Zachariah review article, 'The development of Professor Mahalanobis'

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The development of Professor MahalanobisBenjamin Zachariah aa Trinity College, CambridgePublished online: 28 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Benjamin Zachariah (1997) The development of Professor Mahalanobis, Economy and Society, 26:3,434-444, DOI: 10.1080/03085149700000022

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Review ar t i c le b y B e n j a m i n Z a c h a r i a h

The development of Professor Mahalanobis

Text reviewed

Ashok Rudra (1996) Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobzs: A Biography, Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Abs t rac t

Indian economic planning was conceptualized and administered by middle-class pro- fessional intellectuals who are now increasingly being cast as illegitimate appropria- tors of the right to speak for the nation. This is an attempt to view the social and intellectual trajectories of this appropriation, through the life of one such intellectual.

Keywords: intellectuals; nationalism; science; development.

It is ironic - or perhaps it is just logical - that, as the ideas and assumptions behind Indian development planning come rapidly to be jettisoned, there is among academics a growing interest in them. Loss of confidence in planning, disillusion with the interventionist state and the tendency to cast development as a form of disruption through cultural penetration by alien forces seem to appear together in many minds. This is linked, increasingly, to a critique of 'post- enlightenment modernity', through which a vigorous critique of the assump- tions behind the imagining of the Indian nation-state is now being conducted. Such a critique, from both left and right (the two more than occasionally seeming to occupy the same discursive space), has led us willy-nilly to reassess these assumptions, the more so because the state has clearly failed to play all the roles it arrogated to itself in the late 1940s and 1950s, of administering social justice, producing wealth and refereeing social conflict.

Of these roles, 'development' has been historically crucial in defining a role for the postcolonial Indian state. A legitimate national state, as opposed to an economically retarding colonial one, was expected to play a strong role in developing the economy; therefore the legitimacy of the postcolonial state came

Econom), and So~zety lG/ume 26 Number 3 i i z ~ g t ~ c t 1997: 434-444 O Routledge 1997 0308-5 147

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The development o f Professor Mahalanobis 435

to be crucially linked to its ability to direct a programme of economic develop- ment on behalf of the nati0n.l The debates on economic planning in India in the 1930s and 1940s, emerging through the coalitional alliances against colonial rule, led to economic planning coming to be constituted as a domain of 'experts', rhetorically depoliticized in order to facilitate negotiations between different groups involved in seeking to impose their own visions of India's economic future (Chatterjee 1994: 202-5; Chattopadhyay 1985: 260). The consequences of such a conceptualization should be quite apparent: the 'masses' entered the picture only as the somewhat abstract ultimate beneficiary whose interests were claimed to be represented by various 'experts': a small group of middle-class professional intellectuals stood for the state, and through the state for the nation - an appropriation which is one of the main targets of attack among the critics of the Indian nation-state.

Ashok Rudra's biography of the physicist-turned-statistician, architect of the Indian statistical system and the man behind the Model, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (Rudra 1996), provides an opportunity for a closer look at the intel- lectual development of one of those who came to claim the right to speak for the nation. It is possible to read this text as a fragment of the history of that section among the Indian middle class who, until quite recently, defined and dominated the realm of legitimate politics and political economy, having made a nation in its own image. Rudra's text does not, however, engage with the anxieties regard- ing the nation and the state which direct many of the current debates. The biog- raphy was commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research in 1990, its then Chairman, the late Professor Sukhamoy Chakravarty, persuading Professor Ashok Rudra to undertake the task. Unfortunately, Rudra died in October 1992, leaving behind an incomplete manuscript: second or first drafts of most chapters, and two proposed chapters completely unwritten. The task was left to be completed by three editors, Professors B. L. S. Prakasa Rao, J. K. Ghosh and Nikhilesh Bhattacharya. The two missing chapters, on Professor Mahalanobis' contribution to economics and his work with international organizations, were written by Professor T. N. Srinivasan and Dr R. K. Som respectively, and a number of appendices to each chapter have been added to the ones already selected by Rudra, including one by Professor A. C. Mukhopad- hyay on Mahalanobis' (statistical) work on meteorology, flood control and irri- gation. The editors have also permitted themselves the occasional intervention in Rudra's text, clarifying or occasionally disagreeing with some of Rudra's ideas and opinions - fortunately resisting the temptation to do this too often.

