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Chapter 6: Globalisation and Social Change

It is an ordinary Sunday evening in a district town in India. In one small flat, a family sits down to eat. The pressure cooker on the stove was made in a factory a few hundred kilometres away, but the steel in it may have travelled much further. The television in the corner is playing a serial dubbed into the local language, made by a channel whose head office is in another country. The mother is checking a message on a phone that was designed in one place, assembled in another, and sold here at a price fixed by competition between firms in several continents.

The father’s work has changed too. The small unit where he worked for years shut down when cheaper goods began arriving from abroad. His nephew, on the other hand, has just found a job in a call centre in a nearby city, working through the night while customers in a distant country begin their morning.

Nothing in this room looks dramatic. There is no factory closing on the news, no ship arriving at a port. Yet almost everything on that table — the work, the food, the phone, the programme on the screen — connects this family to decisions taken far away, by people they will never meet.

Sociology asks the obvious question that nobody in the room is asking. How did the world get inside this house?

Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.1 – Everyday household objects and their global connections.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Is India’s connection with the rest of the world something new, or did it exist long before the word ‘globalisation’ was invented? Q2. What exactly did the Indian state change in 1991, and why is liberalisation not simply another word for globalisation? Q3. How can one and the same policy create a new job for one person and destroy another person’s livelihood? Q4. Why do foreign television channels speak in Indian languages, and why do global food chains change their menus in India? Q5. If people everywhere begin to watch, wear and eat similar things, will all cultures slowly become one culture?

Keep these questions in mind as you read. By the end of this chapter you will be able to answer each of them in the language of sociology.

6.1 Globalisation and the Sociological Imagination

No discussion of social change in the twenty-first century can go very far without the word globalisation. In its ordinary working sense, globalisation means the growing interconnection between people, regions and countries — the fact that what happens far away increasingly shapes what happens here. It is a word you have already met more than once in this book.

You met it in the chapter on rural society, where the opening of agriculture to world markets changed what farmers grew and what they earned. You met it again in the chapter on industrial society, when the Indian government’s policy of liberalisation — the set of decisions taken since 1991 to open the Indian economy to the world market — was seen to reshape Indian industry. It appeared once more in the discussion of visions for global cities, where a city’s future was imagined in relation to other cities of the world rather than to its own hinterland.

The word also travels far beyond your school books. It is in the newspaper headline about a global city of tomorrow, in the television debate about foreign investment, in the shopkeeper’s remark that his customers now ask for a brand he had never heard of ten years ago.

For two weeks, read a newspaper regularly and note down every context in which the word ‘globalisation’ is used. Then do the same for television — news, business discussions, cultural programmes — noting down where ‘global’ and ‘globalisation’ appear. Compare your notes with those of your classmates. You will find the same word used to mean rather different things by different speakers. This would also make a good class project on how a single term is used in public debate.

One Word, Many Meanings

The fact that a word is used everywhere does not mean that it is used precisely. Before we can study globalisation, we must be clear about what it is we are studying. That is what this chapter sets out to do: to understand the meaning of globalisation, its different dimensions, and its social consequences.

This does not mean that there is only one correct definition of globalisation, or only one way of understanding it. Different academic disciplines look at the same process through different windows. Economics is likely to concentrate on economic dimensions such as the movement of capital across borders. Political science is likely to ask how the role of governments is changing when so many decisions are taken outside the country.

Yet the process is so far-reaching that no discipline can now afford to stay within its own boundaries. To explain both the causes and the consequences of globalisation, disciplines have to borrow from one another. An economist studying imported yarn will sooner or later have to ask who the spinners were and what happened to their households; a sociologist studying those households will have to understand the trade rules that let the yarn in.

Seeing the Global in the Local

What, then, does sociology bring to the table? Its distinctive contribution is the sociological imagination — the ability to see the connection between the individual and society, between the micro and the macro, between the local and the global.

NoteDefinition

The sociological imagination, a term coined by C. Wright Mills, is the capacity to link personal experience — a job lost, a marriage arranged, a phone bought — to the wider social structures and historical processes that shape it, and to see private troubles as public issues.

Used on globalisation, this imagination generates a whole series of questions. How is a peasant in a remote village affected by decisions taken in distant capitals, and how exactly is she connected to them? How have the chances of employment for the middle class changed? What are the possibilities for big Indian companies of growing into corporations that operate across many countries? What does it mean for the neighbourhood grocer if the retail trade is opened up to giant firms from abroad? Why are there so many shopping malls in our cities and towns today? How has the way young people spend their leisure time changed?

These are only a few examples. Once you begin to ask such questions, you will find many more instances in which developments elsewhere in the world are reshaping people’s lives here — and therefore reshaping the way sociology has to study society.

Q. If globalisation is about the whole world, why does sociology keep talking about a single household or a single village?

A. Because that is where the global becomes visible. A trade rule is an abstraction until you can see it in a shut-down workshop, a new call centre job, or a fruit stall stocked with fruit from three continents. Sociology studies the large process by studying the small places in which it lands.

When the Market Opens

Consider one concrete policy change. Independent India had for decades restricted how much of various goods could be brought into the country. These were quantitative restrictions — limits on the quantity of imports, used to shelter Indian producers from foreign competition. Since 1 April 2001, all types of quantitative restrictions (QR) on imports were withdrawn.

