Pavithra Prasad
Biographic Data
| ID | 956979 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pavithra Prasad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pavithra |
| FAMILY NAME | Prasad |
| SIGNATURE | PRASAD P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Skidmore College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7727-7660 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 154 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
True colors of global economy
This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socio-economic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbo…
Notes on a Terrestrial Performance of Outer Space
From Elsewhere
Phantasms in the Halls
Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible, is a mediated live performance presented synchronously on Zoom and in person. In this devised ensemble piece, the performers offer a performative response to recent scholarship on the settler colonial university and its significance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work weaves together theories of fugitivity, spectrality, and refusal to offer contextually situated critiques of labo…
A Spectral Genealogy of Performance in Intercultural Communication Studies
The traces of performance studies that bolster intercultural communication elude strict disciplinary confinement. Despite many convergences between the two disciplines, they have been frequently made to occupy oppositional positions within Communication Studies. While their methods vary, I see the impetus of both areas being oriented towards moving through three major dialectics: 1. Reflection Reflexivity 2. Illumination Emplacement 3. Transcript…
In a Minor Key
Research Article| February 01 2020 In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad (PhD, Northwestern University) is an assistant professor of performance studies and intercultural communication at California State University, Northridge. Her work as a scholar and artist, critically examines performative constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in South Asia and the diaspora, converging around t…
The Casual Horror of Boredom in Tiger King
There is something nasty to be said about a television program that so accidentally yet perfectly captures the abject experience of living through a late stage of civilizational putrefaction. The acrid humor of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King was the right flavor for the mounting grievances and absurdities of the year 2020, its nightmarish politics, our sudden and rapid disabling at the hands of a global pandemic, and a growing acceptance of th…
Sunburned
This essay considers how travel and mobility inflect our politics of alterity through changing skin color. It asks how globality is rendered through the prism of epidermal vulnerability, the sunburn. When is this affliction of skin desirable and what cosmopolitan relations does it engender? It asks how skin transforms, and transforms us, when it travels. It considers what it means for brown skin to be marked by vacation travel. How is it coded di…
Crafting Qualitative Research
This book provides an overview of qualitative research models and their applications in organization and management studies. Focusing on the philosophical underpinnings and practical implications of diverse qualitative methods, this comprehensive text offers a guided tour of the options available to qualitative researchers, highlighting aspects of research design, execution, and analysis in each tradition. In clear, readable prose, the author off…
Outsider Orbits
Smoke and mirrors
This article examines the institutional entrepreneurship displayed by the US tobacco industry in its attempt to overcome the moral illegitimacy of smoking among women in the years following World War I. Using historical analysis within a critical institutional framework, we trace the strategies used by the tobacco industry in combating seemingly powerful taboos and convincing large sections of the female population to take up smoking. Contrary to…
Paradiso Lost
This essay explores racialized performances of nostalgia in a volatile tourist subculture. It is an ethnography as well as a methodological inquiry into how fieldwork can emerge as not only an experience of witnessing and documentation, but also a continuous and evolving embodied memory. The field and the document simultaneously, but separately, illuminate fantasies, anxieties, and desires that are both lost and recovered through the act of writi…
The baba and the patrao
This article focuses on the concept of ‘localness’ within the subculture of electronic music tourism in Goa, India. Localness as observed through the affective lenses of familiarity, affinity and belonging, emerges as a performative expression of group cohesion, suggesting that the ‘local’, like the ‘nomad’, occupies a transient and shifting relationship with physical and ideological space. Ethnographic observations and thick descriptions articul…
One mirror in another’
In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produce…
The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing
The Postcolonial Imagination
D espite some differences, the two metropolitan accounts—one by Winston Churchill, and the other by Hardt and Negri (2000)— which inaugurate this chapter, share something in common at a deep level: what the two metropolitan accounts may be seen to share is an absolute acceptance of the genocidal consequences of “civilization” as the price that “the wretched of the earth” must willingly pay for achieving Europe’s 1 idea of the Kingdom of God on Ea…
The Empire of Organizations and the Organization of Empires
R ecent management and organizational research has frequently noted the complex nature of workplace resistance, and commented upon the difficulties attending scholarly efforts to theorize resistance in organizations (Hodson, 1995; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994a; Prasad & Prasad, 1998, 2000, 2001). The objective of this chapter is to explore the limits/margins of current management scholarship on workplace resistance by means of drawing upon cert…
The Return of the Native
One of the arguably “scholarly” by-products of the West’s era of high imperialism was ethnography—the institutionalized practice of studying indigenous (non-Western) peoples through a process of extended cultural immersion. While ethnography for the most part tends to be strongly identified with the anthropological subfield that engages in cultural depictions of “other,” its own cultural influence extends way beyond its immediate academic locatio…
The context of third world tourism marketing
(Un)willing to resist? the discursive production of local workplace opposition ∗
