Human motivation is defined as the psychological force that generates complex cycles of goal-directed thought and behavior. Such thought and behavior is ultimately directed toward the achievement of the fundamental goal of inclusive fitness (Bernard, Mills, Swenson, and Walsh, 2005), where individuals strive to match their internal needs to actual or potential resources in their life space. Motivation is what animates us, what prompts us to launch actions, to reach decisions, to make choices, and to persist in the pursuit of courses of action until their completion. Accordingly, scholars studying human motivation intend to unveil the processes by which an individual’s internal, psychological forces in conjunction with external, environmental forces determine the direction, intensity, and persistence of personal behavior aimed at goal attainment (Kanfer, 2009). In preparing this chapter, we have chosen to focus specifically on the complex interplay between endogenous forces, such as internal drives and beliefs, and exogenous forces, such as changes in the stability of rewards, within the work environment. Furthermore, because the study of motivation is extremely vast, we have currently chosen to restrict ourselves to focusing solely on work motivation within work environments. It is definitely included in the immense field of human motivation and it provides a key determinant of reactions to downsizing in organizations.

One recent and dramatic example of how a work environment may rapidly change is the traumatic closure of Deutsche Post World Net operations in Wilmington, Ohio, which has received considerable national media attention in the United States. At the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007, the DHL division of Deutsche Post World Net employed approximately 8,000 workers in Wilmington, Ohio, which was the seat of US domestic air shipping operations. By 2008, DHL announced the phased closure of shipping activities and by the end of operations approximately 7,500 employees were laid off (Lynch, 2008). Although only a portion of the laid off employees were from Wilmington, the layoffs still effectively devastated the local economy (Driehaus, 2008).

Cameron (1994) characterized the business strategy of downsizing as the most pervasive yet most understudied phenomenon in the business world. In the ensuing two decades, downsizing has been studied across various disciplines from sociology to economics, from psychology to strategic management, from finance to human resources. Each of these diverse disciplines offers a unique perspective and point of view. Our book aims to reconcile the different points of view towards downsizing by offering a comprehensive set of chapters that capture the entirety of the process, from beginning to end and with consideration of each of the many facets of the process. We have brought together leading business strategists, business practitioners, human resource experts, and psychologists into a single volume, offering the reader 13 chapters.

Datta, Guthrie, Basuil, and Pandey (2010, p. 282) define downsizing as “a planned set of organizational policies and practices aimed at workforce reduction with the goal of improving firm performance.” In the book’s opening chapter, Hallock, Strain, and Webber survey the job loss literature, thus providing an introduction to the concept of downsizing. Their line of discussion suggests that the employment relationship in the United States has changed over the years. They define the downsizing process even while examining alternatives like work-sharing, to typical mass layoff policies.

The theatre of the new cities

The culture of the great metropolises of nineteenth-century India, foremost amongst them the colonial harbour cities of Calcutta and Bombay, produced a new kind of theatre which played itself out on a stage meant to replicate real life, as it claimed to present real situations, real history and even real gods. It catered to the middle classes, themselves in a formational stage, and was clearly a configuration of parts that had heterogeneous origins. But to the progenitors of this new culture, playwrights, actor-managers and critics no less than audiences, operating under colonial rule in constant interaction with a dominant, still very foreign culture with which it was also essential to establish equivalences, it was of vital importance to stress the indigenous origins of this new theatre and the classical tradition to which it declared itself heir. And if Western orientalists were most often quoted as authorities as to what constituted this classical tradition, their views were adapted by Indians to suit increasingly nationalist purposes.

William Jones, the first high-standing civil servant to write at any length on such matters, in the preface to his translation of Kalidasa's fifth-century Sanskrit drama Shakuntala (1789), had also been the first to announce the sensational new discovery of the national drama of the Hindus to the Occident. ‘Dramatic poetry must have been immemorially ancient in the Indian empire’, he had speculated.

A 1933 article entitled ‘The Pulps: Day Dreams for the Masses’ introduced Vanity Fair's upscale readers to the vast literary underworld of pulp magazines. The exposé called writers of pulp fiction ‘hacks’, implied their readers were only marginally literate, and characterised the magazines themselves as ‘gaudy, blatant, banal’, representing ‘the incursion of the Machine Age into the art of tale-telling’. These were all familiar charges. Pulp fiction was an often sensational, mass-produced literature that had appeared in the pages of pulp magazines and cheap paperbacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The name, ‘pulp fiction’, comes from the cheap, wood-pulp paper on which these stories were printed. Descendants of nineteenth-century dime novels, pulp magazines and paperback originals were frequently viewed as ‘trash’ – cheap, disposable and lacking in literary quality. Rather than evoking a reader's refined, higher feelings, these stories were charged with appealing to baser, corporeal emotions. These reputed moral and aesthetic failings aside, however, pulp fiction has warranted increasing interest in the last twenty years from scholars who see it as an avenue for investigating popular worldviews and for tracking the complex encounter between ordinary people and commercial culture.