The result is visible in the most ordinary places. It is no surprise now to find a Chinese pear and an Australian apple competing for attention at the local fruit stall. The neighbourhood store stocks Australian orange juice and ready-to-fry chips in frozen packets. Slowly, what we eat and drink at home with family and friends changes.

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.2 – Local and imported goods side by side in a neighbourhood stall.

Now look at the same change from two sides of the counter. For an urban, affluent consumer, the withdrawal of restrictions means greater choice and often lower prices. For a farmer whose crop must now compete with produce grown in another country, the same decision may mean a crisis of livelihood. One set of policies; two entirely different experiences.

Notice what has just happened to the boundary between the personal and the public. What appears on a family’s plate looks like a private matter of taste and budget. It is in fact linked to public policies adopted by the government and to its agreements with the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In the same way, macro policy changes explain why a household that once had a single television channel now has scores of them. The dramatic changes in the media are perhaps the most visible effect of globalisation, and the next chapter is devoted to them.

These are random examples, but they help you appreciate the close interconnection between your personal life and the apparently remote policies of globalisation. The sociological imagination is precisely what makes that connection between the micro and the macro, the personal and the public.

Society Can No Longer Be Studied as an Island

There is a methodological consequence here, and it is a serious one. The sociologist or social anthropologist can no longer study a society as though it were an isolated entity, complete in itself. The compression of space and time — the shrinking of the distance and the delay that once separated places, so that events far away are felt almost at once — has put an end to that.

Villages, families, movements, child-rearing practices, work and leisure, bureaucratic organisations, castes: all of these must now be studied with global interconnection taken into account. A study of a farming household that ignores the impact of WTO rules on agriculture — and therefore on the farmer — is an incomplete study.

Who Gains and Who Loses

The effect of globalisation is far-reaching. It affects us all, but it does not affect us all in the same way. For some it means new opportunities; for others, the loss of a livelihood.

The examples are not hard to find. Women silk spinners and twisters in Bihar lost their work once Chinese and Korean silk yarn entered the market; weavers and consumers preferred the imported yarn because it was somewhat cheaper and had a shine. Similar displacement followed the entry of large fishing vessels into Indian waters: these vessels take away fish that were earlier caught by Indian fishing vessels, and the livelihoods of women fish sorters, dryers, vendors and net makers are affected as a result. In Gujarat, women gum collectors who picked gum from the julifera (Baval trees) lost their employment when cheaper gum began to be imported from Sudan. In almost all cities of India, rag pickers lost part of their earnings because waste paper was imported from developed countries. Later in this chapter you will see how traditional entertainers were affected.

Read that list again with the sociological imagination switched on. In each case, a decision about trade — taken in an office, recorded in an agreement — travels down to a specific set of hands: hands that spun, sorted, picked or collected. And in each case, those hands belonged mostly to women working in the least protected parts of the economy.

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 6.3 – The impact of import relaxation on local spinners.

uneven impact of a single change A small grocery shop has stood at the corner of a town street for thirty years. The owner knows every customer by name and extends credit until the end of the month. A large chain store opens two streets away, buying in bulk from suppliers across the country and abroad, and selling at prices he cannot match. Shoppers are delighted: the new store is bright, air-conditioned and cheap. Within a year, his sales have halved. Nothing illegal or unusual has happened; a policy has simply changed who can compete. This demonstrates the uneven impact of globalisation — the same change experienced as opportunity by some and as loss by others.

Q3. How can one and the same policy create a new job for one person and destroy another person’s livelihood?

A. Because a single policy does not meet a single, uniform society. It meets a society already divided by class, gender, region and skill. Opening imports gives a consumer with money more choice, and gives a trader with capital a new market; the same opening exposes a spinner, a gum collector or a small farmer, who has neither capital nor an alternative occupation, to competition she cannot survive. The policy is one; the social positions on which it lands are many.

Sharply Divided Views

It should now be obvious that globalisation is of great social significance. It should be equally obvious why views about it are sharply divided. When a process helps some people and hurts others, people will disagree about what it is worth.

Is globalisation to be welcomed? View 1: Globalisation is necessary, and it heralds a better world. Its strongest evidence is expansion — new products, new industries, new careers, new links between societies, and opportunities that simply did not exist a generation ago. View 2: Globalisation affects different sections of people very differently. Its strongest evidence is displacement — while many in the more privileged sections benefit, the condition of a large section of the already excluded population worsens. What both agree on: that globalisation is producing real and far-reaching social change, and that its consequences are not distributed equally.

There is also a third argument, and it is a sceptical one: that globalisation is not a new development at all, and that the world has been interconnected for a very long time. If that is true, the whole debate needs restating.

The next two sections take up exactly these issues. First we ask what kind of global interconnections India has had in the past. Then we ask whether globalisation today has distinctive features of its own — and, if it does, what they are.

6.2 Are Global Interconnections New to World and to India

If globalisation is about global interconnections, then a sceptic is entitled to ask an awkward question. Is such interconnection really new? Were India and the different parts of the world not interacting with one another in earlier times?

The question matters. If people, goods and ideas have always crossed borders, then perhaps globalisation is only a fashionable name for something very old.

