Many consider caste as an outdated institution, though it thrives in postliberalization India. That being the case, caste has only been studied from a religious, social and political angle. It is grudgingly accepted that caste has economic ramifications. For instance, the establishment and running of businesses tap into caste networks, both in terms of arranging finance and providing access to a ready workforce. Despite that, any study of this aspect has been limited to looking at caste groups in terms of their per capita income, their representation in various professions and other statistical details. Caste as Social Capital examines the workings of caste through the lens of business, economics and entrepreneurship. It interrogates the role caste plays in the economic sphere in terms of facilitating the nuts and bolts of business and entrepreneurship: finance, markets and workforce. Through this qualitative view of caste, an entirely new picture emerges, which forces one to view the ageold institution of caste in a new light.
1. Theories of Capital: The Historical Foundation. 3. 2. Social Capital: Capital Captured through Social Relations. 19. 3. Resources, Hierarchy, Networks, and Homophily: The Structural Foundation. 29. 4. Resources, Motivations, and Interactions: The Action Foundation. 41. 5. The Theory and Theoretical Propositions. 55. 6. Social Capital and Status Attainment: A Research Tradition. 78. 7. Inequality in Social Capital: A Research Agenda. 99. 8. Social Capital and the Emergence of Social Structure: A Theory of Rational Choice. 127. 9. Reputation and Social Capital: The Rational Basis for Social Exchange. 143. 10. Social Capital in Hierarchical Structures. 165. 11. Institutions, Networks, and Capital Building: Societal Transformations. 184. 12. Cybernetworks and the Global Village: The Rise of Social Capital. 210. 13. The Future of the Theory. 243. . References. 251. . Index. 267.
This timely volume puts emphasis on the effect of social capital on everyday life: how the routines of daily life lead people to get involved in their communities. Focussing on its micro-level causes and consequences, the book's international contributors argue that social capital is fundamentally concerned with the value of social networks and about how people interact with each other. The book suggests that different modes of participation have different consequences for creating - or destroying - a sense of community or participation. The diversity of countries, institutions and groups dealt with - from Indian castes to Dutch churches, from highly competent 'everyday makers' in Scandinavia to politics-avoiding Belgian women and Irish villagers - offers fascinating case studies, and theoretical reflections for the present debates about civil society and democracy.
It?s no secret that certain social groups have predominated India?s business and trading history, with business traditionally being the preserve of particular `Bania? communities. However, the past four or so decades have seen a widening of the social base of Indian capital, such that the social profile of Indian business has expanded beyond recognition, and entrepreneurship and commerce in India are no longer the exclusive bastion of the old mercantile castes. In this meticulously researched book ? acclaimed for being the first social history to document and understand India?s new entrepreneurial groups ? Harish Damodaran looks to answer who the new `wealth creators? are, as he traces the transitional entry of India?s middle and lower peasant castes into the business world. Combining analytical rigour with journalistic flair, India?s New Capitalists is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the culture and evolution of business in contemporary South Asia.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
How the language of “merit” makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India. Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post‐racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post‐caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions. Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.
David Rudner's richly detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of a South Indian merchant-banking caste provides the first comprehensive analysis of the interdependence among Indian business practice, social organization, and religion. Exploring noncapitalist economic formations and the impact of colonial rule on indigenous commercial systems, Rudner argues that caste and commerce are inextricably linked through formal and informal institutions. The practices crucial to the formation and distribution of capital are also a part of this linkage. Rudner challenges the widely held assumptions that all castes are organized either by marriage alliance or status hierarchy and that caste structures are incompatible with the "rational" conduct of business. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
It explores the formation of India's rural middle class, which rests on a complex, and often contradictory, set of processes that began unfolding with growing industrialisation in rural areas. It examines its composition, characteristics and social identification from the perspectives of three major class theorists: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu.
Almost everyone on the planet has heard of the "Ancient Hindu Caste" system and somehow, almost everyone knows how horrible it is, but what if it wasn't ancient and it wasn't Hindu? Almost everyone on the planet knows that the colonialist erasure of indigenous languages and ideas was a horrific chapter in human history, but what if it's not over, what if it's morphed in to a new form, just as devastating and destructive, and what if the Caste issue holds the key to revealing it? Every Hindu walks through life carrying a subliminal guilt that his or her ancestors were "caste discriminators" and every devout Christian walks tall and proud in the knowledge that his or her ancestors helped to free the crushed, downtrodden from the depraved Hindoo caste system, and being an accepted "truth" no-one questions it any more. What if they are both victims of the same deception, of the same multigenerational fraud? In 2016, the British Hindu community was rocked when it became the target of demonisation and dehumanisation by anti-Hindu Anglican Evangelists. Allegations were made that caste discrimination was not a relic of history but was present and not only present but rife amongst the British Indian community. The difficulty was that there was no experience of it at the grass roots level, and there was no evidence of it being either systemic nor endemic, so what was afoot? The author Pt Satish K Sharma, a Dharmic Scholar and Theologian and a long serving community worker under took the task of determining, once and for all, the real history of Caste and of establishing and quantifying its presence or absence in the Britain of the 21st Century. There were mountains of academic accounts of the theory, allegations and anecdotes abounded and yet the reality at ground level was remarkably different. The revelations contained in this work were the revelations which incinerated the false claims which had been levelled, revealed the hidden hand behind the anti-Hindu media campaign but also provided the context and framework with which this long running civilisational wound could heal. The contents of this book include actual communications which took place, the information which was presented to Parliamentarians. Legislators and Community leaders as well as eye witness accounts of meetings and "consultations", as well as the authors research, research which led eventually to the senior leaders of the Church of England requesting that Parliament review the whole issue once more. We have the strange situation that Parliament passed legislation without adequate consultation and the Government chose not to enact the legislation, a phenomenon never before arisen in British History, this book provides the answers as to why. The Caste issue remains a colonialist force for harm, and the tropes which underly it cause suffering to the Hindu community in every corner of the world even today, as Isabel Wilkersons recent tragically uninfomed book prove. This book will go a long way to to reversing this harm and should be compulsory reading for every Hindu, Christian and activist working to reverse the civilisational trauma of European Colonialism "I find it extraordinary that there are issues here of which until now I have had absolutely no knowledge. My feeling is that the majority of native Britons will share this reaction. The Church, Christianity, which had perverted the simple message of its founder, believed it could justify imposing its version on a "primitive" people with a concept of original sin and the claim that it alone possessed the means to personal salvation. Between them, they were able to devise an extraordinarily successful divide-and-rule format which did immense damage to that country... Please forgive us now, so that we can move forward together." M Purton BBC Producer (Retd)
