Management and Marketing - Research Publications

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    Caste and Organization Studies: Our Silence Makes Us Complicit
    Chrispal, S ; Bapuji, H ; Zietsma, C (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2021-09)
    The caste system has received scant attention in organization studies, despite persisting over thousands of years, influencing the socioeconomic lives of over a billion people around the world and subjecting over 300 million people to severe socioeconomic discrimination. By overlooking caste, scholars risk conforming subaltern empirics to imperialist knowledge and miss the nuance and complexity that caste can bring to organization studies. We argue that the caste system is an institution that affects the workplace, yet it is difficult to dismantle because of its rooting in bodies and the sacred, which strips away agency. As an institution that is deeply embodied, caste has implications for institutional work, precarious work and modern slavery. We conclude with a call for scholarly engagement with caste to study its implications in the pursuit of grand challenges and inclusive organizations.
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    Understanding Economic Inequality Through the Lens of Caste
    Bapuji, H ; Chrispal, S (Springer Verlag, 2020)
    Research on economic inequality has largely focused on understanding the relationship between organizations and inequality but has paid limited attention to the role of institutions in the creation and maintenance of inequality. In this article, we use insights from the caste system—an institution that perpetuates socio-economic inequalities and limits human functions—to elaborate on three elements of economic inequality: uneven dispersions in resource endowments, uneven access to productive resources and opportunities, and uneven rewards to resource contributions. We argue that economic inequalities persist because these three different elements of inequality feed from and reinforce each other. Our study underscores the potential of the caste lens to inform research on economic inequality as well as organizational theory and practice.