The Early Years

India was not isolated from the world even two thousand years ago. From your history textbooks you already know the famous Silk route, which centuries ago connected India to the great civilisations that existed in China, Persia, Egypt and Rome. Silk, spices, metals and ideas moved along it, and so did people.

Fig. 6.4

Fig. 6.4 – The ancient Silk route linking India to the world.

Movement was not only outward. Throughout India’s long past, people from different parts of the world came here — sometimes as traders, sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as migrants in search of new lands — and settled down. Migration, the movement of people from one place to another to live and work, is not an invention of our times.

Its traces survive in memory. In remote Indian villages, people often ‘recall’ a time when their ancestors lived elsewhere, and can name the place from which they came before settling where they now live. A village that looks entirely rooted in its own soil often turns out, in its own telling, to be the result of a journey.

The economist Amartya Sen has argued that India’s intellectual history is itself a record of such openness. He points out that Panini, the greatest of Sanskrit grammarians, who systematised and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin; and that the seventh-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned his Sanskrit in Java, in the city of Shri Vijaya, while travelling from China to India. The influence of such interactions is reflected in languages and vocabularies across Asia — from Thailand to Malaya to Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. Sen also draws attention to a warning against isolationism that recurs in several old Sanskrit texts: the parable of the kupamanduka, the well-frog. The well-frog lives its whole life inside a well, knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it. It talks to no one and argues with no one, and merely harbours the deepest suspicion of the outside world. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world, Sen suggests, would have been very limited indeed had we lived like well-frogs. (Sen 2005: 84–86)

Global interactions, and even a global outlook, are therefore not novel developments unique to the modern period, or unique to modern India.

Look at what is on your kitchen shelf. Find out where the potato, the chilli, the tomato and tea originally came from, and roughly when they reached India. Then ask an elder in your neighbourhood which everyday foods they think are ‘traditional’. What does the exercise tell you about how quickly a foreign thing becomes a local one?

Colonialism and the Global Connection

Our story of social and economic development in modern India began with the colonial period, and for good reason. You will recall from the chapter on structural change that modern capitalism — an economic system based on private ownership, wage labour and production for profit — had a global dimension from its very inception.

Colonialism was part of the system that sustained it. Expanding capitalism required new sources of capital, new raw materials, new sources of energy, new markets, and a global network to tie them together; colonial rule supplied all of these. The connection between Britain and India was not a friendly exchange between equals. It was a structured relationship in which one economy was reorganised to serve another.

Globalisation today often identifies the large-scale movement of people as one of its defining features. Yet the greatest movement of people in modern history was, arguably, the migration of Europeans who settled in the Americas and in Australia.

Nor was all movement voluntary — and this is the point that the cheerful language of ‘global mobility’ tends to hide. You will remember how indentured labourers were taken away in ships from India, bound by long contracts, to work in distant parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas. And the slave trade carted thousands of Africans away to distant shores. Movement across the world, then, has been driven as much by force and need as by opportunity.

describing people who were moved When we study migration, the words we choose matter. A worker taken across an ocean under an indenture contract was not simply ‘mobile’, and an enslaved person was not a ‘migrant’ in any ordinary sense. Sociology insists on naming the compulsion behind a movement, because a description that hides coercion also hides who benefited from it.

Independent India and the World

Independent India did not turn its back on the world. It retained a global outlook, and in many senses this was inherited from the Indian nationalist movement, whose vision included a commitment to liberation struggles throughout the world and solidarity with people from different parts of it.

That outlook had practical expression. Many Indians travelled overseas for education and for work, and migration remained an ongoing process. The export and import of raw material, goods and technology was very much a part of the country’s development after independence. Foreign firms did operate in India.

Fig. 6.5

Fig. 6.5 – Timeline of India’s historical global connections.

So the sceptic’s question has some force behind it. Interconnection is old; migration is old; trade in goods and technology is old; even foreign firms operating on Indian soil are not new. We are therefore obliged to ask ourselves honestly whether the current process of change is radically different from anything we have seen in the past.

Is globalisation really a new phenomenon? View 1: It is not new. Its strongest evidence is history — the Silk route, the movement of traders and migrants across the ancient world, the global reach of colonial capitalism, the forced movement of indentured and enslaved workers, and the trade and foreign firms of the post-independence decades. View 2: It is new in a decisive sense. Its strongest evidence lies in the scale, speed and intensity of today’s connections, and in the changes in production, communication, finance and culture that come with them — the argument taken up in the next section. What both agree on: that global interconnection as such is not an invention of our lifetime, and that any claim about novelty must be argued rather than assumed.

Q1. Is India’s connection with the rest of the world something new, or did it exist long before the word ‘globalisation’ was invented?

A. It existed long before. Two thousand years ago the Silk route already linked India to China, Persia, Egypt and Rome, and people arrived here as traders, conquerors and migrants and stayed. Under colonial rule, India was tied into a worldwide capitalist system, and its people were carried across oceans as indentured labour. Independent India kept a global outlook, traded, and hosted foreign firms. What is genuinely new about our own times is therefore not interconnection itself, but the form it now takes — and that is what we examine next.

Q. If the well-frog stands for a closed mind, does that mean sociology should simply welcome every global influence?

A. No. The parable warns against suspicion of the outside world, not against judgement of it. A discipline that examines who gains and who loses from a change is doing the opposite of living in a well; it is looking carefully at the world it has been let into.

