In an automobile company, worker A is making seat of a car, worker B is making tyres of a car, worker C is making body of a car, worker D is painting the car. What would you call this process?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Assembly
Option (1) Rationalisation — Incorrect. Rationalisation, in the sense of the sociologist Max Weber, is the broad trend of modern society to organise life and work by calculation, efficiency and fixed rules instead of tradition. It is a general direction of change, not the name of this way of building a car.
Option (2) Bureaucratisation — Incorrect. Bureaucratisation is the running of an organisation through a hierarchy of offices and written rules, as in a government department. The case is about how the work of making a car is divided on the factory floor, not about offices.
Option (3) Privatisation — Incorrect. Privatisation is the transfer of ownership of an enterprise from the government to private hands. Nothing in the case concerns who owns the company.
Option (4) Assembly — Correct. Industrialisation involves a detailed division of labour: people produce only one small part of a product and often do not see the end result of their work. On an assembly line, each worker sits along a conveyor belt and assembles only one part of the final product, just as workers A, B, C and D each make one part of the car; at Maruti Udyog, two cars roll off the assembly line every minute.
Note 1: The paragraph on F.W. Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’ and the assembly line, on which each worker assembled only one part of the final product, in the chapter ‘Change and Development in Industrial Society’, was there in the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2023. This portion has been deleted from the NCERT book (2025-26), though the chapter and its lines on the division of labour and the assembly line at Maruti Udyog are still there.
Note 2: The concept in Option (1), ‘Rationalisation’, is not in NCERT (2025-26); explained here for the benefit of the students.
NCERT (2025-26): “5.1 Images of Industrial Society … 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.…” “5.4 How is work carried out? … The more mechanised an industry gets, the fewer people are employed, but they too have to work at the pace of the machine. In Maruti Udyog Ltd., two cars roll off the assembly line every minute.…” 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. Each worker sat along a conveyor belt and assembled only one part of the final product. The speed of work could be set by adjusting the speed of the conveyor belt. In the 1980s, there was an attempt to shift from this system of direct control to indirect control, where workers are supposed to motivate and monitor themselves. But often we find that the old Taylorist processes survive.…” |