It is a special Russian irony that the eighteenth century – during which explicitly religious values lost a great deal of their position and power within Russian culture – should have seen an influential if subtle reaffirmation of religious attitudes, however disguised, toward its end. Much, though not all, of this reaffirmation was connected to the development of Russian Freemasonry. The attitudes, activity, and organization of Russian Masons played a vital role in the very early stages of the creation of a “civil society” in Russia, a frequently arrested process not complete to this day. At the same time, however, the culture of the educated elite – particularly that portion of it eventually to be called the intelligentsia – took on many attitudes significantly colored by religious values and aspirations, which have never disappeared from the culture. The Russian Church, however, failed to recover the grip it lost on Russian society during and after the reign of Peter the Great.

When Peter told the Russians that he wanted them to become “European,” he basically meant that he wanted to endow them with European energy and dynamism. He wanted to wake them from what he understood to be a sleep of lethargy and barbarism, to make entrepreneurs of the traditionalist merchantry, to make statesmen, administrators, generals, admirals, and scientists of the gentry. (The peasants had to undergird and support this “Westernization” with their meager resources, since there was nobody else to do so.)

In Rus' the official conversion from paganism to Christianity took place in the tenth century. Paganism, thriving in the vast East European territory inhabited by different Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Lithuanian, and Turkic tribes was not an “organized” religion, which could be viewed as some kind of unified whole with common gods for all tribes or with a common level of world understanding. There were, instead, higher deities unifying the tribe or several tribes, and there were local deities, of particular settlements, and even of homes (for example, the house spirits or domovye).

With the adoption of Christianity in the population centers, only the higher deities, such as Perun (in Finno-Ugric Perkun, god of thunder and war), Veles (god of household animals and trade), and Dažbog (god of the harvest), were deposed. The “lesser” deities, the house gods, those imagined by the people to inhabit swamps, forests, rivers, and outbuildings, continued to be objects of worship – or, more exactly, superstition – into the twentieth century. Faith in them coexisted with belief in Christianity, just as superstitions continue to exist to the present day in different varieties of omens, fortune-telling, and so on.

Such cultural conditions among the lower classes – including the pre-existing beliefs regarding the land and nature that supported the ethics of common agricultural labor – made the transition from paganism to Christianity in the official sphere fairly rapid and painless.

In one of its earliest (but still recognisably modern) incarnations, the trade of writing was linked to a specific locale: from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the name of Grub Street developed a very mixed reputation as the place in London where authors, and the booksellers and publishers who paid them, lived cheek by jowl, working together to turn a profit. But by the end of the eighteenth century, the street name had acquired an imaginative life of its own. No longer simply a commercial address, ‘Grub-Street’ became a dismissive term for any published work that had been hastily written for money and was thought to be of poor quality, the product of literary hacks, no matter where it had originated. This distinctly downmarket meaning endured. When George Gissing (1857–1903) began writing the novel he eventually called New Grub Street (1891), no street had borne that name for over fifty years; yet he could still credibly use the phrase to mark a point in the growth of the late Victorian publishing industry when the everyday reality of those who sought to make a living from writing, and particularly from writing fiction, seemed to be more debased and discouraging than ever before – or so Gissing would have his readers believe.

Caste in India has been inextricably linked to the politics of caste from at least the late nineteenth century onwards. Since then, like religion, caste has gone through an identity-building process overdetermined by considerations of power. Like religious identities, caste identities are not ‘given’ but produced according to social cum political strategies and the contexts – often regional – in which they are evolved. In the following pages, I shall focus on the way lower castes' identities have been shaped and infused with new meanings according to an ethnicization process that was largely due to ideologies of autochthony (indigeneity), electoral politics and public policies such as state programmes of positive discrimination.

The transformation of caste during the British Raj

The caste system relies on hierarchical principles that Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) has defined very perceptively in terms of ‘graded inequality’ (see below): the Brahmins (the literati or priestly caste) come first in what is known as the first of the four varna (literally meaning ‘colour’), whereas the Untouchables (technically avarna, or outside of the caste schema) lie at the bottom of the social pyramid, and between these two extremes one can observe a clear-cut social hierarchy: the Kshatriyas (the warrior castes, former rulers and today largely made up of small and big landowners) and the Vaishyas (the merchants and traders) take the second and third positions respectively, but are still upper castes (the ‘twice-borns’) like the Brahmins, whereas the Shudras (cultivators, herdsmen and artisans) are situated between the twice-borns and the Untouchables.

Driving in eastern Bangalore beyond the Intermediate Ring Road, I pass a roadside temple dedicated to Shiva and his holy family; it is guarding the entrance to the old village from which Marathahalli Road, the local name for Airport Road in this area, derives its name. While the road has become more congested, and the village has been incorporated into the city, the temple has nevertheless been embellished over the last three decades, most recently with a new coat of paint and a patio marking its perimeter. Further down Airport Road's intersection with the Outer Ring Road near Brookefields, a banner advertises the ritual consecration of a large new temple dedicated to Shirdi Sai Baba, a relatively modern holy figure. Indian cityscapes have long made space for the celebration of ‘the sacred’ or ‘the religious’ in a wide array of forms, and public life itself is interlaced with religiosity in at least three significant ways.