The resulting text is a curious one indeed, written in the tradition of the com- plete biography of a celebrity: work, family background, private life and person- ality placed together in a good-natured, anecdote-filled narrative of a very full life, not consciously structured around any particular set of concerns or debates. Rudra's biography, as well as all the bits and pieces in the text which are not Rudra's - appendices, editorial interventions and extra chapters - can be engaged with at several levels, serving as an introductory reader to the life and times of P. C. Mahalanobis; to the institutional and intellectual environment of

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436 Benjamin Zachariah

Indian developmental planning; and, read in conjunction with Mahalanobis' own writings, to his work. Rudra's occasional criticism of aspects of his subject's life and work are quite overridden by his obvious admiration for the man whose vision of Indian planning came for so long to be regarded as axiomatic, and who filled the intellectual, professional and institutional space in which his junior contemporary and biographer worked - Rudra, a mathematical statistician by training, worked at the Indian Statistical Institute under Mahalanobis for a good many years, and in the Institute's Planning Division in the crucial period of the making of the Second Five-Year Plan. For Rudra, as for the man responsible for commissioning this biography (Chakravarty 1987), the interventionist develop- mental state is not a discredited idea, the question being the nature of such inter- vention; his narratives of the intellectual and institutional landscapes of Indian development take the importance of their existence for granted.

Rudra's intimate engagement with the details of Mahalanobis' personal history is also traceable to other separately shared pasts, as it were, of biographer and subject - Presidency College, Calcutta, the Brahmo Samaj, Visva Bharati - making a good part of the text an engagement with a very Bengali middle-class milieu and its discontents, the significance of which is not always likely immedi- ately to be clear to the outsider. Some details might none the less be useful in placing Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis' early environment and career. His grandfather, Guru Charan Mahalanobis, came to Calcutta in the middle of the last century from the East Bengali village ofvikrampur, came into contact with and joined the Brahmo Samaj, a religious and social reform movement started by Rammohun Roy at the beginning of the century. Guru Charan was the third to marry according to Brahmo rites, the first to marry a widow, and one of the first to allow his wife to go out in public. His paternal uncle, Subodh Chandra Mahalanobis, was the first to hold the Chair of Physiology at a British university (Cardiff, from 1898); his father gave up painting to be a reasonably successful small businessman until his sports-goods shop went out of business in the Depression. The family was well connected in Bengali society, and, after his grandfather had settled into Calcutta society, seemed to have had no major finan- cial or material worries. Prasanta graduated with honours in physics from Pres- idency College, Calcutta, and went on to King's College, Cambridge, where, after a false start in the Mathematical Tripos, he switched once again to physics, and by 1915 had secured a first-class degree, a research position and a senior research scholarship, aged 22. He then returned to India on holiday, fell in love, and got himself, a temporary job teaching physics at Presidency College through his uncle Subodh Chandra, by this time Professor of Physiology there; his job became a permanent one and it was seven years before he married Nirmal Kumari, the problem of the latter aggravated by her father's objections, her initially being under 18 and by Prasanta's own reservations against being married

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The development of Profesor Mahalanobis 437

according to the marriage laws accepted by the rival school of thought in the Brahmo Samaj to which his future father-in-law adhered. Prasanta objected to the legal necessity, in addition to the Brahmo rites, of a civil marriage, and to the compulsory declaration prescribed therein: 'I am not a Hindu'; this was the occasion of some serious pamphleteering on his part (Rudra 1996: 1-77). Mahalanobis was a close friend and confidant of Rabindranath Tagore, occasion- ally acting as his literary agent - he was considered an authority on the poet's work and was a consultant to Edward Thompson for the latter's book on Rabindranath - and a Joint Secretary, from its inception in 1921 till 1930, along with Rabindranath's son Rathindranath, ofVisva-Bharati, the university started by Rabindranath at Shantiniketan. His relationship with Visva-Bharati was far from smooth; nevertheless this does not seem to have affected his relations with the Tagores themselves (Rudra 1996: 78-1 15).

