The journey
A decade of the argument.
Read forward, the corpus tells a story. It begins with a question about what markets are for, turns toward the people markets forget, finds its thesis in dignity, sharpens its philosophical instruments, tests them in the field, and finally reaches the national stage. Six phases, one continuous argument.
2013 – 2015
Foundations in well-being
The work opens not with markets but with the question of what markets are for. A series of systematic reviews maps the terrain of quality-of-life research in marketing, establishing well-being — rather than sales or share — as the outcome worth measuring.
It is a quiet but consequential starting point: it fixes the moral compass that every later paper will follow.
- A systematic literature review of quality of life research in marketing (2014–2015)
- Quality of life research in marketing: cultural variability and nomology (2013)
2015 – 2017
The turn to the margins
The lens turns to India's margins. Studying commercial surrogacy and the making of markets in a fast-liberalising economy, Jagadale begins building the critical voice that becomes his signature.
Here the surrogate mother enters the work — not as a case study in an emerging industry, but as a figure whose labour the market is arranged to render invisible.
- Externalizing pain: the rise of the commercial surrogacy system in India (2017)
- Institutionalizing subalternization: a case of commercial surrogacy (2016)
2018
Marketing systems of dignity
The flagship paper arrives and reorganises everything around it. 'Tackling the subaltern quandary: marketing systems of dignity' reframes the market itself as a possible system of dignity — the thesis that gives the whole body of work its spine.
It remains his most-cited paper, and the clearest statement of what he stands for.
- Tackling the subaltern quandary: marketing systems of dignity (2018)
2021
A distinctive voice
The analysis matures into something unmistakably his own. He shows how ordinary markets — an exclusive gated community, the very experience of time under poverty — quietly manufacture exclusion and shape what people are allowed to hope for.
This is the period in which his method becomes a signature: the ability to look at a familiar marketplace and reveal the moral machinery inside it.
- Normalized heterotopia as a market failure (2021)
- Quality-of-life as chronotopefication and futurization (2021)
2022
Justice in the field
Theory meets fieldwork. Working alongside rag-picking women, subsistence prosumers, and clean-fuel policy, the work studies justice where it is actually lived and negotiated — in waste centres, kitchens, and markets.
The photographs from this period are not illustrations; they are the research itself.
- Constructively engaging exploitive waste management (2022)
- Exploring unheard voices: interviewing women prosumers (2022)
- ‘Give It Up!’: clean cooking fuel access (2022)
2024 – 2025
Public impact & recognition
The argument leaves the journal. His reading of stubble burning as a marketing-system failure — not farmer defiance — carries into the national press, and his sustained contribution to the field earns the Macromarketing Society's Mittelstaedt Award.
It is the moment the work moves from the seminar room into public debate about how India governs its markets.
- Governmentality and marketing system failure: stubble burning (2025)
- Autoethnography as pedagogical strategy (2024)
Beyond the page
A development practitioner
Jagadale's ideas were not formed at a desk. Alongside his scholarship, he has worked as a development practitioner in some of the hardest terrain for markets to serve — from Bundelkhand, one of India's most drought-scarred and impoverished regions, to Cameroon, where he worked alongside government and development partners on the ground. In Bundelkhand he engaged directly with agrarian communities living at the edge of subsistence, where failing water, credit, and crop markets translate into daily precarity. In Cameroon he carried the same questions into an entirely different context, learning how development interventions succeed or fail depending on whether they honour the people they mean to help. This practitioner's grounding is what lends his research its unusual authority: he has sat with the communities his papers describe, watched markets fail them in real time, and tested — in practice, not only in theory — what it takes to build exchange around dignity.
Every phase above is documented in the full published record.