The Social Life of Skills in the Global South

by Trent Brown (Editor), Geert De Neve (Editor)

Overview

This book expands understandings of how skills are defined, acquired, and utilized in Global South contexts. ‘Skills’ and ‘skill development’ are increasingly prominent focal points for governments in the Global South and international development bodies. Yet, policymakers and practitioners promoting skill development often overlook the everyday realities of how skills are learned and acquired, and how they are deployed and valued by individuals and communities. Frequently, they ignore the social and institutional barriers that prevent people from using their skills in meaningful or remunerative ways.

By focusing on the ‘the social life of skills’, the chapters in this volume invite a broader conceptualization of skills, their development, and their application in Global South contexts. They explore four main areas of theorization and practice:

1. The social and political processes by which certain types of work – and people – are labeled as ‘skilled’ or ‘unskilled.’

2. The different ways people acquire skills: formal, informal, and nonformal.

3. The political economy of skills and skill development and their imbrication in forms of exploitation and intersecting inequalities.

4. The role of skills in the expression of aspirations, identities, and agency.

This book will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of development studies, sociology, anthropology, education, and labor studies, particularly those focusing on the Global South. It will also appeal to policymakers, practitioners, and development organizations working on skill development and vocational training.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781041022558
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/23/2025
Series:	ThirdWorlds
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Trent Brown is Associate Professor at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Farmers, Subalterns, and Activists: Social Politics of Sustainable Agriculture in India (2018).

Geert De Neve is Professor of Social Anthropology and South Asian studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is the author of The Everyday Politics of Labour: Working Lives in India’s Informal Economy (2005).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Skills, training and development: an introduction to the social life of skills in the global South 1. Skilling Indigenous futures: crafts and resilience among the Paiwan people of Taiwan 2. Becoming a repair entrepreneur: an ethnography of skills training in Brazil 3. Skills in ‘unskilled’ work: a case of waste work in Central India 4. Skills to stay: social processes in agricultural skill acquisition in rural Karnataka 5. Rationalising pedagogy: what counts as skill across musical communities of practice in contemporary Istanbul 6. Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India 7. Hāth se sīkhna: geographies of practical learning and India’s agricultural skills agenda 8. Crafting new service workers: skill training, migration and employment in Bengaluru, India 9. Of glass, skills and life: trade consciousness among Firozabad’s glass workers 10. Professionalism as a soft skill: the social construction of worker identity in India’s new services economy 11. More than language: the work of an English training centre in Delhi Afterword: Skill Acquisition in the Informal Sectors of the South