Sociology and Management Education by Manish Thakur

Author:Manish Thakur [Thakur, Manish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Business & Economics, Management
ISBN: 9781000529111
Google: 9zZIEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-31T04:26:27+00:00

The peculiarities of Indian sociology

Like elsewhere, sociology in India has acquired certain local attributes owing to the historical specificities of its growth and development as an academic discipline. These peculiarities have imparted it with an orientation which has made it less hospitable towards a serious disciplinary engagement with the ‘economic’. In fact, a cursory glance at the century-old history of Indian sociology reveals its relative under-engagement with economic phenomena and processes. Although the ‘economic’ did get studied under the influence of agrarian and village studies, and certain apparently economic themes like industry and labour did attract scholarly attention from some sociologists, there has been a noticeable absence of a sustained and robust academic tradition of sociological studies of the economy in India. There appears to have been an intellectual division of labour where the study of economic issues was ceded to economists, whereas sociologists remained jubilant with their studies of traditional institutions of caste, village, family, and the like. In what follows, we present a brief discussion of this persistent disjunction between the social and the economic, which has had implications for the place of sociology in management education.

Indeed, Indian sociology, as conceptualised and executed by its dominant mainstream, never fancied itself as a policy science or a problem-oriented discipline with applied orientation. Its projected image has been that of a critical discipline, incapable, and mostly unwilling, to offer any quick-fix remedies to the innumerable problems facing the country and society (Srinivas and Panini 1973). Save a few exceptions, it did not make assertive claims on matters of public policy, and therefore, was not seen as a policy-relevant applied social science with any immediate pay-offs to the enterprise of nation-building. Surely, Indian sociology seemed to be at odds with the requirements of the national state (Deshpande 2018). The biggest political challenge of the time was to unify a society ravaged by colonialism and religion-based partition and to build a ‘casteless and classless society’ (Srinivas 1994: 14).

In the immediate aftermath of Independence, India also witnessed various secessionist movements and language-based mobilizations. Amidst such a divisive context, sociology's preoccupation with the fault-lines of Indian society – caste, religion, gender, and ethnicity – did not serve its public image well. It came to be seen as a discipline preoccupied with institutional remnants of the past. Such documentation of these changing institutions was indifferently tolerated under the confidence that they were bound to disappear under India's tryst with development and modernity. In any case, sociology, unlike economics, was not seen as making any lasting contribution to the lofty goal of national development. This was also because of its focus and theoretical and methodological resources that were available to the discipline. Since much of its mainstream scholarship was geared towards understanding the basic working of India's traditional institutions, sociology's ability to frame effective policy solutions to even social problems remained suspect. Additionally, there was a widespread belief that economic development, once it gained momentum, would address most of the problems, including the social ones. Little

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