Dharia, N V (2015) Scaffolding sentiment: Money, labor, and love in India's real estate and construction industry. PhD thesis, Harvard University, USA.
Abstract
This dissertation is an ethnography of the building and real estate construction industry in India’s National Capital Region (NCR). It is a cross-class study based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in NCR with real estate developers, planners, contractors, architects, engineers, foreman, migrant laborers, and locals. Within the dissertation, I excavate creativity from its relegation to artistic realms and examine the politics of creative action in real estate. The building construction industry, I argue, deploys creativity as a fetish through the celebration of creative terms and actions such as jugaad , improvisation, fixing, corruption, innovation, and quick thinking. This discourse enables social mobility and survival, but at the same time enhances unequal conditions of work and life. Chapters play with the human and non-human duality of tropes such as plans, money, labor, love, and roads to demonstrate the processes of creative destruction. A critical phenomenology of life in the industry serves as a critique of its political economy.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Thesis advisor: | Herzfeld, M F; Subramanian, A and Steedly, M M |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | India; corruption; creativity; ethnography; innovation; phenomenology; political economy; politics; real estate |
| Index terms: | construction industry, India, dissertation, survival, phenomenology, political economy, real estate, architect, planner, engineer, politics, critique, ethnography, mobility, creativity, corruption, building construction, scaffolding |
| Subjects: | building construction, innovation and creative processes, professional ethics, Geography, operations management, environmental science, research dissemination and communication, evaluation and assessment methods, political science, infrastructure and transport systems, industry analysis, methods and analysis, qualitative and interpretive research, real estate economics, profession, economic and policy analysis |
| Topics: | Legal Issues, Geographical Context, Sustainability, Design Practice, Urban Studies, Site Management, Research Practice, Construction Technology, Governance, Roles and Professions |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTA |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here