Centres Of Excellence

To focus on new and emerging areas of research and education, Centres of Excellence have been established within the Institute. These ‘virtual' centres draw on resources from its stakeholders, and interact with them to enhance core competencies

Read More >>

Faculty

Faculty members at IIMB generate knowledge through cutting-edge research in all functional areas of management that would benefit public and private sector companies, and government and society in general.

Read More >>

IIMB Management Review

Journal of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

IIM Bangalore offers Degree-Granting Programmes, a Diploma Programme, Certificate Programmes and Executive Education Programmes and specialised courses in areas such as entrepreneurship and public policy.

Read More >>

About IIMB

The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) believes in building leaders through holistic, transformative and innovative education

Read More >>

Critical Realism and Mobility Research: A Perspective on Social Mobility and the Indian Information Technology (IT) Sector

Vinay Reddy Venumuddala and Rajalaxmi Kamath
2021
Working Paper No
635
Body

Giving an overview of the extant research on social mobility, we claim that it is mired in the same “Individualism-Collectivism” dichotomy that plagues Social Sciences tackling the “Structure-Agency” conundrum. Critical Realism (CR) offers an archetype that allows us to go beyond this fault line and analyze social mobility as a transformational endeavor. We discuss this in the context of studying social mobility in the new Information Technology (IT) sector of India, where CR provides us with a solid bulwark for our ethnographies in two organizations in this sector. We show that mobility is enhanced in an arena of multiple and diverse structures when agents are able to go beyond the apparent (empirical) circumstances thrown up by structures in a flux and discern the actual forces at work. The intransient real encompassing these multiple structural possibilities offers them the flexibility to carve such a path.

Key words
Social Mobility, Information-Technology, Ethnography, India
WP No. 635.pdf (1.41 MB)

Critical Realism and Mobility Research: A Perspective on Social Mobility and the Indian Information Technology (IT) Sector

Author(s) Name: Vinay Reddy Venumuddala and Rajalaxmi Kamath, 2021
Working Paper No : 635
Abstract:

Giving an overview of the extant research on social mobility, we claim that it is mired in the same “Individualism-Collectivism” dichotomy that plagues Social Sciences tackling the “Structure-Agency” conundrum. Critical Realism (CR) offers an archetype that allows us to go beyond this fault line and analyze social mobility as a transformational endeavor. We discuss this in the context of studying social mobility in the new Information Technology (IT) sector of India, where CR provides us with a solid bulwark for our ethnographies in two organizations in this sector. We show that mobility is enhanced in an arena of multiple and diverse structures when agents are able to go beyond the apparent (empirical) circumstances thrown up by structures in a flux and discern the actual forces at work. The intransient real encompassing these multiple structural possibilities offers them the flexibility to carve such a path.

Keywords: Social Mobility, Information-Technology, Ethnography, India
WP No. 635.pdf (1.41 MB)