Economic Lives in Provincial India: On work and values in small businesses

As part of the bigger framework of REALEURASIA project, Chaki’s research explores how norms, values, and obligations influence economic behavior in day-to-day life in provincial India; the focus is on small businesses. On the one hand, small businesses are envisioned in neoliberal India  as the future motor of the country’s economy, as exemplified by the current government’s “Make in India” campaign. On the other hand, they provide an interesting arena for analyzing the interplay of different value spheres as seemingly contradictory realms – namely, familial values and the profit-maximizing logic of homo economicus – coexist. The research question is premised upon the idea that economy is embedded in the larger social matrix (following Polanyi), and the project explores this link by engaging  with  Weberian concepts of “economic ethics” and “spheres of life”, coupled with Thompson’s notion of ‘moral economy’ as re-conceptualized by numerous  later scholars.

These small businesses feature a plurality of actors who often have diverging interests, and the project aims to understand the multiplicity of values that drive their actions. It uncovers the influence of factors including (but not limited to) religion, tradition, politics, and professional and other codes of ethics. To this end, Chaki looks into the ways these values are used to justify certain actions, to shape specific outcomes, and to harness the capacity of other actors towards a desired end. Against the backdrop of structural changes brought about by the waves of economic liberalization that started in the 1980s, Chaki focuses on the motivations, strategies, and experiences of starting and running these small businesses. She explores the experience of work in these often-precarious workplaces and reveals how these experiences relate to actors’ broader values, aspirations, and ideas of “the good life”. She further delves into the gender dimension of the economic landscape of the field site and uncovers the morality behind gender-specific work preferences.
The project relies upon fieldwork in a Maharashtrian town in the vicinity of greater Mumbai that has expanded rapidly as a result of the government’s attempt to de-centralize the amorphous industries of Mumbai. The empirical data were collected over the course of a year using qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews and participant observation, which were complemented by a detailed quantitative survey conducted among over 40 small businesses representing various sectors ranging from small-scale manufacturing units to retail and service outlets.