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Abstract
The paper applies a theory of institutional change enriched with mezzorules, fluidity and agency to India's informal sector institutional evolution using two illustrative examples. The concrete examples are rooted in unfree labour and rural casual labouring in India, a country which has a high degree of informality. Section 1 introduces some concepts, and section 2 examines processes of institutional change in the informal sector. In section 3, two illustrations are explored: (1) the norms for girl child bonded labour; (2) the individualisation of women labourers. Section 4 concludes. The fluidity of institutional rules demands a recognition of the supra-economic nature of the context within which economic-institutional change occurs. We propose the analysis of mezzorules in a dialogic research context, i.e. interactions among workers and collective agents – as a helpful and transformative approach for sociologists specialising in the informal economy.
Notes
1. The ‘third sector’ refers to the whole of the voluntary, not-for-profit, and non-governmental organisation sector as well as volunteering and social work that is non-governmental.
2. There are many other important sets of norms besides those in the money economy. See Anderson (Citation1993) and Nussbaum and Glover (1995).
3. In other words, we may have academic disciplines of economics and sociology that are separate for the sake of administrative convenience, but in reality the objectives of development all lie in one single set of objectives. This set of aims cuts across social, political, cultural and economic aspects.
4. By a norm situation we mean a social situation which is rich with norms, but where the norms are not simply given as strict rules. In the language used by Elder-Vass, the norms can only exist within norm circles of agents who co-construct norms. A cinema audience is a norm situation. Each agent is embedded in many norm situations at once. We can compare this with Elder-Vass (Citation2010), who calls the group of people involved in developing a norm a ‘norm circle’. We would go further by arguing that the decision about whether to be in the norm circle for a particular mezzorule is in itself not determined by prior norms. A key element underpinning both our and Elder-Vass's argument is that causes do not generally work deterministically, but as tendencies. (See also ch. 6 of D. Elder-Vass's forthcoming book, The causal power of social structures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)
5. By mezzorule we mean a partial rule. The prefix ‘mezzo’, as used for example in mezzo-soprano, refers to not quite being the thing, soprano.
6. Two contrasting schools of thought about institutional change, the new institutional economics and the old institutionalism, are described by Hodgson (2007).
7. A discussion of the supra-individual agent can be found in Garikipati and Olsen, Citation2009. We say: ‘Agency is the capacity of any social actor to act; agents behave according to their internal composition and history, and their external relations. Agents do not always conform to norms of behaviour, although they often do’ (ibid., p. 329). The ability to reason about action helps distinguish agents in society from other forces like lightning, blizzards, and gravity which are forces but are not agents.
8. Notice that agents are partly nested within larger agents, as people work within firms which in turn are nested within regulatory systems. The nesting is only partial.
9. The arguments of Hodgson reflect a slightly different approach, from which ours is derived. Hodgson has argued that habits exist in a given social field as normative givens (Hodgson 2004). He says that norms can be assumed to exist and that habits do not need explicit memory or cognitive attention. See also Berk and Galvan (2009), who discuss the research methods appropriate to the subtleties of knowing about rules. Berk and Galvan stress that cognition about habits can lead to changes in the rules themselves. They agree that most social rules are continually accessible to change by agents.
10. Olsen and Neff (2007); three specific areas were prominent – firstly, how to keep accurate records of daily work and output, involving disputes about who kept records and who scrutinised them; secondly, how the government officer in charge of releasing funds behaved, which wavered between being subservient to local landlords and being active in promoting the cash daily wage norm of Rs. 100/day that was announced as a formal-sector rule for this work; and thirdly, the principle of equal pay for men and women. The ambiguities that arise in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in 2005–7 are widespread because of a general guidance that no intermediaries should be used to mediate the spending of the money on wages of workers. As a result, wage payments are part of the investment planning process at project level, and each NREGS scheme works slightly differently in terms of how piece rate measures translate into daily wage rates. The specification of a daily wage rate in the scheme is two mezzorules: pay women and men equally, and pay them Rs. 100 per day. By contrast, in the Minimum Wage regulations of Andhra Pradesh, which have evolved over a long period, different minimum wages are prescribed for various tasks. As a result, there is less fluidity in the application of the minimum wage. In the case of minimum wages, the mezzorule arises separately from the specification of wage rates: ‘pay a fair wage’ is itself a mezzorule. In the informal sector of rural areas, this can often be read by the employer as ‘pay a fair wage with no reference to the minimum wage laws’.
11. See http://labour.ap.gov.in/ilo.jsp for an overview of the anti-child labour project in Andhra Pradesh and http://labour.ap.gov.in/pdfs/StateActionPlan.pdf for details of various officers’ roles in this context.
12. A detailed description of the permanent labouring situation as it affects both men and women is offered by DaCorta and Venkateswarlu (Citation1999).
13. To illustrate the lack of clarity of rules, consider the wife of a male permanent labourer. As his wife, she may be expected to perform various unpaid labouring tasks. However in doing these, her time is drawn away from her own farming and family work. She has to generate decisions that actively mediate between these different spheres of work. She may have to resist one norm (such as cleaning up the cow dung at the landlord's house) in order to keep time free to conform to other norms (grazing and watering her own cow and taking her cow to the veterinarian to ensure a higher milk output).
14. Specifically, three theories can be nested into the main theory suggested here. These are embeddedness theory, old institutional economics, and new institutional theories of formal market regulation including transactions costs economics. Kähkönen and Olson (Citation2001) discuss the new institutional economics (NIE) approach to Indian institutions. However the NIE needs considerable amendment to become a theory of social change. For the reasoning behind this claim, see Lawson (2003, Chapter 2).
15. The program of initiatives against child labour is extensive, including state monitoring teams, mandil-level (village-level) implementation committees, the building of special schools (locally known as Bridge Schools) in 250 districts of Andhra Pradesh, provision of food and health care at the special school sites, child tracking system, railway-based support groups, capacity building, enrolment drives in selected sectors, and enforcement of the regulations via the active liaison with headmasters of regular schools and Angalwadi staff who run nurseries in the home-base villages of child labourers.
16. Bales defined forced labour as people being in new slavery, rather than using the ILO standard definition. Bales's estimates for regions other than Asia were nearly the same as the ILO's estimates, as Belser et al. (2005) report. Only for Asia did Bales get an estimate about twice as high as the ILO's estimates. See Bales (2004 [1999]). For India, a description of the nature of one group of forced labours is provided by Olsen and Ramanamurthy 2000. Here bondage and coercion overlapped.
17. Microfinance access across India has grown, but membership in microfinance schemes via self-help groups is only 5% of farming households in India; see Morgan and Olsen Citation2011b. ‘Although the increase in micro-finance and in SHGs is a significant trend there is always the danger of exaggerating its overall impact over the last decade. 2005 data from the 2003 National Survey of Farmers indicates that of 55,700 farming households sampled only 4.8% had a member in an SHG for India as a whole, though the figure for Andhra Pradesh was 18%, second only to the state of Kerala’ (ibid, footnote 10).
18. One new empirical question is whether there are also established private practices of patriarchal backlash.