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Structure, Agency, and Strategy Among Tenants in India

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  • Wendy Olsen

Abstract

This paper arises from the Global Poverty Research Group (www.gprg.org), under which I have conducted fieldwork in rural south India. My focus is on strategies, choice, and constraints as aspects of tenants' decisions. My aim is to treat tenants (as both households and as individual agents) in their structural contexts (class, caste, religion, gender).The strategies that people use involve an orientation to current and future events, including possible events which are imagined or which could happen. This orientation creates a context for immediate decision-making as well as a context for reflection and deliberation. The strategies of tenants include being friendly toward landlords but making this conditional upon their proper behaviour; the renegotiation of work; switching from land management to livestock; choosing to rent rainfed land or irrigated land; and so on. Agents negotiate and enforce proper behaviour and thus both create and change the system of norms that exists. In Macintyre's terms (1985), the virtues intrinsic to the socio-economic practices are continually being re-worked. In the paper, I reframe this in dynamic structure-agency terms. Both structural relationships and concrete past incidents act as reference points for decisions made today in a given relationship.The strategy of a household is an emergent property of the household as an agent, and includes detailed first-order strategies along with more reflective second-order strategies which reconcile goals in the education, migration, and marriage domains with assumptions - and explicit strategies - about domestic and paid labour. The paper is thus interdisciplinary and links together several schools of thought.

Suggested Citation

  • Wendy Olsen, 2007. "Structure, Agency, and Strategy Among Tenants in India," Economics Series Working Papers GPRG-WPS-080, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:gprg-wps-080
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B5 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Current Heterodox Approaches
    • O17 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Formal and Informal Sectors; Shadow Economy; Institutional Arrangements
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development
    • O53 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Asia including Middle East

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