This article examines the problems that arise from borrowers’ growing aspirations for credit in rural South India. Two core problems arise, conditioned by the class origin of each family: first, a tendency to borrow beyond the capacity to repay, and second, the creation of new gender...

This paper addresses the issue of how rules are conceptualized by Hodgson in Old Institutional Economics (OIE). The argument is put forward that the concept of rules can be constructively clarified. Rather than provide a general form of single rules within a rule system, we argue for a taxonomic...

Pluralism adds depth to the mixing of methods in development studies. Global society has both structure and complexity, and agents within society actively promote competing ways of describing and interpreting that society. Theoretical pluralism offers a way for social scientists to describe and...

This paper examines recent employment practices among 39 families of Rayalaseema area of Andhra Pradesh, India.  A social class analysis offers a starting point for the study of employment contracts.  Employment practices are diverse, but the habitus of the employers and employees sometimes...

This paper arises from the Global Poverty Research Group (www.gprg.org), under which I have conducted fieldwork in rural south India.  My focus is on strategies, choice, and constraints as aspects of tenants' decisions.  My aim is to treat tenants (as both households and as individual agents)...

This paper arises from the Global Poverty Research Group, under which I have conducted fieldwork about land rental relationships in rural south India. The paper introduces strategies as a solution to the theorists' dilemma of choice vs. constraints with particular respect to rural tenants'...

This paper explores a pluralist approach to moral economy in two ways. First, as a review, four major schools of thought on the rental of land in India are described. I focus on their normative and ontic assumptions. Second, noting that none of these schools is value-neutral, a plurality of six...