SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In our tribute we summarise the initial results of field research on one aspect of civil society which was energised in conversations about the politics of markets with Gordon White [White (ed.), 1993]. While the output of Gordon’s work on the politics of civil society in China ran rapidly to six papers and a substantial book [White et al., 1996] and then flowed on into fertile intellectual distributaries-civil society and democratisation [Luckham and White, 1996; Robinson and White, 1998]; the politics of social provision [Goodman, White and Kwon, 1998] and the political conditions for effective developmental states [Luckham and White, 1996]—our work on the social regulation of the Indian economy required ethnographic field research, proceeded comparatively at a snail’s pace and, in the decade since the original conversations, has generated but three papers and one book [Basile and Harriss-White, 2000; McCartney and Harriss-White, 2000; Harriss-White, 2002a: 2000b]. Three strands of Gordon’s work have been indispensible to the framework we use here to examine the impact of the politics of urban organisations on accumulation in South India: civil society, the politics of market organisation and corporatism. In this introduction, first, we will outline the framework of ‘social structures of accumulation’ (henceforth SSA) and then weave in these strands.