Workplace resistance is conventionally regarded as the product of worker consciousness and intentionality. More recent studies of resistance have questioned this notion, seeing workplace resistance as emerging out of more spontaneous and non-calculative types of action. This paper examines the discursive production of routine resistance in an organization, showing how notions of employee intentionality and non-intentionality were categories throu…
Stretching the Iron Cage
Organizational scholars have shown considerable interest in the rise of complex systems of organizational control, sometimes referred to metaphorically as the process of tightening the iron cage, as well as patterns of workplace resistance to it. More recently, the scholarly spotlight seems to have shifted from formal modes of employee resistance to more informal or routine forms of workplace resistance. This paper presents a detailed ethnographi…
Managing the Organizational Melting Pot
Illuminating the troublesome and disturbing aspects of workplace diversity that tend to be glossed over in most management literature, Managing the Organizational Melting Pot covers key issues such as: individual and institutional resistance, the effectiveness of diversity change efforts, and the less visible ways in which exclusion and discrimination continue to be practiced in the workplace. To assist the reader in understanding some of these d…
Working with the “smart” machine
Computers are routinely anthropomorphized in contemporary societies. Yet, few studies seriously examine the personification of computers at the workplace. This paper focuses on the discourse of anthropomorphism and work computerization. Based on the findings of an ethnographic study that looked at the computerization of administrative processes in a Health Maintenance Organization, the paper demonstrates how the discourse of anthropomorphism simu…
The Ideology of Professionalism and Work Computerization
This paper examines the process of work computerization in a Health Maintenance Organization from an institutionalist perspective. It investigates how one element of the institutional environment, viz., the ideology of professionalism, became a powerful presence and continually influenced the process of work computerization in the organization. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the paper identifies the…
The context of third world tourism marketing
One mirror in another’
In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produce…
The Ideology of Professionalism and Work Computerization
This paper examines the process of work computerization in a Health Maintenance Organization from an institutionalist perspective. It investigates how one element of the institutional environment, viz., the ideology of professionalism, became a powerful presence and continually influenced the process of work computerization in the organization. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the paper identifies the…
In a Minor Key
Research Article| February 01 2020 In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad (PhD, Northwestern University) is an assistant professor of performance studies and intercultural communication at California State University, Northridge. Her work as a scholar and artist, critically examines performative constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in South Asia and the diaspora, converging around t…
Paradiso Lost
This essay explores racialized performances of nostalgia in a volatile tourist subculture. It is an ethnography as well as a methodological inquiry into how fieldwork can emerge as not only an experience of witnessing and documentation, but also a continuous and evolving embodied memory. The field and the document simultaneously, but separately, illuminate fantasies, anxieties, and desires that are both lost and recovered through the act of writi…
The baba and the patrao
This article focuses on the concept of ‘localness’ within the subculture of electronic music tourism in Goa, India. Localness as observed through the affective lenses of familiarity, affinity and belonging, emerges as a performative expression of group cohesion, suggesting that the ‘local’, like the ‘nomad’, occupies a transient and shifting relationship with physical and ideological space. Ethnographic observations and thick descriptions articul…
Notes on a Terrestrial Performance of Outer Space
From Elsewhere
The Ideology of Professionalism and Work Computerization
This paper examines the process of work computerization in a Health Maintenance Organization from an institutionalist perspective. It investigates how one element of the institutional environment, viz., the ideology of professionalism, became a powerful presence and continually influenced the process of work computerization in the organization. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the paper identifies the…
Working with the “smart” machine
Computers are routinely anthropomorphized in contemporary societies. Yet, few studies seriously examine the personification of computers at the workplace. This paper focuses on the discourse of anthropomorphism and work computerization. Based on the findings of an ethnographic study that looked at the computerization of administrative processes in a Health Maintenance Organization, the paper demonstrates how the discourse of anthropomorphism simu…
Managing the Organizational Melting Pot
Illuminating the troublesome and disturbing aspects of workplace diversity that tend to be glossed over in most management literature, Managing the Organizational Melting Pot covers key issues such as: individual and institutional resistance, the effectiveness of diversity change efforts, and the less visible ways in which exclusion and discrimination continue to be practiced in the workplace. To assist the reader in understanding some of these d…
Stretching the Iron Cage
Organizational scholars have shown considerable interest in the rise of complex systems of organizational control, sometimes referred to metaphorically as the process of tightening the iron cage, as well as patterns of workplace resistance to it. More recently, the scholarly spotlight seems to have shifted from formal modes of employee resistance to more informal or routine forms of workplace resistance. This paper presents a detailed ethnographi…
(Un)willing to resist? the discursive production of local workplace opposition ∗
Workplace resistance is conventionally regarded as the product of worker consciousness and intentionality. More recent studies of resistance have questioned this notion, seeing workplace resistance as emerging out of more spontaneous and non-calculative types of action. This paper examines the discursive production of routine resistance in an organization, showing how notions of employee intentionality and non-intentionality were categories throu…
The Postcolonial Imagination
