State spatial restructuring, subnational politics and emerging spaces of engagement for collective action: Labour regimes in Tamil Nadu, southern India
M Vijayabaskar
Environment and Planning C, 2017, vol. 35, issue 1, 42-56
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the emerging literature on state rescaling by examining how processes of restructuring in late transitioning countries like India shape spaces of collective action for labour. India’s subnational States, which have become increasingly critical scales for shaping processes of economic restructuring, face competing governance imperatives. On one hand, they must offer a business-friendly environment, including cheap labour, in order to attract private investments. On the other hand, in a democratic polity, they are compelled to secure political power through electoral appeal to labour. Through a study of labour regimes in the southern State of Tamil Nadu, I argue that subnational governments have responded to this challenge by enabling a scale of labour governance that undermines labour’s ability to engage with new spaces of collective action opened up by reforms and globalization. Rather, the State subsidizes labour through welfare provisioning in their residential spaces even as it draws upon inter-State migrant labour that wields less electoral power.
Keywords: Collective action; spatial restructuring; labour regime; mobility; Tamil Nadu (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263774X16664097 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:35:y:2017:i:1:p:42-56
DOI: 10.1177/0263774X16664097
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().