Contradictions of Employee Involvement in Organizational Change: The Transformation Efforts in NCJM, An Indian Industrial Cooperative, by George M. Kandathil. Lexington Books, Washington, DC, 2015, 192 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐4985‐0567‐3, $80.00, hardback.
| Published date | 01 December 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12209 |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
Book Reviews 873
relationship between working lives, labour markets and the regulationof employment
relations.
The penultimate chapter follows on from this to examine the manner in which
informal workers within these specific configurations organize themselves politically,
contest the terms of their working lives. Here the author utilizes the employment
configurations again to highlight the relationship between dierent regimesof labour
and the form and shape of workers’ politics. In this manner, the politics of workers
working in mediated employment is shaped by their year-long contracts, immobility,
dislocated social reproduction and delayed wages. The politics of those working in
embedded employment, is buttressedby their access to local social networks, and their
relativemobility, but also shaped by continuing staterepression and surveillance in the
migrant enclaves. While the politics of those in individualized employment is directly
shaped by their entrenched precarity and high exposure to street violence.
While there is much scholarship within the academy and more broadly in public
discourse on labour politics in China’s organized manufacturing sector, this book
makes an impressiveforay into geographies of labourprotest within China’s significant
informal sector. More broadly the book is deeply enriched by some fascinating, well-
written and researched ethnographic material from living spaces and work sites in
urban China. The ethnographysubtly and directly under-score the analysis of regimes
of labour employment, regulation and resistance the author seeks to bring out in the
book.
Despite the incredibly rich material and interesting analysis of the heterogeneity
of informal work, the implications of such analysis for labour politics, industrial
relations and political economy more generally are held back until the very last
chapter. This provides the author very little space in which to move the reader
from a nuanced understanding of contemporary labour relations within the informal
sector to a broader location of such relations within the contemporary political
economy. Elsewhere while the author does make passing reference to the gendered
character of production, a greaterattention to social reproductive labour and women’s
roles in employment configurations more generally may have enhanced the analysis
of production–social reproduction relations attempted through the employment
configuration framework. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in providing a nuanced,
compelling examination of contemporary employment relationswithin urban China’s
informal sector,and the divergent ways in which China’s precariatare fighting back.
THOMAS COWAN
King’s College London, London
Contradictions of EmployeeInvolvement in Organizational Change: The Transformation
Eorts in NCJM, An Indian Industrial Cooperative, by George M. Kandathil.
Lexington Books, Washington, DC, 2015, 192 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4985-0567-3,
$80.00, hardback.
Contradictions of Employee Involvement in Organizational Change makes forindulgent
reading by oering an interesting study of the National Jute Mills Corporation
(NJMC) that gives an insight to the transformationaleorts of workers over time.The
book oers pragmatic discussion and critical analysisof the involvement of employees
in organizational change in the context of industrial co-operatives in India. There is
much to learn here fromthe example of NCJM about the historical underpinnings and
future prospects of co-operativesin modern day economically booming India. Outside
C
2016 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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