6.3 Understanding Globalisation

We have seen that India had significant links with the wider world from very early times. We also know that western capitalism, as it emerged in Europe, was both built upon and maintained by global control over the resources of other countries — most obviously through colonialism. So far, the sceptic seems to be winning.

But the important question is a sharper one. Is globalisation only about global interconnections? Or is it about significant changes in the capitalist system itself — in production and communication, in the organisation of labour and capital, in technological innovation and cultural experience, in ways of governance, and in the character of social movements?

If it is the second, then globalisation is not simply more of an old thing. It is a change in the kind of thing it is.

Why ‘More Contact’ Is Not Enough

These changes are significant even though some of the patterns were already evident in the early stages of capitalism. A merchant in the seventeenth century traded across oceans; so does a firm today. But the merchant waited months for news of his own cargo. Today a fund manager moves money between continents in the time it takes to read this sentence.

Some of the changes — above all those flowing from the communication revolution, the transformation brought about by satellites, computers, the Internet and mobile telephony — have in countless ways transformed the way we work and live. They have changed not only how much contact there is, but how quickly it happens, how far it reaches, and how deeply it enters daily life.

This is why a simple definition of ‘global interconnection’ will not do. It does not capture the intensity and the complexity of what is going on. As you work through the distinctive features set out in the sections that follow, you will see why.

global interconnection vs globalisation Global interconnection means that places are in contact — through trade, travel, conquest or migration — and this is ancient. Globalisation means that social and economic relationships have stretched worldwide so thoroughly that distant people and places have become interdependent: what happens in one is felt, and quickly, in the other.

A Working Definition

We can now state what sociology means by the term.

NoteDefinition

Globalisation refers to the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries in the world, as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide.

Read that definition carefully, because two of its implications are easily missed.

First, economic forces are an integral part of globalisation, but it would be wrong to suggest that they alone produce it. Trade and investment are not the whole story. Globalisation has been driven forward above all by the development of information and communication technologies, which have intensified the speed and the scope of interaction between people all over the world. A trade agreement can open a border; only a satellite link can put a customer in one country and a call-centre worker in another into the same conversation at two o’clock in the morning.

Second, globalisation did not simply happen. There was a political context within which it grew — a set of political changes and choices that made these economic and technological developments possible, and gave them the particular shape they now have. We return to that context when we look at political changes.

Q. If interconnection is old, what exactly is new?

A. The intensity. Relationships now stretch worldwide as a matter of routine, not as an adventure. Capital, information, images and jobs move at speeds and volumes that have no precedent, and they reach into ordinary households — into what people eat, watch, wear, and do for a living — rather than remaining the business of merchants and rulers.

The Different Dimensions of Globalisation

To make the discussion manageable, we deal with the economic, the political and the cultural aspects of globalisation separately, taking each in turn in the sections that follow.

This separation is a convenience, not a claim about reality. You will soon realise how closely connected and interconnected these dimensions are. The economic opening of a market brings foreign television channels; those channels carry advertisements; the advertisements shape what people want to buy; what people want to buy alters what is produced and who is employed to produce it. Pull one thread, and the others move.

Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.6 – The interconnected dimensions of globalisation.

6.4 The Different Dimensions of Globalisation: The Economic

In India we often use the terms liberalisation and globalisation as though they were the same thing. They are indeed related, but they are not the same. Keeping them apart is the first step to understanding the economic dimension of globalisation.

Globalisation, as we have defined it, involves a stretching of social and economic relationships throughout the world. That stretching does not happen by itself. It is pushed along by certain economic policies. In India, this set of policies is very broadly termed liberalisation, and it dates from a decision taken by the state in 1991.

The Economic Policy of Liberalisation

Liberalisation refers to the range of policy decisions that the Indian state has taken since 1991 to open up the Indian economy to the world market.

NoteDefinition

Liberalisation is the set of policy decisions taken by the Indian state since 1991 to open the Indian economy to the world market, by steadily removing the rules that regulated Indian trade and finance.

This marked a break with the government’s earlier stated policy of exercising greater control over the economy. After independence, the state had put in place a large number of laws which ensured that the Indian market and Indian indigenous business were protected from the competition of the wider world.

The reasoning behind that protection deserves to be understood rather than dismissed. The underlying assumption was that a country only recently released from colonial rule, with weak industry and little capital, would be at a disadvantage in a free market situation. A young firm competing against an established foreign giant does not lose because it is inefficient; it loses because it started later and started smaller.

why an open market was distrusted In the standard Western account, a free market rewards efficiency and punishes waste. The Indian experience of the market, however, had been the colonial one: an open economy in which Indian producers competed with the industry of the ruling power on terms they had not set. Independent India therefore built its economic policy on the opposite assumption — that a former colony must first be sheltered before it can compete. Whether that shelter protected Indian industry or made it complacent has been argued about ever since; what the Indian case shows is that the same market can look like opportunity from one history and like danger from another.

What liberalisation actually changed

Liberalisation of the economy meant the steady removal of the rules that regulated Indian trade and finance. These measures are also described as economic reforms.

