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...

Labour force participation in India is found to respond to a plurality of causal mechanisms. Employment and unpaid labour are both measured using the 1999/2000 Indian National Sample Survey. Men`s labour-force participation stood at 85% and women`s at 35%. The overall rate of labour force...

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,...

Pluralism adds depth to the mixing of methods in development studies. In this paper, two aspects of pluralism (methodological and theoretical) are described and applied. Pluralism is grounded in an assumption that society has both structure and complexity, and that agents within society actively...

In this paper, I practice using a pluralist approach to moral economy. Firstly, I summarise the main schools of thought about gender pay gaps. These include the marginal productivity theories, the human capital school, compensating differentials, institutionalist, feminist and Marxist...

This article examines the problems that arise from borrowers’ growing aspirations for credit in rural South India. Two core problems arise, conditioned by the class origin of each family: first, a tendency to borrow beyond the capacity to repay, and second, the creation of new gender...

In this paper, realist findings from the philosophy of social science are summarised and implications for rural research methodology are drawn out. Four specific ontological claims are fleshed out. These ontological claims act as grounding assumptions for social research and knowledge, but are...

This paper examines the paradox that a borrower's status aspirations may contribute to a situation in which their borrowings exceed their capacity to repay. This paradox was first described by Thorstein Veblen, and has been fleshed out by Pierre Bourdieu. Thus in the theory of consumer culture...