Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellows, 1997-1998

Sharad Chari, Geography: The Agrarian Question Comes to Town: A Historical Geography of Industrialization in Tiruppur, South India. The reorganization of work in Tiruppur, South India into small-firm networks has propelled it into the center of India's knitwear industry. Industrial studies' explanations of this boom remain unresolved in reconciling elements of informalized and sweated labor alongside possibilities of an Italian-style "industrial district." Mr. Chari hopes to chart a history of changing forms of "agrarian transition" that have linked the development of capitalism in the countryside to the emergence of Tiruppur as a center in the production and export of knitwear. While the fulcrum of this unique form of regional industrialization is the transformation of a class of "progressive" middle peasants of the Gounder caste into successful small-scale industrialists, this analysis places the success story of these rural entrepreneurs in a larger drama of transformation across town and country. Through ethnographic, interview, and archival methods, this research aims to understand what these phases of development in Tiruppur and its rural environs are, and how and why these phases have been constituted as such. Finally, Mr. Chari aims to use this case study to rethink the notion of "agrarian transition" to include the ways in which agrarian power relations and cultural practices are utilized in capitalist industrialization "from below," emerging organically, as it were, from the peasantry, but also limited and attenuated by lingering agrarian connections and contradictions.

Kenneth Dubin, Political Science: Opportunity Knocks: European Integration and the Regionalization of Spanish Labor Relations. In April of 1997, the two majority Spanish labor confederations and the umbrella employer organization signed a bilateral accord to increase external labor market flexibility, encourage firms to convert temporary workers into permanent ones, and restructure the poorly articulated system of multi-level (sector, region, and firm) collective bargaining agreements. The attention devoted to these accords masks the fact that international competition, European Union regulations, and the creation of seventeen regional governments with significant regulatory powers have shifted the center of gravity in the institutional structuring of Spanish labor relations away from the national level. Mr. Dubin's research suggests that these changes are the result not of a transfer of responsibilities from center to region or sector but rather of the emergence of new regulatory tasks both within and outside the firm which have been claimed by some sub-national governments and producer organizations-tasks such as dispute resolution, worker training, health and safety regulation, and market conforming economic promotion. The uneven emergence of sub-national frameworks of labor relations in Spain raises a number of important questions for students of comparative labor relations that he will attempt to address through this project: how do national and regional-level political debates about labor market reforms get linked to broader political struggles between central and regional governments? under what circumstances does administrative decentralization threaten the power of institutionally privileged national producer organizations? how do we explain cross-regional differences in the degree of cooperation and conflict among sub-national producer groups? and, what roles can unions play in advanced economies when they have not been able to attain a significant voice in the re-organization of production?

David Eaton, Anthropology: River with No Source: The Politics of AIDS in Equatorial Africa. This dissertation examines response to AIDS in equatorial Africa, based on two years of ethnographic field research in the former Zaire, the Republic of Congo, and Cameroon. Mr. Eaton considers politics in these societies as imagined and experienced through the body and voice and as expressed in systems of exchange. In particular, he evokes the narratives of young men affected by the epidemic and by the transformation of personal and sexual relationships which it is bringing about. He also analyzes the influence of international sciences in the construction of humanitarian and medical intervention in response to AIDS and other epidemics in the region, linking events in the capital cities with those in a rural forest region shared by several countries, comparing national institutions as they engage local and regional polities.

David Engerman, History: American, Russia and the Romance of Economic Development. This dissertation explores the writings of America's Russia experts (diplomats, journalists and scholars) between 1880 and 1940 to trace the rise of what George F. Kennan once called "the romance of economic development" -- that is, the willingness of Soviet policy-makers and the Western experts who reported on Soviet affairs to value rapid, high-cost (in financial and human terms) industrialization. Because this romance rested also on low opinions of those whose sacrifices made industrialization possible, Mr. Engerman also traces the centrality of national-character assessments in American expert opinion. Finally, he examines the application of these patterns of American thought (valorization of development, denigration of "the Russian character") to foreign policy at key moments such as the revolutions of 1917, the famine relief effort of 1921-23, and American diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1933.

Oz Frankel, History: Discovering Society: The Politics, Culture and Rituals of Social Investigations in Britain and the United States, 1830-1870. This dissertation explores the emergence of two essential features of modern political culture: the social "investigation" as a public ritual and the social "report" as a unique type of document. Both were, Mr. Frankel argues, at the center of a new form of politics, based on the accumulation, presentation, publication, analysis and manipulation of facts about society. As he demonstrates, these practices and texts were important vehicles of modernity, by anchoring politics in printed texts, and undermining local ties and intermediate knowledge in favor of national (or international) communities of decision-makers, experts and readers. Drawing upon a range of case studies in both countries, Mr. Frankel follows the rituals of investigative work and the experience of investigators: philanthropic "tourism" to factories, inspection of mines and prison cells, or field trips to remote Indian tribes and the reconstructed South. He also researches the production of reports -- the process through which information was "digested," printed and disseminated. Indeed, at the center of this project is the history of the social report as a distinctive political-discursive form that, he argues, pre-dates and co-exists with professional social sciences.

Fabio Ghironi, Economics: Macroeconomic Policies in Interdependent Economies: Theoretical and Institutional Issues. Research on economic policy-making in interdependent economies has been evolving along different lines over the past few years. On one side, economists have been trying to produce more reliable models of policy interactions, from which to draw conclusions both from a positive and a normative perspective. On the other side, there has been a recent increase in attention towards issues of actual "making" of economic policies in the real world, where the results from economic theory need to control themselves with a host of imperfections and obstacles that are assumed away in most models. In particular, there has been increasing attention to the importance of institutional structures in affecting economic outcomes and to the issue of how to design such structures to facilitate the making and implementation of (optimal) economic policies. The ambitious goal that Mr. Ghironi intends to pursue in this dissertation is that of improving upon the existing literature along both lines of research.

Sean O'Riain, Sociology: Development and the Global Information Economy: Lessons from the Irish Software Industry. Many analysts have interpreted the process of economic globalization as severely constraining the development policy options for national and regional economies in the global economy. The apparent weakening of the power of social and political institutions to regulate and shape the economy has been both celebrated and lamented but is only recently itself being questioned. Mr. O'Riain's research examines the Irish software industry, the multiple ways it intersects with the global software industry and the crucial role of workplace, industry and state institutions and associations in the development of the industry.