Change and Development in Industrial Society — Class 12 Sociology

Work and the kind of jobs people do are an important part of who they are, and social institutions like caste, kinship, gender and region shape how work is organised. Classical sociologists — Marx, Weber and Durkheim — linked industry to urbanisation, the replacement of face-to-face relations by anonymous professional ones, a detailed division of labour, and what Marx called alienation, when workers find no satisfaction in repetitive work. Indian industrialisation differs from the western model: a very large share of the workforce is still in agriculture, most workers are self-employed or in casual labour rather than regular salaried jobs, and over ninety per cent of work is in the unorganised or informal sector, where personal relationships and insecurity prevail and unions are weak. Liberalisation since the 1990s has brought foreign investment, the buying-over of Indian firms, disinvestment of public-sector companies, and a rise of outsourcing and contract labour, increasing insecurity and income inequality. The chapter examines how people find jobs (largely through personal contacts and contractors), how work is carried out (managers seek to extract more work through longer hours or faster output and mechanisation, as in Maruti or the Taylorist IT sector), and working conditions in mining and migrant-employing industries. It also covers home-based work such as bidi-rolling done mainly by women and children, and the role of strikes and trade unions, illustrated by the Bombay Textile Strike of 1982.