Based on a review of extant literature, this article entreats for thorough-going empirical investigation of rural-agrarian dominance in the context of the fundamental transformation of the ‘village’ from the spatial habitat of the traditionally ‘dominant’ to the ‘waiting room’ for the aspiring and the despairing. 1 Against the backdrop of the cultural devaluation of agriculture as an unrewarding profession and the village as the dark underbelly of a shining India, it underlines the need to revisit the conventional political economy models of rural-agrarian dominance. We argue that the triad of caste, land and political power does not exhaust the emergent constituents of rural-agrarian dominance. The aspirational surge towards middle-classisation, even among the village dominants, has unleashed forces and processes whose ramifications have to be meticulously thought through. The three-class dominant social coalition model prevalent in the political economy literature largely fails to take into account the inherent dynamism of the village dominants and their deep-seated propensity for middle-classisation.
This paper presents a critical assessment of the much-discussed tension between bureaucratic accountability and the contextual discretion of ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (i.e. front-line public sector workers). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper outlines the implications of the exercise of agency by street-level bureaucrats in everyday settings. It also looks at the challenges this agency engenders: loss of accountability and divergence from stated policy goals. The paper underlines the need for future research on institutional structures and organisational cultures around street-level bureaucracy. It suggests possible lines of enquiry to steer the debate in new, and hopefully productive, directions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.