Working Lives in India: current insights and future directions

India presents a rich context for research on work and employment, epitomising the paradox of an ‘emerging economy’ but one where 92.4 percent of the workforce is informal - insecure, unprotected, poor – and women and disadvantaged groups most vulnerable. It displays a wide range of production relations in its formal/informal economy, embedded in diverse social relations, and the related forms of exploitation and resistance. This e-special issue of Work, Employment and Society (WES) aims to review existing WES scholarship on India since 2001, identifying both gaps in scholarship and fruitful avenues for future research on India. The purpose is to showcase some of this scholarship while also advancing the internationalization and expansion of the journal’s presence in countries in the Global South. This effort is timely as decolonisation of scholarship and increased focus on the South is on the intellectual agenda, challenging established structures of power and knowledge in academia.

Hammer, A., Keles, J. Y., & Olsen, W. (2022). Working Lives in India: Current Insights and Future Directions. Work, Employment and Society, 36(6), 1139–1154. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170221083511
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