📝 Building a network of employment

As part of his doctoral thesis, Cécile Mouchel is interested in analyzing the determinants of employment on rural areas of Tamil Nadu. She is about to start her third ans final fielwork in villages part of Cuddalore and Villupuram districts. She would like to understand to what extent ongoing socio-economic changes at the national level and Tamil Nadu level have effects on the structure of labour markets. She especially puts the accent on the creation and the use of interpersonal relationships on strongly segmented labour markets.

Her research is based on the characterization of networks of employment. Her methodology includes Social Network Analysis (SNA) ; a set of tool developped by quantitative sociologist from the 1980s. She took as case study the labour market of Manamthavizhinthaputhur, a village nearby Panruti.

She has already started to build two networks of employment during her previous in-depth qualitative survey in May an June 2022.
The first network of employment was extracted from a 8-acre sugar cane farm. She wanted to be focused on practices in the agricultural sector. It only gathered female employment, although a number of male workers were included.
The second network of employment was drawn from a cashew factory recently implemented in Manamthavizhinthaputhur. Workers were, here also, almost exclusively female workers. The objective was to give testimony on practices in the secondary sector.
For both case studies, employment was casual and strongly segmented around gender, caste and geographical position.

In order to collect additional information on these two networks, Cécile has started a last fieldwork. She will also build a last network regarding male housepainters from Manamthavizhinthaputhur. She is still thinking about the best strategy to adopt.

Notwithstanding, as of now, she would like to begin with the study of a 1-year construction site in Chettipalayam.

For more details on this research, please contact Cécile Mouchel.