Mahalanobis was at Presidency College from 1915 to 1948, teaching physics, with spells as Acting Principal, Head of the Department of Physics, and Princi- pal; and far more importantly for himself, conducting his statistical research (the college playing host, in a corner of the physics department, to his statistical laboratory, which was to grow into the Indian Statistical Institute). His first encounter with the discipline of statistics was apparently through the journal Biometrika at Cambridge; on his return to India, Sir Brajendranath Seal, Pro- fessor of Philosophy at Calcutta University, asked him to work with some figures relating to Calcutta University examination results. Seal was himself acquainted with the statistical methods in use at the time, and gave Mahalanobis detailed guidelines on what to do, this being the latter's first encounter with actual sta- tistical analysis (Rudra 1996: 127-8). Much of his first published work in the 1920s and 1930s, related to anthropometrics, eugenics and race2 (Mahalanobis 1922, 1927, 1931, 1933), a consequence of his meeting and working with Dr N. Annandale, then Director of the Zoological and Anthropological Survey of India, on some of the latter's anthropometric data (IS1 n.d: 1). This was the sort of problem to which the young discipline of statistics was being applied, especi- ally through the work of Karl Pearson, Galton Professor of Eugenics at Uni- versity College, London, until 1933, and with which these early writings engage. Yet they make strange reading, and might have been somewhat embarrassing later - although the general conclusions of these papers cast doubts on concep- tions of purity of race, the relevance of the category of race itself was not ques- tioned: 'By "race efficiency", I would denote stability, combined with capacity to play a part in the history of civilisation' (Mahalanobis 1922). A few whimsi- cal studies apart, by the mid-1930s he had begun to do market surveys, and from the late 1930s onwards, crop surveys; he did some influential work on the Bengal Famine and its aftermath (Mahalanobis, A. 1983: 64-90). The only article on industry he wrote before the Planning Commission papers was one for Meghnad Saha's new journal Science and Culture, on the application of statistical methods in industry (Mahalanobis 1935).

As far as his commitment to planned economic development was concerned, the Professor, as he came to be called, seems to have been a rather backward

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438 Benjamin Zachartah

child. The field of discourse was already well formed and differentiated by the time he entered it. The inter-war period, especially from the Depression onwards, and the Second World War saw the rise in India of a significant band of proselytizers for various models of development through economic planning. A good number of these operated from within left-wing perspectives (Narayan 1936; Banerjee et al. 1944) or capitalist frameworks with mild doses of Key- nesianism thrown in (Thakurdas et al. 1944; Birla 1950); but along with this was also a strand of thought which placed great faith in technological or 'scientific' solutions (Saha 1938,1939;Visvesvaraya 1934; Nehru 1938,1946: 44) which had the added advantage of being non-confrontationi~t.~ It was felt that an empha- sis on agriculture, on rural life and on village crafts, demonstrated an incapac- ity to understand 'the way in which the world progresses'. If India had to 'grow into a powerful world-entity like the U.S.A., Soviet Russia, and the countries of Western Europe', and to survive in the modern world, she must 'develop the latest techniques of civilised existence' (Saha 1939). Barring among the Gandhians (Kumarappa 1936, 1945; Agarwal 1944), whose political influence among the educated middle class was by the mid-1930s in relative decline follow- ing the anticlimax of the 1931 Round Table Conference and the failure of the second Civil Disobedience Movement, the solution was universally acknow- ledged to be industrialization.

