Suchergebnisse

Employee involvement is an evolving process replete with uncertainties even given the best of preconditions–worker ownership. This case study of the largest Indian worker cooperative focuses on the processes of employee involvement over a decade. The authors argue that employee involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that the employees consider critical is shared with them. While for the management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, for the employees it is a matter of trust. The authors propose that as the management expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, the worker expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional, trust-based loop. This mismatch in expectations around information critically influences employee involvement.

During the mid-1990s, the state of Kerala witnessed a wave of 'fever epidemics', which the government tackled by establishing fever clinics. Based on an ethnography of these clinics, this article examines how, from being a symptom of the body's defensive response, fever has itself become institutionalised as a disease. It argues that the institutionalisation of fever as a disease has occurred through two sets of practices: first, discursively at the societal level by interactions among health professionals, the media, organisations repre-senting various systems of medicine, and ordinary people; and second, curatively at the clinic while rendering fever care, including diagnosis and treatment. The article shows that, despite the discursive prevalence of a dominant system of allopathic medicine, the practices at the fever clinic are not consistently based on an allopathic understanding of physiology and pathology but rely on skilled trial-and-error which incorporates plural medical traditions. The article critically evaluates the effects of institutionalisation in terms of narrowing how fever is understood and how it may be treated.

The author argues that grass roots democracy is the base of a democratic community and state. He examines the Indian tradition and experiences in grass roots movement and local government.

The 73rd Constitution Amendment Act, making Panchayats at three levels 'Institutions of Self-government' has also provided a list of subjects to be brought under the Panchayats. Among the 29 subjects mentioned in the Eleventh Schedule, land improvement, land consolidation, soil conservation, water management, social forestry, minor forest produce, non-conventional energy sources, sanitation, and maintenance of assets, are subjects related to environmental management. In the fifty years after Independence there was a statutary vacuum at the local level for planning and implementing programmes which protect the life and property of the people and improve their quality of life. The idea was that whatever the people's needs were, they could be dealt with from the top, the relics of an imperial structure, through the departments and their officials. Now we know that this approach has never been sensitive to local necessities. If we accept Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) as the defacto third tier of governance, all administrative, planning and implementation activities should converge at the district level from the Gram Sabhas, Village Panchayats and Block Samitis. The Constitution has made provisions for this in Article 243. People's representatives taking decisions in tandem with the experts, is the ideal situation to protect the environment and ecological balance.