1,720,955 research outputs found
Aspirational Labour and Self-Making: A Study of Retail Workers in Delhi Malls
No full textWith the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s, there has been an expansion in consumption-driven organised services such as real estate, retail and hospitality, manifested in the proliferation of expensive shopping malls, multiplexes, gated communities, cafes and restaurants -- particularly in the urban metropolises. This new service economy employs a large youth workforce, who usually come from under-privileged backgrounds and many of whom are migrants. The nature of labour and employment in this sector is distinctive, shaped by neoliberal management ideas and practices that promote self-making, self-maximisation and self-disciplining. While all of us have encountered these young men and women in shopping malls and large retail stores, few studies have investigated their social backgrounds, their educational or employment trajectories, or the processes that mould them into modern service workers. Given that organised services employ a growing proportion of the workforce in India, an examination of the nature of these jobs and the kinds of labour that these young men and women perform warrants sociological attention. My dissertation explores the lives of retail workers in malls of Delhi and Gurgaon, specifically within the apparel and beauty segments. The thesis is framed as a workplace ethnography and is situated within the anthropology and sociology of work and labour. It traces how young retail employees are crafted into appropriate service workers through management practices, how they engage with the requirement to perform aesthetic labour, and how they negotiate with practices of self-making and self-maximisation encountered in the workplace. I describe the life histories of retail workers in three large stores, their entry into the retail workforce, the aspirations that they associate with these jobs, and the kinds of labour they perform. Through an ethnography of retail spaces and retails workers’ lives, I discuss how their expectations and aspirations are altered by their work and how they negotiate their identities as they come to inhabit the novel environment of the shopping mall and interact with managers and customers. The thesis examines the implications of neoliberal employment practices and middle-class and elite consumer cultures for the subjectivities of service workers, and the ways in which working in elite mall spaces shape social identities
Malls versus streets: North-Eastern women between modernity and marginality
No full textThis paper explores the experiences of migrant women from
Northeast India who work in retail stores in malls in Delhi and
Gurgaon, and the conflicting discourses of modernity and marginality which they negotiate at work and outside work. Managers of
high-end retail stores in malls view these women as ‘modern’,
‘global’ and reflective of the aesthetic sensibilities of the brands
they are hired to sell. For this reason, north-eastern women’s
bodies and identities are ‘valued’ and ‘sought after’ by retailers
and recruiters. Yet, outside, especially on the streets of Delhi, the
same women whose aesthetic and modern attributes are valued
at the workplace are subject to racial and sexualised stereotyping
that labels them as ‘promiscuous’, ‘provocatively dressed’ and
lacking in sexual respectability. This paper describes the spatial
practices of north-eastern migrant women as inscribed by the
shifting landscapes of modernity and marginality that they must
negotiate as they reconcile their different public identities in
the city
Professional identities and servile realities: Aspirational labour in Delhi malls
No full textThe article explores how retail workers envision and pursue aspirations for social mobility through employment in Delhi malls. Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation, this study examines how retail store employees cultivate professional occupational identities as a way of distancing themselves from informal and manual workers and claim a new class identity. The article also shows how workers come to view the job as dhoka (deceit), once they experience humiliation and disrespect at the hands of customers and managers and realise that such employment does not allow them to transcend their social class positions. However, they continue to stay on in these demeaning jobs because they believe that employment in the new service economy is their best option. By exploring retail workers’ narratives of majboori (constraint or compulsion) in this context, the article unpacks their contradictory experiences of work in the service sector and sheds light on youth aspirations and mobility strategies in post-liberalised India
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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