Caste as spatial confinement: how caste-structured social capital traps urban workers in Patna’s precarious labour markets

Purpose This paper aims to investigate a theoretically underexplored mechanism through which caste structures inequality: its role in confining workers’ spatial and occupational mobility. Drawing on 76 in-depth interviews with informal-sector workers in Patna, India, this study asks: How does caste-structured social capital produce and reproduce spatial immobility as a distinct dimension of precarious work? Design/methodology/approach Reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted between July 2024 and April 2025 with workers across construction, security, housekeeping and small manufacturing in Patna, Bihar. Participants were drawn from Scheduled Caste, Other Backward Class, Scheduled Tribe and General category groups, with purposive and snowball sampling ensuring variation across caste, occupation, gender and neighbourhood. Findings Caste structures workers’ access to housing areas, neighbourhood networks and occupational clusters in ways that create a compound spatial trap. Workers from marginalised castes are excluded not only from resourceful job networks but from the urban spaces − residential areas, front-of-house roles and upward mobility pathways − that are prerequisites for escaping precarity. This spatial confinement is materially reinforced through housing gatekeeping, symbolically reproduced through occupational stigma and temporally extended through intergenerational aspiration foreclosure. Research limitations/implications The study is situated in one Indian city. Comparative work across regions and urban contexts would extend the generalisability of findings. Future research should examine how digital platforms and collective organising interact with spatial exclusion. Practical implications Urban planning, labour law enforcement and anti-discrimination policy must address spatial exclusion as a structural condition of caste-based precarity, not merely as a workplace phenomenon. Social implications Spatial confinement produces layered dignity injuries that are simultaneously personal, social and intergenerational, with effects extending far beyond the immediate workplace. Originality/value This paper makes an original contribution by theorising caste as a spatial mechanism of labour market exclusion, a dimension that existing literature on caste, precarity and social capital has not explicitly addressed. It advances a conceptual distinction between social capital as a resource deficit and social capital as a spatial regime.