My first book, Narrow Fairways: Getting By & Falling Behind, draws on ten-plus years of deep ethnographic fieldwork at three exclusive golf clubs in Bangalore, India. The book focuses on the lives of poor and mostly lower-caste caddies who carry the golf sets of wealthy upper-caste members at these clubs. Members, as I show, among them industrialists, salaried professionals, and civil servants, publicly support fairness and equality, and yet routinely undermine these intentions in the way they relate to the caddies. Though members tout the merits of hard work and discipline as a means to self-improvement, they invariably obstruct paths to social and economic independence. Most notably, they refuse to grant the caddies status as employees, which would provide them with the benefits and guaranteed wages necessary for stability. As a result, the caddies have little choice but to cultivate ties of servility and deference, seeking handouts from members in order to procure health care, educate their children, and cover rising household expenses. Absent robust industrial policy, mass jobs programs, and adequate investments in public health care and education, I show how servility and deference all too often operate as the most viable ways to get by, if not ahead, in the “new” India—increasingly, too, in the U.S. and other industrialized societies, as I demonstrate in an op-ed published in August 2019 in the Washington Post. I have also shared insights from the book on various podcasts, including The Sociology Annex, New Books Network, and Inequalities.
In 2014, while undertaking fieldwork on the first project, I started tracking a select few graduates of an English-language residential boarding school for poor and lower-caste children in South India. The school, founded in the late-1990s by a former Wall Street executive, prepares children to one day lift their families out of poverty and assume leadership roles in the society once they leave the school. Graduates, indeed, are successful. Almost all of them go on to competitive colleges in Bangalore; some are now enrolling in colleges in the US. Post-college, they take high-paying jobs at local and international firms in India and around the world. In addition to following these personal successes, however, I seek to understand the challenges graduates encounter in meeting the expectations to support families and solve social problems in their communities and in the country, more generally. With nearly 100 interviews now completed, along with several site visits on-campus, I am preparing two article manuscripts, one that is addressing the specific struggles of women graduates and another that is looking at the ideological assumptions that underpin most graduates’ thinking about poverty alleviation in a country riven by social and economic inequalities.
I am also laying the groundwork for new research on elites in Mexico. The project concerns two related strands of inquiry. With the first, I want to learn more about the role of Mexico’s political and economic elites in bringing about the neoliberal turn of the 1980s through the 1990s, which is often told from the perspective of US and UK interests. Among scholars and journalists, there is considerable agreement that something changed in Mexico in these decades, visible with the shift to US-friendly rhetoric, more business-friendly policies, and Harvard-trained economists and civil servants assuming important public posts. Then again, too little attention is paid to how and why this change took place, and what active as opposed to merely passive or reactionary role Mexico’s elites played in the process. While the neoliberal turn itself cannot be put down to the actions of a few such elites in Mexico, I want to propose that these elites together with the decisions they made functioned as a political and economic bridge of sorts linking the interests and intensions of elites elsewhere in the global economy, particularly in the US, and thereby ensuring the stability of the larger neoliberal project.
The elevation of Andrés Manuel López Obredor to the office of the presidency in December 2018 motivates a second line of inquiry concerning the present and future trajectory of development and growth in the society. AMLO, as he is called, brazenly challenges the legacy authored by political and economic elites of the past. As such, I want to understand how elites perceive this moment in the country’s history, if they think AMLO indeed represents a sharp break with the past, as he intends, or only a momentary threat to the prevailing order. Highlighting the competing visions represented by AMLO and his detractors, I want to discern what prospects there might be for genuine reform of the state and its institutions in service of large swaths of the population that remain on the margins of prosperity.
These three projects—one complete, and the other two, one in India and another in Mexico, underway—reflect not only scholarly interests, but also personal concerns. I am driven to understand how differently situated actors in the global economy reinforce and challenge inequality. This larger objective is premised on the belief that sound, empirically grounded research on inequality can enliven public debate and move policy in a positive direction.