Postdoctoral Fellows

Current Status: Onboarding for the selected candidates is complete.

About NPEI :

The New Political Economy Initiative is a project of IIT Bombay’s Centre for Liberal Education. The Initiative aims to rethink the study of the economy by catalysing a set of research collectives, namely (a) Industrial Policy and Structural Transformation, (b) Regional Political Economy, (c) Social Structures of the Economy, (d) Public Goods and Public Sphere. The Initiative draws together economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, geographers, legal scholars, urbanists, technical experts, journalists and research practitioners to build a structural and institutional vision of South Asia’s economies, past, present, and future.

Job profile:

We invite applications for Postdoctoral Fellows from the various disciplines interested in studying the economy in the four above mentioned research clusters. In this cycle of recruitment, we are interested in proposals that seek to answer the following questions for our four research clusters –

Social Structures of the Economy –

• What role does caste play in shaping the supply side of the Indian economy? What would an “organisational analysis” of caste and capital accumulation entail?
• Can kinship (albeit on caste lines) be a better organising frame given that only a subset of dominant castes were able to transfer agrarian surplus into industrial capital?  Does caste hinder agrarian transition in India?
• How do caste-based divisions of labour shape the transfer of agrarian surpluses into capital accumulation in urban India?
• What are the determinants of success at the firm level in terms of productivity, and what role do caste power and malleable/adaptable caste networks play in this success? Does the prevailing and inherited caste networks discourage new entrants by setting up barriers to entrepreneurship or scaling up the existing enterprises?
• How might we explain the lack of jobs or lack of dynamism in the Indian economy through an account of social structure, social stratification, caste etc.? Is and under what conditions is “caste corporatism” productivity enhancing or productivity limiting?
• What has the development of the Indian economy since the 1990s meant for the labour movement broadly defined and the working conditions of labour? How has this reshaped dynamics of region, caste and gender in labouring communities?

Public Goods & Public Sphere –

• Why are public goods so poor in India, seemingly locked in a policy and popular imagination of particularism despite its active democracy?
• What is it about the configuration of the political economy that keeps us in this poor equilibrium?
• How do clientelism and targeted schemes feed into the fractured nature of Indian society so that collective action of a universalistic kind is not just costly but unthinkable?
• What kind of identities do targeted schemes, on the one hand, and discretionary political-bureaucratic power on the other hand generate to lock Indian democracy into a patronage paradigm?
• What are some of the long-term  patterns of continuity and change in India’s public goods and social good provisioning when analysed against a backdrop of nation-building, economic change, and democratisation?

Regional Political Economy –

• How can we question “region” as one methodological pathway to economic structure? How do regions give us particular ways to conceptualise particular constellations of classes, institutions, and relations of production?
• What are the changing dynamics of interaction among regional, national, and global capital in India after the advent of neoliberal reforms of the 1990s? How does regional capital in some parts work closely with global capital? Did certain regional pockets not have possibilities for surplus accumulation? If not, why not?
• Does the regional formatting of caste limit or enhance the transformation of social to economic capital?   How does caste account for the increasing differentiation between national and regional capital?  Does caste account for the fragmentation associated with the informal economy?
• How can we conceptualise primate cities and their hinterlands or core periphery relations within India, map key commodity national supply chains using GST data and map credit system relations in their hierarchy? How do socially produced spatial relations inscribe and reproduce power in sticky and material ways? What are the implications of the new centralised forms of corporate governance in India for a federal polity?
• How are formal banks in cities and rural moneylenders connected? How do credit conditions in different regional systems affect other regions? Do some regions set credit conditions for others?
• Projects in labour history that enrich our understanding of regional political economy of India.
• How have regional imbalances and particularities shaped India’s inter-regional linkages, labour market and labour politics?

 Industrial Policy & Structural Transformation –

• What has been the role and impact of national and sub-national industrial policies on the trajectory and development outcomes of an industry in terms of employment, national value addition and retention, technological and trade performance?
• What roles have/have not been played by industrial policies in addressing continuing import dependence and lack/loss of global competitive advantage due to the poor level of technology development, limited foreign technology transfer, absence of indigenous innovation and manufacturing efforts as well as missing domestic backward and forward linkages?
• What has been the role and nature of foreign capital engagement through different types of FDI? How has such foreign capital engagement impacted the development outcomes in individual industries (driven primarily by GVC dynamics or not) and the economy at large?
• How are the imperatives of adapting industrial processes to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change translating at the policy level (central and local levels), and what are their implications for a specific industry and its upstream and downstream industries?
• How are the industry’s value chains being transformed through digitalisation and other transformative technologies, and what will their likely implications for national value retention and employment generation in that industry?
• How do the new set of industrial policies being implemented since the mid-2010s or/and in the post-pandemic years differ from the previous policies that focused on the constraints (actual and perceived) under WTO agreements, FTAs and other trade and investment deals? Does the policymaking process include strategic learning or embeddedness? Are the goals and tools of the new industrial policies aligned to ensure their effectiveness, with enough elements in the policy design to ensure reciprocity? Who are the main actors in the policy formulation processes for the industry concerned and how do their strategic priorities contradict or get consolidated to shape the policies being implemented?
• How can trade, investment/FDI, technology, labour, taxation and competition policies be re-aligned along with a re-imagined role of the public sector, in the context of the decarbonisation imperatives and data-centric innovations of products and production processes? How can these policies at the local/state and national levels reconcile a techno-centric focus on the adoption of transformative technologies with the adoption of production processes that are worker-centred and sustainable for the planet?
• Projects in business history that enrich our understanding of industrial policy thinking in India broadly empirical work on the post 1980s economy in India are also welcome.

Essential Qualifications & Experience:

• Candidates must have earned their PhD in the past three years. Those who have defended their thesis are also eligible.
• The doctoral thesis of the applicant should have been focused on the above mentioned themes and the candidate should have relevant skill-set and academic background for conducting research in the above mentioned themes.
• We especially encourage applications from individuals belonging to under-represented and/or marginalised groups.

Compensation:

Consolidated salary of INR 100,000 per month

General information:

• The position is for one year and can be renewed for an additional year at most.
• The appointment is for a time bound project and the candidate is required to work mainly for the successful completion of the project and its allied programmes. Administrative duties are expected.
• Postdoctoral Fellows will be given a shared office space and a research budget including support for conference/workshop related travel.
• Basic medical coverage will be provided.
• This is an in-person role and postdoctoral fellows are expected to work in person from the campus for the majority of their time.
• The selection committee may offer lower or higher designation and lower or higher salary depending upon the experience and performance of the candidate in the interview.
• The interviews for shortlisted candidates will be conducted online.

Application Process:

• The applications for this position, can be made on this link.
• This advertisement is very targeted and we will not be able to consider applications that don’t relate their proposals to the questions above or are not closely adjacent to the themes we are interested in.
• While submitting the applications and proposals we request applicants to clearly mention their year long research plans, outputs and timelines. Without these details, we will not be able to consider any applications.