Read the passage given below and answer the question.
Thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim associated a number of social features with industry, such as urbanisation, loss of face-to-face relationships that are found in rural areas. This was substituted by anonymous professional relationships in modern factory and workplace. Industrialisation involves a detailed division of labour people often do not see the end result of their work because they are producing only small part of product the work is often repetitive and exhausting, however it is better than being unemployed. Marx calls this situation alienation where people do not enjoy work and see it as something they have to do in order to survive.
Increasing industry production of goods occurs due to:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → division of labour
Option (1) division of labour — Correct. Industrialisation involves a detailed division of labour: the work of making a product is broken into small tasks, and each worker does only one of them. Doing one task over and over makes the worker fast at it, so the factory as a whole turns out far more goods. Scientific management and the assembly line took this further: work was broken down into its smallest repetitive elements, divided between workers, and production was speeded up.
Note: The paragraph on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’, which shows how output was increased by breaking work into small repetitive tasks divided between workers, in the section ‘How is work carried out?’ of the chapter ‘Change and Development in Industrial Society’, was there in the pre-rationalised NCERT, the textbook of 2022. This portion has been deleted from the NCERT book (2025-26), though the chapter is still there.
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.” NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “5.4 How is Work Carried Out? … Another way of increasing output is by organising work. An American called Frederick Winslow Taylor invented a new system in the 1890s, which he called ‘Scientific Management’. It is also known as Taylorism or industrial engineering. Under his system, all work was broken down into its smallest repetitive elements, and divided between workers. Workers were timed with the help of stopwatches and had to fulfil a certain target every day. Production was further speeded up by the introduction of the assembly line.…” |