Yet if Mahalanobis was not yet a major contributor to these debates, he was not too far away from them either. He was certainly part of the social and pro- fessional circles which had begun closely to associate science, development and modernity; he was a major contributor to the annual Indian Science Congresses; in Bengal he was a close associate of Meghnad Saha and Satyendranath Bose (the latter of Bose-Einstein statistics fame), the three once having co-authored a book on relativity (Rudra 1996: 199); both Saha and Mahalanobis had worked on the problem of floods in the Damodar Valley, in the 1920s and 1930s (Mukhopad- hyay 1996: 160; Ray 1996: 74). Sir M. Visvesvaraya, civil engineer, Dewan of Mysore and author of several books on developmental schemes was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Indian Statistical Institute for a while; and Saha, Visves- varaya and Mahalanobis were all involved in the Congress's National Planning Committee, though Mahalanobis was more peripherally connected: he wrote to Nehru in 1940 suggesting that he examine all the reports of the NPC from a 'purely statistical point of view' (Chattopadhyay 1985: 118). Mahalanobis was also associated with Rabindranath Tagore's experiments in rural reconstruction at Sriniketan (Dasgupta 1962; Rudra 1996: 88,297).

It was clear, however, that, as Saha and his associates in Science and Culture approached development through science, the Professor approached develop- ment through statistics. In November 1934 he complained, in a letter to G. M. Morant of the University College, London, 'Statistics is still an outcaste, in fact an Untouchable among scientific workers in India. With one or two excep- tions every responsible scientist in India looks upon Statistics as that awful stuff with which Economists and Politicians play about and try to prove any thing they like.' He had at the time not yet been successful in starting a statistics

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The development o f Professor Mahalanobis 439

section at the Indian Science Congress, which was still run on 'orthodox' lines.4 He did not regard himself as an economist; his economics was applied statis- tics, and his genealogy of statistics traces the origins of the latter in the needs of statecraft - inevitably to Kautilya's Arthashastra - and its modern develop- ment as a science to the need for economic information - the New Deal, wartime planning and GOSPLAN (Mahalanobis 1950: 2146) . I t is unsur- prising that those who have been willing to defend his economics have seen in his Model a rather naive view of the manipulability of society, politically and otherwise (Patnaik 1994).

Rudra's biography does not, unfortunately, explore these connections, though tantalizing references to some of them do emerge, as do passing references to hitherto unexplored matters, one instance being the divergence of opinion between Nehru and Mahalanobis after the Second Plan (Rudra 1996: 433-4), which is contrary to the generally accepted accounts of a 'Nehru-Mahalanobis strategy' (Chakravarty 1987: f%18), an assumption accepted elsewhere in the same biography (Srinivasan 1996).

The largest part of the biography deals with the institution that Mahalanobis almost single-handedly built, the Indian Statistical Institute, from its small beginnings as the Statistical Laboratory at Presidency College, living on bor- rowed space, its survival on ad hoc jobs from the Government of Bengal and the occasional grant from Finance Member Sir James Grigg, the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research, and eventually the Government of India, to its ulti- mate recognition as a national institution intimately connected with planning, funded by the Government and with the power to grant degrees. This is a story that has been told before (IS1 n.d.); the peculiarity of Rudra's account is in his mixing of institutional history with frankly anecdotal accounts of its work and members, and above all of its 'Dictator', a 'whimsical royal personage' who was nothing if not arbitrary.

The Professor ran the IS1 without making distinctions between the private and the public: he was the IS1 and the IS1 was him -property matters included. Rudra provides a detailed account of various instances of Mahalanobis' arbitrary methods, his tendency to acquire land without any apparent purpose, his curious rental agreements with the IS1 regarding his own or his wife's property which was leased to the Institute, a large number of financial irregularities, wastage of time and money (Rudra 1996: 184-93, 349-53, 361-7). Rudra succeeds in making a case for the Professor being given the benefit of the doubt, but it is curious that as a biographer he should decide that the best way to defend the Professor's reputation was to resurrect these allegations, more than a few of which seem to have been of substance, and then to attempt to refute them - an indicator that they were taken more than a little seriously within IS1 circles, from which perspective Rudra seems to be writing. His main line of defence of the

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440 Benjamin Zachariah

Professor was that none of this was for personal gain, and could be attributed to his idiosyncratic style of functioning.

