A security guard standing at the gate of store in a mall greets every customer entering or exiting. He has to smile every time irrespective of his emotional state. Moreover, he cannot afford anything being sold in the store. As a sociologist how would we refer to this situation.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Alienation
Option (1) Commodification — Incorrect. Commodification occurs when things that were earlier not traded become commodities, as when labour or skills are bought and sold. The guard’s labour is indeed sold, but the question asks about his own situation: smiling against his feelings and guarding goods he can never buy. That is how the worker feels about his work, which sociology calls alienation, not the turning of labour into a commodity.
Option (2) Inhumanisation — Incorrect. This is not a sociological concept. The word suggests cruel treatment, while the guard in the case is employed and paid; what troubles him is the nature of his work.
Option (3) Proletarianisation — Incorrect. Proletarianisation is the process by which people who owned their means of livelihood, such as land or tools, lose them and must sell their labour for wages. The case does not describe how the guard became a wage worker; it describes how he experiences his work.
Option (4) Alienation — Correct. Marx called it alienation when people do not enjoy work, and see it as something they have to do only in order to survive. The guard must smile every time whatever he feels, so his own feelings are not his own at work; and he guards goods he cannot afford, so he is cut off from what is sold around him. Both parts of the case show a worker estranged from his work and its products.
Note 1: This is an application-based question. The book explains Marx’s alienation, but the case of the security guard is not in it; the answer comes from applying the concept to the case: work that brings no joy and is done only to earn a living, among goods the worker cannot buy.
Note 2: The concept in Option (3), ‘Proletarianisation’, is not in NCERT (2025-26); explained here for the benefit of the students.
NCERT (2025-26): “5.1 Images of Industrial Society … Many of the great works of sociology were written at a time when industrialisation was new and machinery was assuming great importance. Thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim associated a number of social features with industry, such as urbanisation, the loss of face-to-face relationships that were found in rural areas where people worked on their own farms or for a landlord they knew, and their substitution by anonymous professional relationships in modern factories and workplaces. Industrialisation involves a detailed division of labour. People often do not see the end result of their work because they are producing only one small part of a product. The work is often repetitive and exhausting. Yet, even this is better than having no work at all, i.e., being unemployed. Marx called this situation alienation, when people do not enjoy work, and see it as something they have to do only in order to survive, and even that survival depends on whether the technology has room for any human labour.” “Commoditisation and Consumption … The growth of capitalism around the world has meant the extension of markets into places and spheres of life that were previously untouched by this system. Commodification occurs when things that were earlier not traded in the market become commodities. For instance, labour or skills become things that can be bought and sold.…” |