Over the last few decades, politics in India has moved steadily in a pro-business direction. This shift has important implications for both government and citizens. In Business and Politics in India, leading scholars of Indian politics have gathered to offer an analytical synthesis of this vast topic. Collectively, they cover the many strategies that businesses have used to exert their newfound power in recent times and organize the book around a few central concerns. They first analyze the nature of business power and how it shapes political change in India. Second, they look at the consequences of business' growing power on some important issue areas-labor, land, urban governance, and the media. Finally, they take account of regional variation and analyze state-business relations. This definitive account offers significant insights into how and why corporations have increased their power in contemporary Indian politics.

Adopting a truly global, theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, Media Pluralism and Diversity intends to advance our understanding of media pluralism across the globe. It compares metrics that have been developed in different parts of the world to assess levels of, or threats to, media pluralism.

This volume looks at human rights in independent India through frameworks comparable to those in other postcolonial nations in the Global South. It examines wide-ranging issues that require immediate attention such as those related to disability, violence, torture, education, LGBT, neoliberalism, and social justice. The essays presented here explore the discourse surrounding human rights, and engage with aspects linked to the functioning of democracy, security and strategic matters, and terrorism, especially post 9/11. They also discuss cases connected with human rights violations in India and underline the need for a transparent approach and a more comprehensive perspective of India’s human rights record. Part of the series Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought, the volume will be an important resource for academics, policy makers, civil society organisations, lawyers and those concerned with human rights. It will also be useful to scholars and researchers of Indian politics, law and sociology.

Call centers have come, in the last three decades, to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. The offshoring and outsourcing of call center employment, part of the larger information technology and information-technology-enabled services sectors, continues to be a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs and providing new services. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and "offshore" labor forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labor unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call center workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call center industries located in Canada and India, this book contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, the sociology of work, and labor studies.

In A Village Goes Mobile, Sirpa Tenhunen examines how the mobile telephone has contributed to social change in rural India. Tenhunen's long-term ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal began before the village had a phone system in place and continued through the introduction and proliferation of the smartphone. She here analyzes how mobile telephones emerged as multidimensional objects which, in addition to enabling telephone conversations, facilitated status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment practices. She explores how this multifaceted use of mobile phones has affected agency and power dynamics in economic, political, and social relationships, and how these new social constellations relate to culture and development. In eight chapters, Tenhunen asks such questions as: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to change their lives, or does phone use merely amplify existing social patterns and power relationships? Can mobile telephony induce development? Going beyond the case of West Bengal, Tenhunen develops a framework to understand how new media mediates social processes within interrelated social spheres and local hierarchies by relating, media-saturated forms of interaction to pre-existing contexts.

This book asks why some governments improve public services more effectively than others. Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management, and comprehensiveness of reforms. The book also illuminates the importance of electoral constituencies and coalition politics in shaping policy outcomes.

International Marketing presents an innovative, integrated approach to the course, in which marketing concepts are explored in depth within the international context. The authors identify five key factors that impact any international marketing venture-culture, language, political/legal systems, economic systems, and technological/operational differences-and discuss them in relation to the core marketing concepts of markets, products, pricing, distribution (place), and promotion. Uniquely, the book provides discussions of sustainability and "bottom of the pyramid" concepts within each chapter, and is richly illustrated with examples from both multinational companies as well as smaller local concerns. Setting the path for the future direction of this course, the authors provide instructors and students with the first truly international marketing textbook.