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Place Matters: (Dis)embeddedness and Child Labourers’ Experiences of Depersonalized Bullying in Indian Bt Cottonseed Global Production Networks

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Abstract

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions.

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Notes

  1. The Bhils are one of the major Adivasi (first people) groups of Western and Central India. They consist of multiple sub-groups such as Bhilalas, Barelas and Naiks (Sinha 2017). These groups typically retain their own traditional and cultural practices and are marginalized from mainstream Hindu ritual praxis (Roche 2000). The Bhils inhabit the largely hilly regions of Northeastern Maharashtra, Eastern Gujarat, Southern Rajasthan and Western Madhya Pradesh. This is denoted as the ‘Bhil culture zone’ because the Bhils once shared a common language, Bhili. The Bhili dialect of Wagdi, spoken in the Southern Rajasthan region where our participants came from, incorporates features of Gujarati [the regional language], dialects such as Mewari and Malvi as well as elements of Hindi [the national language] (Phillips 2012).

  2. Depersonalized bullying involves employers’ adoption of abuse and aggression in their interactions with employees as the former pursue profits. Depersonalized bullying lacks a target orientation but is impersonal and applied uniformly across the workforce by business owners, leaders, managers and supervisors, as a means of ensuring employee task performance in the quest for competitiveness (D’Cruz and Noronha 2009).

  3. Names of all 5 villages included in the study are withheld to maintain confidentiality.

  4. The removal of stamens/anthers or the killing of pollen grains of a flower is done with the thumbnail in a single twirl. This action, without damaging the fragile pistil or the ovaries of the flower, is known as emasculation. The pistil of the emasculated bud is tagged with a red plastic square. The purpose of emasculation is to prevent self-fertilization in the female parent flowers (Ramamurthy 2011; Venkateswarlu 2004).

  5. I: Interviewer; P: Participant

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Business Ethics, Michelle Greenwood, for handling the double blind peer review process for their paper and ensuring no conflicts of interest. The authors are grateful to the three anonymous peer reviewers whose comments, questions and suggestions sharpened and improved the paper. The authors deeply appreciate and warmly acknowledge the support of Sudhir Katiyar of PCLRA during the conduct of this study.

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  1. Organizational Behaviour Area, IIM Ahmedabad, Wing 14C, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad, 380 015, India

    Premilla D’Cruz, Ernesto Noronha, Muneeb Ul Lateef Banday & Saikat Chakraborty

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D’Cruz, P., Noronha, E., Banday, M.U.L. et al. Place Matters: (Dis)embeddedness and Child Labourers’ Experiences of Depersonalized Bullying in Indian Bt Cottonseed Global Production Networks. J Bus Ethics 176, 241–263 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04676-1

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