This paper examines recent employment practices among 39 families of Rayalaseema area of Andhra Pradesh, India.  A social class analysis offers a starting point for the study of employment contracts.  Employment practices are diverse, but the habitus of the employers and employees sometimes...

This paper arises from the Global Poverty Research Group (www.gprg.org), under which I have conducted fieldwork in rural south India.  My focus is on strategies, choice, and constraints as aspects of tenants' decisions.  My aim is to treat tenants (as both households and as individual agents)...

This paper explores a pluralist approach to moral economy. Firstly, four schools of thought on the rental of land in India are described. The normatic and ontic assumptions of each school are described. Then I look closely at a debate between two feminist authors, Agarwal and Jackson. The...

This paper adds a moral angle to a pluralist approach to development economics. Normative assumptions can be found in all the five main schools of thought that have analysed India`s rural labour markets (neoclassical, new institutionalist, Marxist political economy, formalised political economy,...

Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...