First, there has been a proliferation of new temples, religious buildings and altars of various scales and genealogies. These include fixed ones such as roadside temples, vernacular shrines in market places, taxi stands, exterior walls of homes, or within the courtyards of apartment complexes. In urban Goa, wayside shrines alter the centuries-old religion of Goan Hindus and Catholics by allowing devotees to worship saints and deities outside what might have been their own parochial religious associations. On a grander spatial scale, there is also the model of ‘the religious campus’.

Appearing on his computer screen at work one night, these words, the opening lines of the text adventure game Adventure, fill Jackdaw Acquerelli ‘with a great sense of well-being. Happiness flowed in its own small stream out of [his] chest and down into his typing digits.’ A computer programmer in Richard Powers's novel Plowing the Dark, Jackdaw is not the only person to have had this response. Adventure, created originally by Will Crowther around 1975 and modified by Don Woods in 1976, invited a whole generation to enter the digitally created world of caves, mazes, puzzles, story, gameplay and participatory culture that has indelibly altered our understanding of popular fiction. When the young Jackdaw first discovered the game he perceived it as a world of ‘pure potential’. Today, the world of digital popular fiction built on that potential is vast and constantly changing, a world without clear origins, definitions, or borders, with so many paths to follow, so many disparate artefacts and practices to collect and describe, that even the most intrepid critical explorer could easily get lost. In many ways there does not yet exist a defined field that would contain a ‘digital’ version of popular fiction; both the artefacts, or new fictional forms, and the critical tools defy traditional categories, crossing media and disciplines.

On 25 February 2008 a group of student activists, accompanied by a camera crew, charged into the office of the head of the history department at Delhi University demanding that a particular text be removed from the syllabus of an undergraduate course on ancient Indian history. The activists belonged to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), part of a larger Hindu-nationalist group of organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. The text in question was A. K. Ramanujan's ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, an essay that documents the array of tellings of Valmiki's great Sanskrit epic, The Ramayana. By detailing five of these alternative Ramayanas, the essay brings to life different interpretations of characters and alternative narratives of the epic itself. Ramanujan (1929–93) was a translator, poet and scholar who for many years taught at the University of Chicago. In the essay in question, he writes with genuine reverence of how the ‘number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing’. He goes on to list the numerous languages in which the Rama story can be found, including Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai and Tibetan –

One of the standard denigrations of popular culture since the rise of its mass, industrial forms in the nineteenth century is that it debases appropriate public representations and discourse. Where we might hope for discernment, popular culture offers uncritical gorging and passive absorption. Where we might have had ambitions for informed and critical public opinion, we get instead sensation and emotional excess. The popular is something that cheapens public discourse, which mesmerises its mass audience with spectacle and threatens, as one panicked critic put it in the 1950s, ‘to engulf everything with its spreading ooze’, like something out of The Blob. This disdain is shared across the political spectrum. In the immediate post-1945 era, cultural conservatives like Evelyn Waugh saw an aristocratic cultural heritage being sacrificed for bloodless meritocracy, the world made safe ‘for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures’. A liberal like Richard Hoggart, founding professor of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, worried that authentic traditions of English proletarian culture were being destroyed by American mass culture, ‘a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements’ that had been garnered from ‘crime, science fiction and sex novelettes’. On the left, the pessimism of the Marxists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer led them to denounce the ‘culture industry’, as they witnessed it in exile in the 1940s in America, as a destruction of the critical capacities of serious art and its replacement by the mechanical repetition and indoctrinations of capitalist mass entertainment. Popular culture everywhere destroys any chance of a proper public culture.

Not long ago, in Khairlanji, a nondescript rural town in the western Indian state of Maharashtra's Bhandara district, often called the state's ‘rice bowl’, Surekha Bhotmange, a Dalit woman in a neo-Buddhist household was getting ready to cook dinner for her family. Her husband, Bhaiyalal, was due to return from the paddy field on which he toiled each day. Her three teenage children, Priyanka, Sudhir and Roshan, were studying nearby, a sight that must have been a source of daily cheer for Surekha. She herself had studied up to the ninth standard and had taken to heart Dr B. R. Ambedkar's call for the Untouchable castes to educate their children. Priyanka cycled to her college in a nearby town. The previous year she had topped her class in the tenth standard. But that evening, on 29 September 2006, Surekha and Priyanka were anxious about an unspoken horror hovering on their threshold. While they had over the years grown immune to the everyday taunts of their upper-caste neighbours, they found that they could not ignore the crescendo of threats that had descended upon them in recent days. At 6.30 p.m. their worst fears came true. A truck came to an ominous halt in front of their home and sixty-odd villagers including women, armed with cycle chains, knives, sticks and axes, got out. They rushed in to drag Surekha and her three children from their home.