Showing papers by "Jonathan Parry published in 1999"

Lords of labour: Working and shirking in Bhilai:

Abstract: At the ethnographic level this paper discusses work and work-groups in the company town of Bhilai (Madhya Pradesh). Though its central focus is on those who have permanent jobs with the Bhilai Steel Plant, a large-scale public sector enterprise, brief comparison is made with current attitudes to peasant agriculture, with contract labour in the plant and with workers in the private sector. At an analytical level, it offers a critique of E.P. Thompson's thesis that modern machine production requires and promotes a new concept of time and a new kind of work discipline, arguing that this thesis not only romanticises task-oriented peasant agriculture but also effaces the extremely variable nature of industrial production. It further suggests that—at least here—public sector employment serves in significant measure as a 'melting-pot' which creates important solidarities between work-mates that transcend the barriers of caste, religion and regional ethnicity, whereas recruitment procedures and the composition of work-groups in the private sector have tended to reproduce such 'primordial' loyalties. The tentative hypothesis is that the dominance of the public sector is not unrelated to Bhilai's history of relative communal harmony, which is potentially threatened by current economic and policy trends.

The worlds of Indian industrial labour

Abstract: Introduction - Jonathan P Parry The Study of Industrial Labour in Post-Colonial India - The Formal Sector - Jan Breman An Introductory Review Work and Resistance in the Jharia Coalfield - Dilip Simeon On Living in the Kal(i)yug - Christopher Pinney Notes from Nagda, Madhya Pradesh Lords of Labour - Jonathan Parry Working and Shirking in Bhilai Just Like a Family? Recalling Relations of Production in the Textile Industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940-60 - Douglas E Haynes Hope and Despair - Chitra Joshi Textile Workers in Kanpur in 1937-38 and the 1990s Questions of Class - Rajnarayan Chandavarkar The General Strikes in Bombay, 1928-29 At the Margins - Samita Sen Women Workers in the Bengal Jute Industry The Badli System in Industrial Labour Recruitment - Arjan de Haan Managers' and Workers' Strategies in Calcutta's Jute Industry Artisan Labour in the Agra Footwear Industry - Peter Knorringa Continued Informality and Changing Threats Gender Ideologies and the Formation of Rural Industrial Classes in South India Today - Karin Kapadia Diamonds and Patels - Miranda Engelshoven A Report on the Diamond Industry of Surat Asking For and Giving Baki - Geert de Neve Neo-Bondage, or the Interplay of Bondage and Resistance in the Tamilnadu Power-Loom Industry The Study of Industrial Labour in Post-Colonial India - The Informal Sector - Jan Breman A Concluding Review