What are these reforms? Since July 1991, the Indian economy has witnessed a series of reforms in all the major sectors of the economy — agriculture, industry, trade, foreign investment and technology, the public sector, financial institutions, and others. The basic assumption of these reforms was that greater integration into the global market would be beneficial to the Indian economy.

the economic reforms from July 1991 From July 1991 the Indian state began a series of reforms across all major sectors of the economy — agriculture, industry, trade, foreign investment and technology, the public sector and financial institutions. Together they reversed a long-standing policy of shielding Indian business from foreign competition, on the assumption that closer integration with the world market would benefit the Indian economy. They are the concrete policy machinery through which globalisation entered Indian economic life.

Fig. 6.7

Fig. 6.7 – The process of economic liberalisation in India.

Loans, conditions and structural adjustment

The process of liberalisation also involved taking loans from international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Such loans are not given unconditionally. In return, the government makes commitments to pursue certain kinds of economic measures, which involve a policy of structural adjustment.

Here is where a sociologist begins to pay close attention. Structural adjustment usually means cuts in state expenditure on the social sector — on health, on education, on social security. A cut in a budget line is an economic fact; a village school without a teacher and a hospital without medicines are social facts. The two are the same event seen at different distances.

Alongside this, there is a greater say by international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in decisions that were once taken nationally.

Liberalisation vs Globalisation | Feature | Liberalisation | Globalisation | |—|—|—| | What it is | A set of policy decisions | A wider social and economic process | | Who brings it about | The state of a particular country — in our case, the Indian state | Many actors together: states, corporations, technologies, markets, media | | Scope | National: it changes the rules within one country | Worldwide: social and economic relationships stretch across the globe | | Beginning | In India, from 1991 | Long-running, but sharply intensified in recent decades | | Relationship between them | One of the economic policies that push globalisation forward | The larger process that such policies help to produce |

Q2. What exactly did the Indian state change in 1991, and why is liberalisation not simply another word for globalisation?

A. From July 1991 the state began steadily removing the rules that had regulated Indian trade and finance and had protected Indian business from foreign competition, and it opened all major sectors — agriculture, industry, trade, foreign investment, the public sector, financial institutions — to the world market. Liberalisation is thus a policy, chosen by a particular government at a particular time. Globalisation is the much wider process of worldwide interdependence that such policies help along, but which no single government controls.

The Transnational Corporations

Among the many economic factors driving globalisation, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) is particularly important.

NoteDefinition

Transnational corporations are companies that produce goods or market services in more than one country.

They vary enormously in size. A TNC may be a relatively small firm with one or two factories outside the country in which it is based. It may equally be a gigantic international enterprise whose operations criss-cross the globe. Some of the biggest such companies are known all around the world: Coca Cola, General Motors, Colgate-Palmolive, Kodak, Mitsubishi and many others.

What defines them is not their address but their orientation. They are oriented to global markets and global profits, even when they have a clear national base. Some Indian corporations, too, are becoming transnational. What this trend may mean for the people of India as a whole is not something we can be sure about at this point of time.

Make a list of products that you use, or have seen in the market, or have seen advertised, which are produced by transnational corporations — shoes, cameras, computers, televisions, cars, music systems, cosmetics such as soaps or shampoos, clothes, processed food, tea, coffee, milk powder. For each one, try to find out where the company is based and where the product is actually made.

The Electronic Economy

The electronic economy is another factor that underpins economic globalisation. Banks, corporations, fund managers and individual investors are able to shift funds internationally with the click of a mouse.

This new ability to move ‘electronic money’ instantaneously carries great risks with it. In India, this is often discussed with reference to rising stock markets — and to sudden dips, when foreign investors buy stocks, make a profit and then sell them off. A market can be lifted, and dropped, by decisions taken by people who have never set foot in the country whose companies they are trading in.

Such transactions can happen only because of the communication revolution, which we discuss later in this chapter.

Q. How can money moving on a screen be a sociological problem?

A. Because the money does not stay on the screen. When investors withdraw suddenly, share prices fall, firms postpone hiring, contracts are cancelled and workers are let go. The person who loses a job in a small supplier firm has never bought a share in his life, yet his household budget has just been rearranged by a transaction that took a fraction of a second.

The Weightless Economy or Knowledge Economy

In contrast to previous eras, the global economy is no longer primarily agricultural or industrial in its basis.

The weightless economy is one in which products have their base in information — as is the case with computer software, media and entertainment products, and internet-based services. Nothing is mined, grown or carried; and yet a great deal is bought and sold.

The knowledge economy is one in which much of the workforce is involved not in the physical production or distribution of material goods, but in their design, development, technology, marketing, sale and servicing. It can range from the neighbourhood catering service to large organisations that provide a host of services for professional meets like conferences and for family events like weddings.

The result is a whole set of new occupations that were unheard of a few decades ago — the event manager, for instance. Have you heard of them? What exactly do they do?

Find out what an event manager actually does in a working week, and then list five other services that exist in your town today but did not exist when your parents were your age. Ask what skill each of them sells. This would make a good short project on the growth of the knowledge economy in a small town.

work in the knowledge economy A young woman finishes her degree in a district town and does not look for a factory job or a government post, as her father did. She learns to design websites, and works from a rented room for clients she has never met, in cities she has never visited. She is paid for what she knows and for what she can make appear on a screen; nothing she produces can be weighed or stacked. Her earnings are good, but there is no contract, no provident fund and no guarantee of work next month. This demonstrates both the opportunity and the insecurity of the knowledge economy.

