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Ranjana Padhi, Those Who Did Not Die: Impact of the Agrarian Crisis on Women in Punjab. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2012. 228 pages. ₹ 650.

Focusing on the gaps in the practice, methodologies, pedagogies, and texts related to the 'Sociology of India', this article locates key problems in the theoretical and methodological orientation of the discipline, analyses the tensions within and between the varied institutions responsible for the production of sociological knowledge, and notes the absence of linkages between the discipline and the larger society and nation. The article provides three sug-gestions to pluralise the discipline: facilitating wider and more diverse themes and issues in research including encouraging studies of the 'vicinity'; developing and deploying multiple methodologies to study and represent a range of issues; and integrating Indian language writings into the pedagogical, textual, and theoretical apparatus of the discipline.

The jajmani system has often been seen as the model representation of rural provisioning transactions which link landed members of agrarian societies to the labour and service caste groups. However, attention to a variant of provisioning transactions enacted in rural north Karnataka indicates the extent to which these transactions differ from the jajmani system and exemplify what might be called 'embedded' transactions. It is their embedded dimension, in which political and economic motivations are intertwined with the social and cultural, that enables these transactions to function, simultaneously, as a form of social reproduction. However, recent shifts in the organisation of agriculture and in the changing identities of low- ranked caste members have led to a decline in these transactions, producing ruptures in the reproduction of the local social order. While the articulation of these transactions in their 'embedded' state camouflages their economic and social orientation, it is in their state of decline that the 'special logics' of these transactions can be discerned.

While much has been written on the growth of information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services in India, little is known about the people who work in these industries, about the nature of the work itself, and about its wider social and cultural ramifications. The papers in this collection combine empirical research with theoretical insight to fill this gap and explore questions about the trajectory of globalization in India. The themes covered include: sourcing and social structuring of the new global workforce; the work process, work culture, regimes of control and resistance in IT-enabled

Drawing on neo-liberal economic norms, India and the US are increasingly marking and constituting women in poverty as new economic agents. Though based in vastly different socio-economic polities, poor women in both countries are subject to state- led agendas that seek to alter their economic conditions and their subjectivities. Discourse in the US seeks to shift women from welfare to that of workfare and thereby integrate them into the normative structures of dual-parent families. In India the state draws cn the rhetoric of enabling economic empowerment and yet fails to provide the required structural support. Details from the various programmes in the two countries and their impact indicate the extent to which there is a 'serial collectivity' between women in the two countries who share similar shifts in their identities, cul tures and life conditions despite being located in vastly different structural conditions.