Doing Labour Management Research is Not Easy: A Methodological, Experiential and Emotional Note

Abstract

Despite the primacy of labour in life, mainstream scholars in economics and other disciplines have looked down upon labour studies as a peripheral subject and labour researchers as those who are kind of too mentally retarded to pursue top-end intellectual labour, but is doing labour research easy? In this note, we point out the hellish experience we had gone through in conducting a research project on mapping labour relations, in the fieldwork tradition, in an automobile production chain in Northern India.