Mahalanobis, it is said, did not believe in class differences, by which, I suppose, it is meant that he did not like to emphasize or draw attention to their existence. Those employed at the IS1 were called 'workers' and known not by their designation but by roll numbers. This can be seen only as a cosmetic gesture; Mahalanobis' own roll number was zero, a good starting point for a sta- tistician. It is unclear how seriously the Professor took this little device, or act of generosity. He had a self-image of himself as a model employer and was not par- ticularly fond of trade unions, with whom he had running disputes. Yet he had close contacts with the Communist Party of India, though never a member, and from the 1940s, while maintaining his links with the Goverment of Bengal, and the Government of India, had several Communists on the IS1 staff, some by an arrangement made in 1943 with P. C. Joshi, then General Secretary of the Party; this continued in 1948-9 when the Party was formally at war with the Indian state. The Professor's own contacts with the Party went back to the 1930s, and were strengthened through his contacts with Joshi during the period of the Bengal Famine. None of this prevented conflict with labour at the ISI; a strange situation was created in which the CPI leadership failed to support the workers against their employer on the grounds that he was doing important work at the national level; many communists in their individual capacities were sympathetic to the Mahalanobis Model because of its apparent similarities with the Soviet model (Rudra 1996: 351,438-9,369-78). Mahalanobis also seemed adept at dis- sociating his behaviour as employer from his political sympathies, as also his employees' actions as communists from their activities as workers at the ISI; and at protecting them from the state.

If any worker of the I.S.I. is believed to be engaged in unlawful activities within or outside the Institute [he wrote to Nehru] it is the responsibility of the Government and police authorities to take appropriate action to initiate cases in law-courts, or to pass order for detention without trial, or to make arrests as may be considered proper. . . . Personally, I am not in favour of Government or police authorities asking the I.S.I. to discharge any of the Institute workers on political grounds on the responsibility of the I.S.I. itself and without Government or police authorities undertaking the responsibility for such discharge because, in my opinion, this procedure may undermine basic democratic rights. It is, however, both necessary and desirable to main- tain a scientific and non-political atmosphere within the I.S.I.

(Rudra 1996: 379)

This letter, reproduced in some detail, plays on the idea, mentioned above, that developmental and scientific work must take place outside politics. Such a luxury as an apolitical environment was at least partly a deliberately and carefully main- tained myth, but Mahalanobis seems to have been particularly adept at main- taining it. The narratives of his negotiations with colonial authority show that he took pains to maintain reasonably good links with the Government, and give

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The development of Professor Mahalanobis 441

no indication that he found it particularly difficult to reconcile his anti-imperial- ism with his work for and dependence on funding from Government agencies such as the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research (which could perhaps be justified on the grounds that it was a developmental agency similarly engaged in technical, therefore apolitical work), or his negotiations with Casey, the Gover- nor of Bengal, for funding - in the latter case, he wrote that negotiations were greatly simplified by the fact that Casey was also a Cambridge graduate (Rudra 1996: 180). If he had a need for a show of dissent, this was met in relatively quiet ways. In October 1937, for instance, Mahalanobis refused the title of 'Rai Bahadur', to be conferred on him in the New Year's Honours List, on the grounds that he had 'strong objections': he did not e1aborate.j

Rudra's style of biographical writing does not particularly allow a reader to follow up these potential points of creative tension in the development of Pro- fessor Mahalanobis. The text operates as a collection of anecdotes about an old comrade everyone knew; the problem is, everyone did not. It is necessary to keep in mind that this is essentially an unfinished work. But the narration of a tale requires a certain shared vocabulary and a commonly understood framework of experiences which Rudra seems to take for granted. It is difficult to engage with any of it, lacking a context in which to place it. Such a context might have been provided through an attempt to look at the intellectual or social ambience in which the Professor lived and worked - the beginnings of which I have tried to provide, but for which a more detailed engagement with the particular histories which mingle in Mahalanobis' life is necessary. This context is strongest in the sections on Mahalanobis' early life, in which the particulars of Bengal and Calcutta history emerge, but disappears as the narrative proceeds into the Pro- fessor's later life. Such a difficulty may proceed from the atmosphere of awed reverence created by the Professor's presence later in his career; the person dis- appears behind the persona, making anything like an intimacy with his subject impossible for the biographer.

