation of the ‘village’ from the spatial habitat of the traditionally ‘dominant’ to the ‘waiting room’ for the aspiring and the despairing. 1 Against the backdrop of the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an unrewarding profession and the village as the dark underbelly of a shining India, it underlines the need to revisit the conventional political economy models of rural-agrarian dominance. We argue that the triad of caste, land and political power does not exhaust the emergent constituents of rural-agrarian dominance. The aspirational surge towards middle-classisation, even among the village dominants, has unleashed forces and processes whose ramifications have to be meticulously thought through. The three-class dominant social coalition model prevalent in the political economy literature largely fails to...

Research paper thumbnail of Dalit politics and the Indian State : Changing landscape, emerging agendas

Social Change, 2004

The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond ... more The conscious effort on the part of dalit activism to take the issue of dalit empowerment beyond the pale of the agency of the modernising State and firmly place it in the arena of global civil society, and the frequent appeal to the United Nations or the international human rights bodies to pressurise and morally coerce the Indian State, is part of the new dalit political tactics. This dampens the formation of a critical dalit consciousness by altering the flow of discontent from the State towards an incipient global civil society. Downgrading those struggles which are political / economic in nature or seek to capture State power, the new dalit activism tries to hegemonise the entire dalit movement.

Research paper thumbnail of Democracy, Pluralism and the Religious Minorities: The Muslim Question in India

Research paper thumbnail of The State of Management Education in India: Trajectories and Pathways

Management Education in India, 2016

Research paper thumbnail of Carol Upadhya: Reengineering India: work, capital and class in an offshore economy

Research paper thumbnail of Radhakamal Mukerjee and the Politics of Disciplinary Erasure: A Preliminary Note

The Eastern Anthropologist, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Review: Adrian Holliday (2007). Doing and Writing Qualitative Research

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum Qualitative Social Research, Oct 30, 2008

The book fruitfully combines discussions on qualitative research methods with the craft of academ... more The book fruitfully combines discussions on qualitative research methods with the craft of academic writing. While detailing different stages involved in qualitative research, it accords appreciable attention to the fundamental epistemological premises of different qualitative research genres. Yet, its central concern is to demonstrate ways and means to manage researcher's subjectivity in the writing of qualitative research. The book looks at the act of writing as crucial to the twin concerns of rigor and validity in qualitative research. It privileges writing as an important methodological resource that qualitative researchers employ to make the workings of their research procedures transparent and establish their accountability in relation to specificities of a given research setting. Given this focus, the eight chapters of the book discuss at length issues such as authorial voice, the trials and tribulations of transition from data to written study, the reflexivity of the researcher as writer, and the demanding expectations of cautious detachment in reporting the people, setting, and the worlds and sensitivities that are part of any qualitative research enterprise.