The Globalisation of Finance

It should also be noted that, for the first time, and mainly due to the information technology revolution, there has been a globalisation of finance.

Globally integrated financial markets undertake transactions worth billions of dollars within seconds in electronic circuits. There is 24-hour trading in capital and security markets: as one market closes, another opens, so that money is never asleep. Cities such as New York, Tokyo and London are the key centres for financial trading. Within India, Mumbai is known as the financial capital of the country.

Fig. 6.8

Fig. 6.8 – The 24-hour cycle of global financial trading.

Count how many television channels are business channels, giving updates on stock markets, flows of foreign direct investment and financial reports of companies; you may choose an Indian language channel or English channels. Find out the names of some financial newspapers. Do they focus on global trends? Discuss in class how you think these trends have affected our lives.

6.5 Global Communications

Important advances in technology, and in the world’s telecommunications infrastructure, have led to revolutionary changes in global communication. Some homes and many offices now have multiple links to the outside world: telephones, both landlines and mobiles, fax machines, digital and cable television, electronic mail and the Internet.

Read that sentence again and notice the two small words that carry the sociology: some homes, many offices. Some of you will be able to think of many such places around you. Some of you will not.

The Digital Divide

That difference is what is often termed the digital divide in our country.

NoteDefinition

The digital divide is the gap between those who have access to the new information and communication technologies — computers, the Internet, reliable connectivity — and those who do not, and who are therefore cut off from the opportunities that flow through them.

The divide follows lines you already know. It runs between town and village, between rich and poor households, between the literate and those denied education. A technology that is supposed to connect everyone to everything ends up reproducing the inequalities of the society it enters.

Table 6.1 – Growth of Internet use, world and India, 1998–2000 (millions of users, with regional shares in per cent) | Year | Internet users worldwide | Share of USA and Canada | Share of Asia | India | |—|—|—|—|—| | 1998 | 70 million | 62% | 12% | — | | 2000 | 325 million | — | — | 3 million Internet subscribers; 15 million users | | Now | — | — | — | 700 million users |

Table 6.1 shows two things at once. Globally, the use of the Internet increased phenomenally in the 1990s — from 70 million users in 1998 to 325 million by 2000. But look at how those users were distributed: in 1998, the USA and Canada alone accounted for 62 per cent of the world’s Internet users, while the whole of Asia accounted for 12 per cent. India’s own numbers have since risen enormously, from 15 million users in 2000 to 700 million. (Singhal and Rogers 2001: 235)

Growth, however, is not the same as equality. According to a study in 2017–18, only one in ten households had a computer at home, and about a quarter of all homes had Internet connectivity through a mobile phone or another device. These figures indicate the digital divide that continues to prevail in the country, despite the rapid spread of computers. Cyber connectivity had largely remained an urban phenomenon, though widely accessible through cyber cafés; rural areas, with their erratic power supply, widespread illiteracy and lack of infrastructure such as telephone connections, still remain largely unconnected.

Fig. 6.9

Fig. 6.9 – The digital divide in Indian households, 2017–18.

Distance Without Delay

Despite the digital divide, these forms of technology do make possible the ‘compression’ of time and space that we met earlier. Two individuals located on opposite sides of the planet — in Bengaluru and in New York — can not only talk to each other, but also send documents and images to one another with the help of satellite technology.

Out of this grows what may be called a network and media society: a society whose work, information and relationships increasingly run along electronic networks rather than along roads.

The state has been an active participant in this. To create global interconnectedness more efficiently, the Government of India has initiated an ambitious programme in the form of ‘Digital India’, in which every exchange will incorporate digitisation, with the stated aim of transforming India into a ‘digitally empowered society’ and a ‘knowledge economy’.

Digital India Digital India is a programme of the Government of India that seeks to digitise exchanges of information, services and payments across the country. Its declared purpose is to make India a ‘digitally empowered society’ and a ‘knowledge economy’. It responds to a double problem: a country that wants to compete in a world economy running on information, and a population large parts of which are still on the wrong side of the digital divide.

This is also the infrastructure on which outsourcing rests — the practice by which a firm in one country has part of its work, such as customer service or data processing, done by workers in another. You have already seen how outsourcing operates in your earlier chapters. Without satellite links and cheap data, a customer in one continent and a worker in another could not be placed in the same conversation.

Q. If the Internet compresses space and time, why does the village down the road still feel far away?

A. Because compression works only for those who are plugged in. Time and space collapse between Bengaluru and New York, and stay stubbornly wide between a metro office and a village with an erratic power supply and no connection. Technology shortens the distances it is allowed to reach; it does not touch the rest.

The Telephone and the Family

India’s telephone story is worth telling in numbers, because the numbers make the transformation visible.