Generalizations following from material of this sort must necessarily be specu- lative. Certain aspects of the intellectual development of Professor Mahalanobis are, however, echoed in the development of other figures who similarly came to stand for science, modernity and planned development, though particular tra- jectories differed. There are dangers that the rather well-documented history of the Calcutta bhadralok be allowed to stand forth as representing the Indian middle class as a whole; but there nevertheless may be room to ask whether par- ticular Bengali histories may not overlap with wider Indian histories. Similarities of educational background and high achievement in academic and professional terms would be high on the list of possibilities for overlap; one might look at the career and writings of Visvesvaraya (1920, 1934,1937, 1951) for an example from a different local context.

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442 Benjamin Zachariah

The economic imperatives behind the drive to development bear no repeti- tion here; but a lot of the emotional energy invested by these intellectuals in various developmental schemes can be attributed to the opportunity to resume leadership of a nationalist movement which in its Gandhian phase had become increasingly anti-intellectual. The consequent mass appeal of the national move- ment under Congress leadership was at the expense of the intellectual's former pre-eminent position of formulator of arguments and strategies against colonial rule: this position passed to Gandhi's brand of what the former regarded as anti- intellectual romanticism. 'Development' and 'Planning' saw the resurrection of the intellectual Clite in Indian political culture. Perhaps, then, the reason for the initial immense hostility among this group to the Gandhian position of opposi- tion to industrialization (a hostility replaced in some cases, from the 1950s, by ambivalence) was the implications this had for their own position of legitimacy. Gandhi's position called for what amounted to the unmaking of the colonial intellectual, only properly achievable by the renunciation of a large part of them- selves, a renunciation which was supposed to return them to some sort of auth- enticity.

The other curious point which deserves comment is the mixing of liberal and socialist idioms associated with India, aspects of which were later to be rational- ized and dignified as 'non-alignment' and the 'third path'. Part of this was merely an acceptance, not all of it conscious, of unresolved conflict, a stalemate of forces in the making of the nation-state. This can be viewed at the level not of conflicting class interest, but often of an intellectual dilemma within middle- class thought; formal politics, despite, or perhaps because of, Gandhism, remained the domain of the urban middle-class intellectual; thinking about formal politics was similarly his domain even when he was not a politician. Dis- tances between political positions were consequently not particularly unbridge- able, the same family or circle of friends accommodating widely divergent and incompatible political views, and crossovers were made across intellectual, not social, distances. For those outside formal politics but with perceived commit- ments to public welfare or ideas regarding matters such as development, the available surrogate for actual political activity - under both colonial rule and its successor state - could be found in the quiet and relatively non-confrontation- ist 'constructive work' of technician to the nation: quiet, but not unimportant, and not lacking in its own grandeur. 'The first five-year plan is an anthology', Mahalanobis once said to his future biographer, 'a plan has to be a drama' (Rudra 1996: 432).

Trinity College, Cambridge

Notes

1 Arguments critical of this formulation diverge from this point onwards, in directions ranging from a wholesale critique of modernity and its alleged allies, science and reason, and a defence of an alternative Indian 'tradition' (Nandy 1987, 1988, 1989), to a more

