Structure, Agency, and Strategy Among Tenants in India.

Working paper

This paper arises from the Global Poverty Research Group, under which I have conducted fieldwork in rural south India. My focus is on strategies, choice, and constraints as aspects of tenants' decisions. My aim is to treat tenants (as both households and as individual agents) in their structural contexts (class, caste, religion, gender). The strategies that people use involve an orientation to current and future events, including possible events which are imagined or which could happen. This orientation creates a context for immediate decision-making as well as a context for reflection and deliberation. The strategies of tenants include being friendly toward landlords but making this conditional upon their proper behaviour; the renegotiation of work; switching from land management to livestock; choosing to rent rainfed land or irrigated land; and so on. Agents negotiate and enforce proper behaviour and thus both create and change the system of norms that exists. In Macintyre’s terms (1985), the virtues intrinsic to the socio-economic practices are continually being re-worked. In the paper, I reframe this in dynamic structure-agency terms. Both structural relationships and concrete past incidents act as reference points for decisions made today in a given relationship.

Authors: Olsen, W

• Publisher: GPRG
• Series: Working Paper Series
• Publication date: 2007-07-31
• Language: English