Table 6.2 – The expansion of telephone services in India, 1947–2000 | Year | Telephone facilities | Population served | |—|—|—| | 1947 | 84,000 telephone lines | 350 million | | 1980 | 2.5 million telephones; 12,000 public phones; only 3 per cent of India’s 600,000 villages had telephones | 700 million | | 1988–1998 | Villages with some telephone facility rose from 27,316 to 300,000 (half of all villages in India) | — | | 1999 | Over 25 million telephone lines across 300 cities, 4,869 towns and 310,897 villages — the ninth largest telecommunication network in the world | — | | 2000 | Some 650,000 public call offices (PCOs) | — |

Read Table 6.2 slowly. For the first three decades after Independence, telephone provision barely moved: the population doubled between 1947 and 1980, while telephones remained few and villages remained almost entirely without them. Then, in the late 1990s, a sea change occurred. Within a decade, half of all Indian villages had some kind of telephone facility, and by 2000 some 650,000 public call offices had mushroomed all over India — including in remote, rural, hilly and tribal areas — where a person could simply walk in, make a call, and pay the metered charges.

Fig. 6.10

Fig. 6.10 – A public call office (PCO) in a small town.

Why did the PCO spread so fast? A purely commercial answer is incomplete.

The emergence of PCOs satisfied a strong Indian sociocultural need — the need to keep in touch with family members. Much like train travel in India, which is so often undertaken to celebrate a marriage, visit relatives or attend a funeral, the telephone came to be seen as a way of maintaining close family ties. It is not an accident that most advertisements for telephone services show mothers talking to their sons and daughters, or grandparents talking to their grandchildren. The expansion of the telephone and the cell phone in India thus serves a strong sociocultural function for its users, in addition to a commercial one.

The Cell Phone and the Self

Cellular telephony has grown enormously, and the cell phone has become part of the self for most urban-based middle class youth. There has been a tremendous growth in the usage of cell phones, and — just as important for a sociologist — a marked change in how that use is seen.

The change in meaning is as striking as the change in numbers. In the late 1980s, cell phones were looked at with distrust, as devices misused by criminal elements. As late as 1998 they were perceived as luxury items — only the rich could own one, and it was argued that owners should therefore be taxed. By 2006, India had become the country with the fourth largest usage of cell phones. They had become so much a part of everyday life that students were ready to go on strike, and to appeal to the President of the country, when denied the use of cell phones in their colleges.

In roughly twenty years, then, the same object travelled from suspect, to luxury, to necessity, to right. Nothing changed in the instrument; everything changed in the society around it.

Is there an Internet café in your neighbourhood? Who are its users, and what kind of use do they make of the Internet? Is it for work, or is it a new form of entertainment? Note down what you observe, without asking anyone personal questions.

Organise a discussion in class on the reasons for the amazing growth of cell phone usage in India. Has it happened because of clever marketing and media campaigns — is the phone still a status symbol? Or is there a strong need for remaining ‘connected’ with friends and near and dear ones? Are parents encouraging its use in order to lessen their anxieties about where their children are? Find out the different reasons why young people feel so strongly that they need a cell phone. Then consider one more: in 2020–21, during the COVID-19 pandemic, lakhs and lakhs of children began using cell phones and attending classes online. How do you see that change sociologically — and who was left out of it?

6.6 Globalisation and Labour

Capital has become mobile. Work has therefore become movable, and workers have become insecure. That, compressed into three sentences, is what globalisation has done to labour — and this section unpacks it.

Globalisation and a New International Division of Labour

A new international division of labour has emerged, in which more and more routine manufacturing production and employment is done in Third World cities.

NoteDefinition

The new international division of labour is the arrangement by which the design, financing and marketing of goods remain concentrated in the richer countries, while the routine work of making them is shifted to countries where labour is cheaper.

You have already dealt with outsourcing in the chapter on rural society, and with contract farming in the chapter on industrial society. Here we simply take one company, Nike, to illustrate how the arrangement works.

The travels of a shoe

Nike grew enormously from its inception in the 1960s. It began as an importer of shoes: the founder, Phil Knight, imported shoes from Japan and sold them at athletics meetings. From this the company grew into a multinational enterprise — a transnational corporation. Its headquarters are in Beverton, just outside Portland, Oregon.

Now note a striking fact. Only two US factories ever made shoes for Nike. In the 1960s the shoes were made in Japan. As costs increased, production shifted to South Korea in the mid-1970s. Labour costs then grew in South Korea, so in the 1980s production widened to Thailand and Indonesia. Since the 1990s, we in India produce Nike.

Fig. 6.11

Fig. 6.11 – The movement of Nike’s production centres over time.

The logic is not hidden; it is stated openly. If labour is cheaper elsewhere, production centres will move somewhere else. The company follows the lowest cost, and the map of the world is simply the ground it walks on.

For the people who do the work, this entire process makes the labouring population very vulnerable and insecure. A job is no longer attached to a place; it is attached to a cost comparison that may be revised next year. This flexibility of labour often works in favour of the producers.

Behind the change lies a shift in the whole system of production. Instead of mass production of goods at a centralised location, which is called Fordism, we have moved to a system of flexible production at dispersed locations, which is called post-Fordism.

