Examine social consequences of changes in technology. Illustrate your answer with examples from new productive processes and equipment. (1998)
Technology enters society as a productive process, not as an isolated device, and its social consequences flow from the way that process arranges people — how it distributes skill, supervision, property and risk. Examined through successive production technologies, the effects are real and patterned, yet the same equipment yields different outcomes in different institutional settings.
From craft to assembly line: skill, solidarity and alienation
- Karl Marx argued that machinofacture inverts the relation between worker and instrument: the worker becomes an appendage of the machine, and detail labour reduces the producer to a fragment. Mechanised equipment thus generates alienation as a structural, not a psychological, condition.
- Émile Durkheim read the same change more hopefully — the specialisation that machinery permits creates interdependence and organic solidarity — but warned that when technical change outruns moral regulation the result is the anomic and forced division of labour.
- Henry Ford‘s moving assembly line (1913), built on Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s scientific management, made this concrete: pace set by the conveyor, tasks stripped to seconds, conception separated from execution. Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974) generalised this as deskilling.
- Robert Blauner (Alienation and Freedom, 1964) tested the effect across four production technologies — craft printing, machine-tending textiles, assembly-line automobiles and continuous-process chemicals — and found alienation rising to a peak on the assembly line and falling under automation, an inverted U.
- The decisive limit came from Duncan Gallie (In Search of the New Working Class, 1978), who compared British and French oil refineries running the same continuous-process technology and found sharply different attitudes and industrial relations: consequences are mediated by management style, unions and national institutions.
Flexible equipment and a divided workforce
Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel (The Second Industrial Divide, 1984) showed that programmable and numerically controlled machine tools make short, varied production runs profitable — flexible specialisation. Socially this produces a small permanent core and a large contractual periphery. India’s automobile belt illustrates it: robotic welding and computer-controlled machining in the Gurgaon–Manesar plants sit alongside a contract workforce doing identical work for a fraction of the wage, the grievance underlying the Manesar conflict of 2012. Shoshana Zuboff adds that such equipment not only automates but informates — it records the worker while replacing his effort.
Agrarian equipment: differentiation and cultural lag
The Green Revolution package of high-yielding seeds, tubewells, tractors and threshers is the clearest Indian case. It raised output and, simultaneously, class differentiation: capital-owning peasants gained, tenants were evicted, attached labour and jajmani obligations gave way to casual wage work, and Jan Breman‘s footloose labour — circulating, unprotected migrants — emerged as the new agrarian proletariat. William F. Ogburn‘s cultural lag describes the unadapted remainder: the tubewell spread far faster than any institution to govern the aquifer, so the Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment of 2025 records Punjab extracting 156% of its annually replenishable groundwater.
Conclusion
Technology sets the possibilities; social organisation selects from them. The same continuous-process plant can yield either Blauner’s re-skilled operator or Braverman’s monitored hand, and the same tubewell can mean food security or an exhausted aquifer. The sociological consequence of new equipment is therefore decided less at the point of invention than at the point of ownership and regulation.