Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Undoing Boundaries
- Chapter 2 Formal and Informal Technologies of Alternative Organisational Spaces within the State: An Analysis of Violence, Wrongdoing and Policing
- Chapter 3 Scripting Alternative Images: Institutions, Practices and Scripts of the Mritshilpis of Kumortuli
- Chapter 4 Shelter for Homeless: Ethnography of Invisibility and Self-exclusion
- Chapter 5 Alternative Spaces of Employment Generation in India: Informal Rules, Structures, and Conflicting Organisational Requirements
- Chapter 6 Shaheed Hospital: Alternative Organisation, Ideology and Social Movement
- Chapter 7 Acting for Change: A Circuits of Power Analysis of a Denotified Nomadic Tribe and Budhan Theater's Struggle for Change
- Chapter 8 Swaraj: An Alternative University
- Chapter 9 Alternative Organisations: Spaces for Contestation
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter 1 - Introduction: Undoing Boundaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Undoing Boundaries
- Chapter 2 Formal and Informal Technologies of Alternative Organisational Spaces within the State: An Analysis of Violence, Wrongdoing and Policing
- Chapter 3 Scripting Alternative Images: Institutions, Practices and Scripts of the Mritshilpis of Kumortuli
- Chapter 4 Shelter for Homeless: Ethnography of Invisibility and Self-exclusion
- Chapter 5 Alternative Spaces of Employment Generation in India: Informal Rules, Structures, and Conflicting Organisational Requirements
- Chapter 6 Shaheed Hospital: Alternative Organisation, Ideology and Social Movement
- Chapter 7 Acting for Change: A Circuits of Power Analysis of a Denotified Nomadic Tribe and Budhan Theater's Struggle for Change
- Chapter 8 Swaraj: An Alternative University
- Chapter 9 Alternative Organisations: Spaces for Contestation
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The water sold itself
and from the desert's
distilleries
I've seen
the last drops
terminate
and the poor world, the people
walking with their thirst
staggering in the sand.
I saw the light
at night
rationed,
the great light in the house
of the rich.
All is dawn in the
new hanging gardens,
all is dark
in the terrible
shadow of the valley.
The day is coming
when we will liberate
the light and the water,
earth and men,
and all will be
for all, as you are.
For this, for now,
be careful!
(From ‘Ode to the Air’ by Pablo Neruda)
In the last twenty five years of neoliberal governance, India has witnessed a dramatic shift to privatisation and corporatisation. The new regime of governance has allowed accumulation of wealth for a few with an accompanying rise in inequity at an unprecedented scale. In this neoliberal era, discourse of management is exalted and allows a significant symbolic capital to accrue to managers. Such a discourse fosters conditions for managementality, or the the mentalities and rationalities of management, to determine subject positions that are economically and culturally privileged. While most people struggle for their survival, neoliberalism creates the condition for a small elite to become entrepreneurial, prudential and active to exploit the opportunities offered by corporatisation in a socially uneven India. As Neruda perceptively observed, the corporate-state nexus commodifies and sells everything to the highest bidder leaving the majority of the Indian population in a state of abject poverty. In such times of abundance for a few and deprivation for the vast majority, the question of alternative organisations becomes particularly relevant in India.
Our ideas of alternative organisations in this book are inspired by critical traditions in social and management theory to imagine a different world in which there are emphases on human emancipation, equity and justice. We believe academic writings create counter-discourses that may lead to conditions of what Neruda describes, ‘The day is coming when we will liberate’. Such conditions often hinge on the creation and dissemination of alternative imaginations that are repressed by dominant management discourses under neoliberalism.
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- Alternative Organisations in IndiaUndoing Boundaries, pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
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