Summary |
This collection puts together research papers by experts interested in situating workers in the so-called informed sector in the context of economic development in the historical past and the contemporary scene of gloabalisation in countries of the South. The authors examine the conceptual problems and empirical evidence in this regard from the varied perspectives of the disciplines they belong to- economics, anthropology, history and sociology. They share a certain dissatisfaction with the Euro-centric approach which privileges a paradigm of development in which the emergence of an industrial proletariat, firmly founded on wage-labour relationship vis-à-vis capital, is conceded a centrality. This paradigm marginalizes other forms of labour, including those in the so-called informal sector in countries of the South as well as vast sections of the laboring poor who are represented as residual or transitional.
The need to bring such supposedly marginal groups to the centre stage of scholarly attention and the close interrogation of the Euro-centric paradigm may be said to be the agenda that emerges from the collection of research papers. The regions studies range from Thailand, India, and Congo to some Latin American countries and the temporal span covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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