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Burrell (2020) challenged management and organization studies (MOS) scholars to pay attention to a topic they have mostly ignored: the peasantry, those 2 billion people that work in the rural primary sector. This paper aims to address the topic to expand Burrell’s challenge by indicating that the peasantry offers a unique context to study a paradoxical condition: the coexistence of persistent poverty and vanguardist innovation.

The authors advance conceptual arguments that complement the reasons why researchers should pay more attention to the peasantry. They argue that continuation of past research into field laborers, transitioning from feudalism to industrial capitalism, still has currency, not just because of the good reasons listed by Burrell (enduring relevance of the phenomenon in developing countries; sustainability concerns; acknowledgment of common heritage) but also because some seemingly archaic practices are evident in the economically developed countries where most management and organizations scholars live.

The authors show that in advanced economies, the peasantry has not disappeared, and it is manifested in contradictory forms, as positive force contributing to sustainable productivity (in the case of digitized agriculture) and as a negative legacy of social inequality and exploitation (as a form of modern slavery).

The authors discuss contrasting themes confronting management of the peasantry, namely, modern slavery and digital farming, and propose that a paradox view may help overcome unnecessary dualisms, which may promote social exclusion rather than integrated development.

It has been argued that scholars in management and organization studies (MOS) need to take the peasantry into account in their work. This study aims to address the complexity revealed by these arguments, suggesting that one needs clearer definitions and an appreciation of the complexities of historical development if one is to gain appreciation of the impaction of agriculture more generally on MOS.

This study uses historical material to develop a conceptual argument that challenges the homogenous nature of the peasantry. It uses a detailed contrast between two peasant groups in 19th and early 20th century Scotland to suggest divergent patterns of development.

Paying closer attention to definitions and historical development indicates that, as well as the survival of so-called archaic practices alongside highly developed agriculture, the main impact of agriculture on MOS might be the legitimacy it accords, as a cultural resource, to particular forms of organizing. While the issues outlined by previous authors are significant, they need to be discussed with more care to avoid a scattergun approach to analysis.

This study points to the neglect of agriculture more broadly and not just the peasantry, in MOS. It suggests the need to look at not only the economic impact but also the cultural resonance of agriculture in ideas about legitimate forms of organization. It also demonstrates the value and necessity of paying close attention to history in the analyses.

This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi's theorisation of the post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi's other work (e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

Witchcraft in Honduras is an unprotected marginalized woman’s efforts to gain social, economic, and political power through an informal economy by utilizing the cultural belief in the witches’ supernatural power. The Honduran post-colonial Latin American culture allows for a persistent informal economy, in part, based on the commoditization of witchcraft and exorcism. The case study provides a specific example through ethnographic interviews of this under-researched informal economy driven by fear and economic desperation. Further research and analysis of these poorly understood and rarely recorded modern phenomena and the associated informal economy is needed.

This chapter offers an introduction to two leading Sri Lankan Marxist political economists, S. B. D. de Silva and G. V. S. de Silva. By surveying their most influential writings – the 645-page book The Political Economy of Underdevelopment by S. B. D. de Silva and the pungent essays ‘Heretical Thoughts' and ‘Social Change’ by G. V. S. de Silva – -it traces the distinctive and provocative qualities of these two thinkers, especially concerning problems of development and underdevelopment. In doing so, it is argued that S. B. D. de Silva is best understood as a leading anti-imperialist political economist alongside Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, distinguished by a classical Marxist focus on class struggle and relations of production in his narration of the ‘colonial mode of production’ in Sri Lanka. As for G. V. S. de Silva's erudite reflections on the trajectories of transition to capitalism and socialism as well as the prospects of social and economic development in countries emerging from pre-capitalist social formations in the wake of colonization, his remarkable attention to spatial questions at multiple scales – between country and city, colony and metropole – receives special attention. The conclusion underlines the sustained relevance of both de Silvas to making sense of the origins of the present crisis in Sri Lanka.

In this introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxist Thought in South Asia’, we detail the long history of Marxist politics and theorizing in South Asia and highlight the unique contributions and perspectives of South Asian Marxists to global Marxism. Three contributions we find particularly significant are (1) South Asian Marxists' approach to thinking about questions of capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, (2) the treatment of agrarian and feudal continuities in Marxist theories from South Asia and (3) unique South Asian contributions to theorizing caste from a Marxist perspective.