Contract Farming, Ecological Change and the Transformations of Reciprocal Gendered Social Relations in Eastern India

Debates on gender and the commodification of land highlight the loss of land rights, intensification of demands on women’s labour, and decline in their decision-making control. Supported by ‘extra-economic forces’ of religious nationalism (Hindutva), such neoliberal interventions are producing new gender ideologies involving a subtle shift from relations of reciprocity to those of subordination. Using data from fine grained fieldwork in Koraput district, Odisha, we analyse the tensions and transformations created jointly by corporate interventions (contract farming of eucalyptus by the paper industry) and religious nationalism in the local landscape. We examine how these phenomena are reshaping relations of asymmetric mutuality between nature and society, and between men and women

Addressing Social Justice and Cultural Identity in Pakistani Education : a Qualitative Content Analysis of Curriculum Policy

Pakistan was set up as a relatively egalitarian and democratic state. However, the trend has been for successive governments to create a more theocratic/Islamic, less inclusive, and less democratic state especially during the Zia regime. This led to the dominance of a relatively narrow and exclusionary conception of Pakistani national identity—based on the aspirations of the dominant Sunni Punjabi ethnic group. This increased the difficulties of the remaining ethnic and religious groups, whose cultural diversity was less clearly recognised either politically, socially, or educationally—and indeed there was a distinct prejudice practised against them. In the early twenty first century, the Musharraf regime tried to make changes to this approach through policies based on enlightened moderation—a variant of liberal democracy. Against this background, this chapter presents the findings from a qualitative content analysis of some of the key education policy and secondary school curriculum documents produced during the Musharraf regime. The aim of this analysis was to understand how these policy documents addressed social justice and cultural diversity issues in Pakistan

Rhetorics and realities of management practices in Pakistan: Colonial, post-colonial and post-9/11 influences

This study explores how colonial laws and administrative practices shaped the evolution of employment management in Pakistan. It identifies important mechanisms used by the British Raj (the period of British rule of the subcontinent) to institutionalise legal and administrative frameworks: the legacies of these structures continue to influence contemporary management practices in government sector organisations. This article investigates the legacy of the Raj's ¿quota system¿ in the civil services and the doctrine of the ¿martial race¿ in military services, both of which offered enduring structural advantages in the labour market to designated groups. It further considers the implications of the study's findings for international HRM in particular, but also management theory, comparative HRM and comparative management in post-colonial societies