D espite some differences, the two metropolitan accounts—one by Winston Churchill, and the other by Hardt and Negri (2000)— which inaugurate this chapter, share something in common at a deep level: what the two metropolitan accounts may be seen to share is an absolute acceptance of the genocidal consequences of “civilization” as the price that “the wretched of the earth” must willingly pay for achieving Europe’s 1 idea of the Kingdom of God on Ea…
The Empire of Organizations and the Organization of Empires
R ecent management and organizational research has frequently noted the complex nature of workplace resistance, and commented upon the difficulties attending scholarly efforts to theorize resistance in organizations (Hodson, 1995; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994a; Prasad & Prasad, 1998, 2000, 2001). The objective of this chapter is to explore the limits/margins of current management scholarship on workplace resistance by means of drawing upon cert…
The Return of the Native
One of the arguably “scholarly” by-products of the West’s era of high imperialism was ethnography—the institutionalized practice of studying indigenous (non-Western) peoples through a process of extended cultural immersion. While ethnography for the most part tends to be strongly identified with the anthropological subfield that engages in cultural depictions of “other,” its own cultural influence extends way beyond its immediate academic locatio…
The context of third world tourism marketing
The Context of Third World Tourism Marketing
One mirror in another’
In this article, we report on a multi-sited ethnographic study that investigates how the discourse of fashion influenced the design and implementation of workplace diversity management programs in six organizations. These organizations, from the Canadian petroleum and insurance industries, were manipulated by an institutional field of consultants and experts into adopting relatively superficial initiatives that lacked local relevance, and produce…
The baba and the patrao
This article focuses on the concept of ‘localness’ within the subculture of electronic music tourism in Goa, India. Localness as observed through the affective lenses of familiarity, affinity and belonging, emerges as a performative expression of group cohesion, suggesting that the ‘local’, like the ‘nomad’, occupies a transient and shifting relationship with physical and ideological space. Ethnographic observations and thick descriptions articul…
Paradiso Lost
This essay explores racialized performances of nostalgia in a volatile tourist subculture. It is an ethnography as well as a methodological inquiry into how fieldwork can emerge as not only an experience of witnessing and documentation, but also a continuous and evolving embodied memory. The field and the document simultaneously, but separately, illuminate fantasies, anxieties, and desires that are both lost and recovered through the act of writi…
Smoke and mirrors
This article examines the institutional entrepreneurship displayed by the US tobacco industry in its attempt to overcome the moral illegitimacy of smoking among women in the years following World War I. Using historical analysis within a critical institutional framework, we trace the strategies used by the tobacco industry in combating seemingly powerful taboos and convincing large sections of the female population to take up smoking. Contrary to…
Crafting Qualitative Research
This book provides an overview of qualitative research models and their applications in organization and management studies. Focusing on the philosophical underpinnings and practical implications of diverse qualitative methods, this comprehensive text offers a guided tour of the options available to qualitative researchers, highlighting aspects of research design, execution, and analysis in each tradition. In clear, readable prose, the author off…
Outsider Orbits
Sunburned
This essay considers how travel and mobility inflect our politics of alterity through changing skin color. It asks how globality is rendered through the prism of epidermal vulnerability, the sunburn. When is this affliction of skin desirable and what cosmopolitan relations does it engender? It asks how skin transforms, and transforms us, when it travels. It considers what it means for brown skin to be marked by vacation travel. How is it coded di…
A Spectral Genealogy of Performance in Intercultural Communication Studies
The traces of performance studies that bolster intercultural communication elude strict disciplinary confinement. Despite many convergences between the two disciplines, they have been frequently made to occupy oppositional positions within Communication Studies. While their methods vary, I see the impetus of both areas being oriented towards moving through three major dialectics: 1. Reflection Reflexivity 2. Illumination Emplacement 3. Transcript…
In a Minor Key
Research Article| February 01 2020 In a Minor Key: Queer Kinship in Times of Grief Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad Pavithra Prasad (PhD, Northwestern University) is an assistant professor of performance studies and intercultural communication at California State University, Northridge. Her work as a scholar and artist, critically examines performative constructions of race, gender, and sexuality in South Asia and the diaspora, converging around t…
The Casual Horror of Boredom in Tiger King
There is something nasty to be said about a television program that so accidentally yet perfectly captures the abject experience of living through a late stage of civilizational putrefaction. The acrid humor of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King was the right flavor for the mounting grievances and absurdities of the year 2020, its nightmarish politics, our sudden and rapid disabling at the hands of a global pandemic, and a growing acceptance of th…
Phantasms in the Halls
Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible, is a mediated live performance presented synchronously on Zoom and in person. In this devised ensemble piece, the performers offer a performative response to recent scholarship on the settler colonial university and its significance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work weaves together theories of fugitivity, spectrality, and refusal to offer contextually situated critiques of labo…
True colors of global economy
This paper unpacks the notion of racial capitalism and highlights its salience for Management and Organization Studies. Racial capitalism is a process of systematically deriving socio-economic value from non-white racial identity groups, and has shaped the contours and trajectories of capitalism for over 500 years. Drawing on the contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois, Bourdieu, and a number of labor historians, we argue that whiteness operates as symbo…
Notes on a Terrestrial Performance of Outer Space
From Elsewhere
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Anthropology (13 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (7 works) · Psychology (7 works)