University of Chicago doctoral student Adam Sargent, with the guidance of Dr. Susan Gal, will conduct research on local cultural dynamics of capitalist development. The research will be carried out in India through an ethnographic account of new skill training programs for construction workers, which is intended to transform a rural, migrant workforce organized around caste, kinship and residential relations into a modern one organized around skill. Sargent hypothesizes that the skill training programs may actually be producing the forms of difference that they purport to overcome and perpetuating rather than eliminating non-skills-based distinctions.
The researcher will explore this hypothesis through participant observation and interviewing at a skills training center in Ghaziabad, a "modern" construction site in Delhi that employs workers from the training center, and a "traditional" construction site in Varanasi that employs informally trained workers. The researcher will pay particular attention to socio-linguistic data because understanding the definition of good quality work and the ability to reflect on one's own competence are signs of skilled labor. Furthermore, it is through talk in everyday interactions, both on and off the site, that connections between forms of labor and kinds of people (members of different classes and castes, or exhibiting different skills) are produced, challenged and negotiated. Other material to be analyzed include labor disputes, evaluations, work orders, and remunerations.
The research will contribute to a better understanding of how local cultural forms affect capitalist development. It will also suggest possibilities for new and more inclusive ways of training workers and organizing labor processes. The project has the potential to affect policy decisions since the skill training organization involved in the project is heavily involved in policy decisions regarding the construction industry. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
The award was used to partially fund a 16 months of fieldwork in and around New Delhi, India. The goal of the research was to understand the processes by which workers are taken up into the constrcution industry. Some organizations have argued that the construction industry in India transforms poor, unemployed, rural migrants into modern workers capable of working in contemporary urban environments. The research critically investigated this claim and explored how employment in the construction industry was shapping and reshapping the lives of workers on the ground. To this end, participant observation wsa carried out at three sites. The first was a training institute where students were received training in various construction trades. Many of the students saw employment in the construction industry (with the aid of formal training) as a way to gain access to the upper middle class lifestyle of contemporary india. Of crucial importance to many students was that training at the institute would allow them to skip over working as a laborer. Indeed, one of the tensions during training was that the institute requiresd students to do practical training. This seemed too close to labor to many students and thus they often complained of being treated as laborers. This concern came up on the other two research sites which were construction porjects run by a large and smaller company respectively. Here as well there were often heated negotiations around how one could or couldn't treat different categories of workers. Laborers were at the bottom and often had no room to refuse certain tasks or to work autonomously. Laborers were also figured as a sign for all that was wrong with the construction industry, particularly the persistence of kinship and caste nteworks in recruitment. Yet the research demonstrates that these very relations that are publicly decried were in fact crucial to supporting supposedly modern ecnomic strategies. Thus, employing one's relatives actually allowed a greater degree of flexibilty in the payment of wages and allowed contractors to be more adaptable to a regime of flexible accumulation based on piece-rate contracts. Thus, the abhorence of laborers was found to exist in tension with their importance to construction projects. In this way the practices that are considered iappropriate for a modern industry were, in fact, the very practices that supported the industry.
