Bangladesh is one of the leading exporters of ready-made garments (RMG) worldwide producing at very low cost almost exclusively for Western markets. Empirical evidence on psychologically adverse working conditions and their association with health in the RMG setting remains sparse. Drawing on insights from previous ethnographic research, we conducted a cross-sectional epidemiological study among 332 RMG workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. High work-related demands and poor interpersonal resources represented key components of work stress and were important determinants of poor health. The key work stress components observed in this study partly differed from those identified in Western work place settings.

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Evidence on the association of work stress with cortisol levels is inconsistent and mostly stems from Western countries, with limited generalizability to other regions of the world. These inconsistencies may partly be due to methodological limitations associated with the measurement of cortisol secretion in saliva, serum or urine. The present study set out to explore associations of work stress with long-term integrated cortisol levels in hair among 175 workers of an export oriented ready-made garment (RMG) factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Work-related demands (WD), interpersonal resources (IR) and work-related values (WV) were assessed using a psychometrically evaluated interview. WD consisted of four items on physical demands, time pressure, worries about mistakes and exposure to abusive language. IR comprised five items addressing support, recognition, adequate payment, workers' trust in the management, and the management's trust in workers, as perceived by the workers. WV captured job security, promotion prospects and job latitude by three items. Hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) were analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Stepwise multivariable linear regression models (backward elimination of predictors) were used to estimate associations of HCC with the three work stress components. For significant work stress component(s), further multivariable linear regression analyses were conducted to explore whether, and if so, which individual item(s) contributed most. The mean HCC equaled 3.27 (SD 2.58) pg/mg. HCC were found to be significantly associated with WV (beta=0.209, p=0.021). Additional analyses of the three WV items revealed that this association was largely driven the item on "promotion prospects" (beta=0.230, p=0.007) implying that the perception of good promotion prospects was associated with higher HCC. The finding of elevated HCC with good promotion prospects may initially seem counter-intuitive, but is supported by research documenting that job promotion may result in poorer mental well-being. Moreover, being promoted in the Bangladeshi RMG industry may represent a stressful experience: job promotions are rare in this setting and are associated with the need to meet exceptional job-related demands. Further research from ethnic and culturally diverse occupational settings is needed to test this hypothesis, to shed light on the reproducibility of our findings and to improve our understanding of the psychobiological implications of psychosocial working conditions across cultures and contexts.

This special issue brings together ethnographic accounts exploring local and regional effects of transformations in India that social scientists have described under the heading of 'neoliberalism' (Alternative Survey Group 2007;Oza 2006;Patnaik 2007). Chief among these transformations in India are the economic restructuring processes after 1991 when the Government of India launched far-reaching policies of economic liberalisation, arguably under the pressure of global financial institutions. Acknowledging this significant turning point, we aim to highlight, however, the variegation with which neoliberal ideas, policies and technologies are dispersed and experienced among different segments of the population. In doing so, the authors of this special issue pursue an ethnographically informed 'grounding' of large neoliberal transformations. In Michael Burawoy's terms, such grounding is about 'extending out from the micro-processes to macro forces, from the space-time rhythms of the site to the geographical and historical context of the field' (2000a: 27).

Inspired by E. P. Thompson´s modelling of class as the contingent outcome of historical processes, this paper explores how autochthony and descent came to inform the boundaries of industrial workforces in the Indian steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela. We suggest that if class is a historical object, then it relates to other forms of power and identity in ways that question the use of rigid analytic typologies. In the private sector Tata company town of Jamshedpur, an industrial working class was constructed during the late colonial period from labour migrants, whose employment became heritable within families. In the public sector Rourkela Steel Plant, founded in the mid-twentieth century, the politics of ethno regionalism coincided with state development policy to inform employment reservation for autochthons. Through a historical analysis of urbanization, migration and employment policy, we consider how elite workforces that bound themselves according to the principles of autochthony and descent were formed in the social laboratories of India´s steel towns. We suggest that such processes demand a class concept that engages more subtly with the work of E. P. Thompson.

The article discusses how industrial workers in Rourkela, a steel town in Odisha, experience the large-scale job losses entailed by the recent restructuring of India’s first public sector steel plant. In this article, I argue that this manpower reduction presents a moment of what Harvey (2003) calls accumulation by dispossession and which he considers as the hallmark of neoliberal capitalism. Importantly, I add to Harvey’s analysis that this process is experienced, and acted upon, in significantly different ways by different fractions of the town’s steel workforce. Taking a long-term historical perspective, I will show that these differences are rooted in the politics that the postcolonial regional state of Odisha has pursued in the town since the 1950s. In methodological terms, the argument put forward in this article follows Burawoy’s (2000) call for an ethnographic ‘grounding’ of global processes such as neoliberalisation that pays attention to how such processes shape and are shaped by local histories of dispossession and resistance against it.

With reference to original ethnographic and historical research on India, the papers collected in this forum suggest conceptual refinements that might re-centre the study of class in regional scholarship. Through discussions of class politics in industrial, construction and agricultural contexts, the authors interrogate the conceptual oppositions between stably employed fordist labour forces and the ‘working poor’ that have often constrained ethnographic and historical analyses of India's working classes. Inspired by Marxist historiography, this forum engages with the historically contingent emergence of Indian working classes through different types of labour, gender and ethnic struggles, and considers the complex political boundaries that are produced by such processes.

Among themselves and within their families, workers of a public sector power project in Orissa, constantly and intentionally, violate the restrictions on inter-caste contact that they perceive as prevailing in their various villages of origin. Subscribing to the teleology of modernisation, the workers dichotomise the industrial settlement and the village as ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ sites, respectively. Their withdrawal into these ‘backward’ villages for weddings and other rituals is explained with reference to the ‘outside’, peripheral character of the settlement. I argue that this conceptualisation hints at a spatial limitation of the institution of caste, and has, at the very least, facilitated the creation of a ‘modern’, caste-negating working class.