How democratic decentralisation facilitates,sustains, and interrupts market-driven development in India

Democratic decentralisation has emerged as an instrument to implement market-driven development, and elected bodies now extend commercial inputs for commodity production and link households to firms. However, the nature of market-driven development under this condition is understudied. This article focuses on an Indian case where, while access to market inputs was shaped by political capital with elected leaders, narrowing market participation, leaders – now market intermediaries – fostered trust in firms, helping sustain market participation. Conflicts over electoral politics interrupted market production. Markets rely on state institutions and are intertwined with politics, contrary to market proponents’ claims that markets stand above society and are unmediated spaces of exchange.     

Elected Leaders,Community and Development: Evidence on Distribution and Agency from a Case in India

Although democratic decentralisation or community development by elected leaders is hypothesised to broaden development, there is little evidence on just how elected leaders make distributional decisions and far less on how communities in turn shape their leaders' decisions. This study combines structural equation modelling with ethnography in India to investigate how leaders of elected local bodies called panchayats distribute development. While quantitative findings reveal that democratic decentralisation mitigates elite capture, ethnography gives insight into the role of political brokers in brokering development for votes, widening distribution to non elite groups.     

Societal and Managerial Implications of Implicit Social Cognition: Why Milliseconds Matter

This article argues for the vulnerability of managerial work to unintended forms of racial and other bias. Recent insights into implicit social cognition are summarized, highlighting the prevalence of those mental processes that are relatively unconscious and automatic, and employed in understanding the self and others. Evidence from a response-time measure of implicit bias, the Implicit Association Test, (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) illustrates this phenomenon. Recent work on the predictive validity of the IAT demonstrates that social cognitive pitfalls threaten a) managers' explicit commitments to egalitarianism and meritocracy and b) managers' performance in their three primary roles of processing information, interacting with others, and making decisions (Mintzberg, 1973). Implicit bias influences managerial behavior in unexpected ways, and this influence is heightened in the messy, pressured, and distracting environments in which managers operate.     

Market-driven dairying and the politics of value,labor and affect in Gujarat,India

Ethnography in Gujarat, India’s poster-state of market reforms, recovers what transpires when the individual embraces capital for market-driven production. This contribution reports on resource-poor rural households who embark on dairying through buffaloes acquired with microcredit. The essay discusses the politics of economic value, and economic value encountering other values, lifeworlds and affective relations related to work, humans and non-human others. These phenomena interrupt commodity production. Human–animal relations challenge both capitalism’s treatment of bovines as machines, and the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism rooted in ignorance of rural economy, lifeworlds and livelihoods.