Book reviews

Vernon Hewitt, The New International Politics of South Asia (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1997), xxxvi +305 pp., ISBN 0–7190–5121–5 (hb), 0–7190–5122–3 (pb)

Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Macmillan, London, 1997), 284 pp., ISBN 0–333–53488–3

Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (eds), Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics (Frank Cass, London, 1997), 253 pp., ISBN 0–7146–4816–7 (hb), 0–7146–4366–1 (pb)

Linda McDougall, Westminster Women (Vintage, London, 1998), 215 pp., ISBN 0–09–927405–1     

Surplus yield and production structure: The case of small‐scale rural industries in West Bengal

Rural industries in West Bengal are characterized by a multiplicity of organizational forms, such as independent petty production, petty production under subcontracting relations with a master trader, modern small‐scale production, and medium‐sized capitalist production. On the basis of field data, we have estimated the amount of surplus generated by these different kinds of producer across a number of organizations and industries, using an alternative criterion: imputing wages to family labour. It was observed that a large number of petty producers generate negative or very low surpluses, and thus have to find supplementary sources of income. Further, the surpluses generated by petty producers attached to a master trader are generally higher than those of independent petty producers.This can be explained in one of two ways. Either the existence of mutual trust between attached petty producers and a master trader offers the former certain advantages over the independent ones, in terms of steady access to urban markets, cheaper sources of raw materials, and easy credit. Or, alternatively, the control such attachment licenses enables a master trader both to extract and to maintain continuous access to higher levels of surplus. For these reasons, this system, of organization lends viability to artisanal production.     

Confirmatory Factor and Smallest Space Analyses on the Belief in a Just World Scale

Social Justice Research - A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used on the Belief in a Just World Scale (BJW; Lucas, Zhdanova & Alexander in J Individ Diff 32:14–25, 2011) to test...     

Moving beyond nation-state: Framing state-level politics in India

The article refers to the processes that have been critical to the emergence of states as significant categories for the analysis of politics in India after a considerable period of academic neglect. It is in this context that the article considers the following research questions for discussion while referring to the state politics literature: what has been the contribution of the “first generation” of state-specific studies and to what extent has the “second generation” of inter-state comparative studies been able to take this forward? What could be the specific advantages of inter-state studies over single case studies? Finally, the article argues in favour of a need to develop further what may be considered the “third generation” of studies in the discipline, that remain comparative in nature but are in search of a much-nuanced grounded analysis; this would move beyond state-specific or inter-state studies and start taking up intra-state comparative studies, focusing on historical-cultural substate regions that have emerged as political (and economic) units within and across the constituent states of the Indian Union.