“Write short note: Industrialisation and social change.” (2002, 1997)
Industrialisation is the shift from human and animal energy to machine power, and from household and craft production to factory production. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England around 1760, gave sociology its founding problem: how a society is reordered when the way it produces changes.
Classical readings
- Karl Marx: factory capitalism turns peasants and artisans into wage labourers, polarises society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, and alienates workers from product, process and one another.
- Émile Durkheim (The Division of Labour in Society, 1893): specialisation replaces mechanical with organic solidarity. When regulation lags behind, the result is an anomic or forced division of labour.
- Max Weber: industrial capitalism rests on rationalisation: calculable law, bookkeeping, bureaucracy and formally free labour, which together make profit a matter of systematic calculation.
- Ferdinand Tönnies (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887): communal ties give way to contractual, impersonal association.
Dimensions of change
- Work and occupation: home and workplace separate; occupational roles multiply and status comes to rest on achievement rather than ascription.
- Family: the household changes from a unit of production into a unit of consumption. Talcott Parsons argued that the isolated nuclear family suits a mobile labour market, and William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) saw a worldwide drift towards the conjugal family.
- Stratification: class displaces estate and caste as the main axis; trade unions and labour parties emerge.
- Culture and time: E. P. Thompson (“Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, 1967) showed how the clock, the factory bell and fines replaced task-oriented rhythms of work, and religion loses its hold over public life.
- Settlement: urbanisation, slums and the anonymity of the metropolis.
The convergence debate
Clark Kerr and colleagues (Industrialism and Industrial Man, 1960) held that a “logic of industrialism” pushes all societies towards similar structures: open mobility, a professional elite, a pluralist state. Ronald Dore (British Factory–Japanese Factory, 1973) countered that Japanese firms built lifetime employment and company paternalism on older cultural foundations, so industrial societies do not simply converge.
The Indian experience
- Partial structural shift: the urban share was only 31.16% in Census 2011, and agriculture still employed 43% of workers in PLFS 2025.
- Tradition adapts rather than dissolves: Milton Singer’s Madras industrialists kept joint families and ritual observance. Caste and kin networks still shape factory recruitment.
- Informality: Jan Breman’s “footloose labour” describes circular migrants moving between village and worksite without secure jobs. The four Labour Codes in force since 21 November 2025 extend social security for the first time to gig and platform workers.
- Costs: Walter Fernandes estimated that development projects displaced or deprived at least 21 million people between 1951 and 1990. Adivasis made up over 40 per cent of those affected by dams and mines.
Conclusion
Industrialisation reshapes work, family, class and culture everywhere, but it works through existing institutions rather than a single logic. India shows industrial growth without full proletarianisation or the end of caste and kin, which Yogendra Singh called the modernisation of tradition rather than its replacement.