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The development o f Professor Mahalanobis 443

constructive questioning of the relationship between the nation and the state in India and the arguments used to build the relationship (see Bose and Jalal 1997: 1-6; Sen, 1997). For two alternative readings of the relationship of these elites with the ideas that went into the making of the ~ndian state and its 'd&ocracy', see Nandy (1989) and Kaviraj (1995). 2 He kept extensive notes on race and anthropometry -much of the list of books is in German - also head-length measurements of Bengalis by caste, presumably for his articles: Trunk T-2, P C Mahalanobis Archive, Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (here- after PCMA). 3 This non-confrontationist approach is visible in most of the documents which were produced by the National Planning Committee of the Congress, which first met in 1938 and tried to accomplish the ambitious task of arriving at generally agreed upon principles of planning in consultation with capitalists, scientists, technocrats, Gandhians and social- ists. For a sumrnary,.see Shah (1949). 4 P C Mahalanobis, Presidency College, Calcutta, to G M Morant, University College, London, 29 November 1934, Trunk T-2, 'letters of scientists', PCMA. 5 Letter from Bazhul Karim, 6 October 1937, Canopus Lodge, Simla (confidential); and Mahalanobis's reply, 11 October 1939, Trunk T-2, PCMA.

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Notes on contributors

Julie Froud has worked with her fellow authors on a wide variety of projects, most recently on utility privatization and acute hospital trusts, as well as on restruc- turing in pharmaceuticals and labour conflict at Caterpillar Inc. She works in the School of Accounting and Finance and the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.

Haldun Gulalp is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bogazi~i University in Istanbul. His recent publications include 'State and class in capitalism: Marx and Weber on modernity' Current Perspectives in Social Theory 16 (1996) and 'Islamism and Kurdish nationalism: rival adversaries of Kemalism in Turkey', in Islamism and the Question of Minorities, ed. Tamara Sonn, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press (1996).

Colin Haslam has worked with his fellow authors on a wide variety of projects, most recently on utility privatization and acute hospital trusts, as well as on restructuring in pharmaceuticals and labour conflict at Caterpillar Inc. He works in the School of Management at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

SukhdevJohal has worked with his fellow authors on a wide variety of projects, most recently on utility privatization and acute hospital trusts, as well as on restructuring in pharmaceuticals and labour conflict at Caterpillar Inc. He works in the School of Management at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

kt'endy Larner, born 1963 New Zealand, B.Soc.Sci. University of Waikito, 1983; MA (Hons) University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1989; Lecturer in Geography, University of Waikito, New Zealand, 1990-1; Commonwealth Scholar, Carleton University, Canada 1991-7; Lecturer in Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand 1997-; author of various articles on restructuring in New Zealand.

John Wilkinson wrote this article while on post-doctoral leave at the CEDI/Paris XIII. He has specialized in issues of technological and organizational innovation and has published widely on agrofood and biotechnology (From Farming to Biotechnology, Blackwell; The Future of the European Food Industry, FAST/CE; Biotechnology Strategies of Leading Agrofood Firms, OECD). He has worked as a researcher at the FAST programme of the European Commission and as con- sultant to the OECD, FA0 and ECLA on these and related themes. He is cur- rently senior lecturer at the Graduate Centre for Agricultural Development, Rio de Janeiro Federal Rural University, and is presently working on issues of econ- omic co-ordination and consumption within an economic sociology perspective.

John Williams has worked with his fellow authors on a wide variety of projects, most recently on utility privatization and acute hospital trusts, as well as on

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446 Notes on contributors

restructuring in pharmaceuticals and labour conflict at Caterpillar Inc. He is Emeritus Professor of Economic History at the University of Wales, Aberyst- wyth.

Karel Williams has worked with his fellow authors on a wide variety of projects, most recently on utility privatization and acute hospital trusts, as well as on restructuring in pharmaceuticals and labour conflict at Caterpillar Inc. He works in the School of Accounting and Finance and the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester.

Simon Wortham, born 1966, studied at the University of Sussex.'He is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Portsmouth. He has written a number of articles on economic discourse in seventeenth-century literature and issues in Renaissance studies.

Benjamin Zacharzah, completed a BA in history from Presidency College, Uni- versity of Calcutta, in 1993. He is at present at Trinity College, Cambridge, working towards a PhD on ideas of development in India.

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