Place Matters: (Dis)embeddedness and Child Labourers’ Experiences of Depersonalized Bullying in Indian Bt Cottonseed Global Production Networks

Meaningfulness and Impact of Academic Research: Bringing the Global South to the Forefront

“…Our interest in understanding workplace bullying and child labor tied in well with CLRA’s initiative to eradicate child labor from Indian Bt cottonseed farms. This resulted in a collaboration that produced a report for activists and the funding agency and an academic publication (D’Cruz et al, 2021) which contributed to the scholarly understanding of workplace bullying experienced by a young population employed in the informal sector. Through this collaboration, we were able to overcome the delays associated with academic publishing and produce research that had both short-term and long-term benefits.…”

Shared Responsibility and Labor Rights in Global Supply Chains

“…In general, the connectedness principle inserts a normative meaning to the notion of embeddedness, which gained prominence in recent GPN scholarship (Coe et al, 2008;D'Cruz et al, 2021;Henderson, et al, 2002;Hess, 2004;Lashitew et al, 2020;Noronha et al, 2020). Since moral obligations exist between actors who are connected to each other in special relationships, the actor's embeddedness level may indicate the degree of his/her moral commitment and, thus, responsibility, especially when embeddedness is defined in territorial or in network terms (Burt et al, 2017;Hess, 2004;Noronha et al, 2020).…”

“…By and large, however, the existing literature that concerns labor in GSCs focuses mainly on measuring the efficacy of existing (primarily private) labor regulatory schemes (e.g., Lee et al, 2017;Locke, 2013;Lund-Thomsen & Lindgreen, 2014) and on empirical investigations of key factors shaping labor conditions. Such analyses tend to focus on inter-firm power dynamics or buyer-supplier relationship (e.g., Gereffi, 2004Gereffi, , 2018Lakhani et al, 2013;Bartley & Egels-Zandén, 2015;Barrientos, 2013) or on the sociopolitical, legal, economic, and cultural contexts within which global production networks are embedded (Coe & Yeung, 2018;Coe et al, 2008;D'Cruz et al, 2021;Levy, 2008).…”

Role of Contract Farming in Crop Diversification and Employment Generation: Empirical Evidence from Indian Punjab

“…In Tumkur in Karnataka, the use of family and hired labour increased to as high as 280 person-days and 309 person-days, respectively, in contract crops as against only 87 person-days and 111 persondays, respectively, for non-contract crops on a yearly basis due to higher cropping intensity, labour-intensive nature of crops under contract and higher economic ability of the contract farmers to pay wages to hired labour (Kumar & Kumar, 2008). On the other hand, there were studies, which pointed to the illeffects of contract farming practice on already precarious labour conditions in terms of use of child labour and gender discrimination, besides poor conditions of work, especially for women workers (D'Cruz et al, 2021;Singh, 2003Singh, , 2008. The above review shows that contract farming can lead to crop diversification and higher levels of employment for owner farmers and farmworkers, but it depends on the crops and the local context of such interventions, which makes it important to study it in each specific context.…”