Introduction: The Economic Dynamism of Middle India

Abstract

The town (Arni) at the centre of this book reflects non-metropolitan and non-corporate ‘Middle India’ widely regarded as marginalized from twenty-first century growth processes and drivers. But re-assessments of Indian censuses (for example by the ‘Indiapolis’ project) reveals this view as misguided. Middle India is constituted through small towns in a process of ‘subaltern urbanization’ where vibrant economic growth coexists with infrastructural neglect. The informal economy of such towns is now known to drive both growth and livelihoods. Termed ‘unorganized’, economic order is achieved through a balance between selective state regulation and the play of many forms of social authority revealed in this book. Liberalization and globalization has not dissolved this regulative complex, it has increased the tension between dissolving forces and those reworking and sometimes intensifying social regulation. The dynamism of this economy is explored through a range of theoretical prisms, through field research and case studies of the business economy, labour relations, clustered development (rice, silk and gold), income, investments and material spatial flows. But dynamic forces also involve ambivalence (infrastructure, forms of regulation and livelihoods are discussed here) and destruction (commodities and changes to the family firm are taken as examples). Links between urban dynamism and rural distress are followed (through crises of water, livelihoods and consumption). An introduction to the economic and political history of the town and its countryside is also provided.

‘My fascination with the energies exploding inside the bazaar always delays me … (Gita Mehta 1994, A River Sutra)

Appendix: The Case for the Case Study

The kind of context-dependent knowledge which a case study produces is just as fundamental as context-independent rules and theories to the expertise needed for both studying and actively conducting human affairs. There is no substitute for the case study in providing an intimate understanding of human behaviour—in this case expressed in economic activity. Predictive social science has not succeeded in generating theory which anticipates the main events of history; close observation is the ‘only route to knowledge-noisy, fallible, and biased though it be’ Campbell (1975, pp. 179, 191).

• (i) The history of science shows that large samples are by no means always needed for hypothesis testing, generalizability or falsification. The role of context is crucial and this in turn requires the kind of knowledge that is derived from case studies.

• (ii) It follows that case studies are useful both for hypothesis generation and testing but that their uses transcend these two activities. As a field of knowledge develops, extreme, most or least likely or critical cases are essential for critical progress in the development of rule-based knowledge/theory. The problem arises when, as in the case of Arni, there are few other cases to benchmark it against. Even then—or rather especially then—the case becomes a lens through which a whole society can be glimpsed. Flyvbjerg (2006) makes a strong justification for the roles of experience and intuition in identifying the paradigmatic case.

• (iii) A bias towards verification rather than testing hypotheses or propositions is found to be a general phenomenon throughout science. But case studies often produce surprises which lead to prevailing theories being revised or even rejected altogether. Studying Arni produced many such surprises. And if a bias in favour of verification dominated this means of learning, that would not have happened.

• (iv) Flyvbjerg showed that a detailed analytical narrative of the kind that pervades this book engages both with the abstract and the concrete, revealing the detail more as a property of the reality studied than of the case method as such.

Flyvbjerg concludes, with Kuhn, that disciplines which ignore ‘exemplars’ are ineffective. But that ‘case studies have to be ‘good’.