Fordism vs post-Fordism | Feature | Fordism | Post-Fordism | |—|—|—| | Where goods are made | Mass production at one large, centralised location | Flexible production spread across many dispersed locations | | Scale and variety | Large volumes of standardised goods | Smaller runs, quickly changed to suit shifting demand | | The workforce | Concentrated in one place, in stable, long-term employment | Scattered across countries, on flexible and often insecure terms | | Who bears the risk | Largely the firm, which is tied to its plant | Largely the worker, since the firm can shift production elsewhere | | Illustration | A single vast factory town built around one plant | A shoe designed in one country, stitched in a second, and sold in a third |

Q. If a firm can always find cheaper labour somewhere, does the worker have any power at all?

A. Less than before, and that is the point of the word ‘flexibility’. Where a plant cannot move, workers can bargain, because the employer needs them where they are. Where production can shift to another country within a year, the threat of moving is itself a bargaining weapon — and it is held by only one side.

Where the money goes

A single car makes the new division of labour visible. General Motors produces an ostensibly American car such as the Pontiac Le Mans. Of its showroom price of $20,000, only $7,600 goes to Americans — to workers and management in Detroit, lawyers and bankers in New York, lobbyists in Washington, and General Motors shareholders all over the country.

Table 6.3 – Where the rest of the $20,000 showroom price of a Pontiac Le Mans goes (per cent), Reich 1991 | Destination | Share | What it pays for | |—|—|—| | South Korea | 48 per cent | Labour and assembly | | Japan | 28 per cent | Advanced components such as engines and electronics | | Germany | 12 per cent | Styling and design engineering | | Taiwan and Singapore | 7 per cent | Small components | | United Kingdom | 4 per cent | Marketing | | Barbados or Ireland | About 1 per cent | Data processing |

Table 6.3 rewards close reading. The largest single share, 48 per cent, goes for labour and assembly — the physical making of the car — and it goes to South Korea. The tasks that carry knowledge, design and finance are distributed among the richer economies. An ‘American’ car is in fact a product of at least seven countries, and the country that supplies most of the muscle is not the country whose name the car carries. (Reich 1991)

when the order moves A small unit on the edge of a city stitches sports bags for an export buyer. For six years the orders arrive steadily, and about forty women work there. One season the buyer finds a supplier in another country who can do the same work for less, and the orders simply stop. The unit is not accused of poor work; nothing about it has changed. Within three months it closes, and the women look for work in other units that face exactly the same risk. This demonstrates the vulnerability of labour under flexible, dispersed production.

how we name workers It is common to describe such women as ‘unskilled labour’. A sociologist should hesitate. The term describes what the employer pays for, not what the worker can do, and it quietly suggests that low wages follow from low ability rather than from a weak bargaining position. Labels of this kind travel from research reports into policy, and they can harden into a judgement about people. Naming a job insecure is accurate; naming a person unskilled is a claim that needs evidence.

Globalisation and Employment

Another key issue in the relationship between globalisation and labour is employment. Here too we see the uneven impact of globalisation.

For middle class youth from urban centres, globalisation and the IT revolution have opened up new career opportunities. Instead of routinely picking up a B.Sc., B.A. or B.Com. degree from a college, many young persons now learn computer languages at computer institutes, take up jobs at call centres or at Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, work as sales persons in shopping malls, or find jobs in the many restaurants that have opened up.

Fig. 6.12

Fig. 6.12 – A call centre operating on the night shift.

This is a real gain, and it should not be dismissed. But it is the experience of one section of one class in one kind of settlement, and it is a poor guide to what is happening to employment as a whole.

An ILO report, Labour and Social Trends in Asia and the Pacific 2005, stated that the largest number of poor people lives in South Asia, with the poverty rate particularly high in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The study offered a stark analysis of a growing ‘employment gap’ in the Asia region: the creation of new jobs had failed to keep pace with the region’s impressive economic growth. Between 2003 and 2004, employment in Asia and the Pacific increased by a ‘disappointing’ 1.6 per cent — by 25 million jobs, to a total of 1.588 billion jobs — while the region’s economic growth rate was over 7 per cent. (“Job Growth Remains Disappointing – ILO”, Labour File, September–October 2005, p. 54)

Hold those two numbers together: growth of over 7 per cent, employment growth of 1.6 per cent. An economy can expand handsomely while producing very few additional jobs. This is why sociology refuses to read a growth figure as a report on people’s lives.

Has globalisation been good for employment? View 1: It has created work that did not exist before. Its strongest evidence is the new occupational world of the urban middle class — call centres and BPO firms, retail and restaurant jobs in malls, IT skills learnt outside the old degree route. View 2: It has not created enough work, and not for those who need it most. Its strongest evidence is the employment gap recorded in the ILO study, where job creation lagged far behind economic growth, in a region carrying the largest number of poor people in the world. What both agree on: that economic growth and employment growth are two different things, and that the benefits of the new economy have reached some groups far more than others.

Find out from newspapers and television what the employment situation is today in Asian countries, including India. Compare the growth rate of the economy with the growth rate of employment. What do you conclude?

6.7 Globalisation and Political Changes

It is tempting to think of globalisation as something that simply happened to the world — a natural consequence of better technology and cheaper transport. It is not. In many ways it was a major political change that hastened it.

The Political Vision Behind the Economics

The change was the collapse of the erstwhile socialist world. That collapse not only hastened globalisation; it also gave a specific economic and political approach to the policies that underpin it. These changes are often termed neo-liberal economic measures.

NoteDefinition

Neo-liberal economic measures are policies that give free rein to market forces, in the belief that the market will be both efficient and fair, and that are therefore critical of both state regulation and state subsidies.

You have already seen the concrete steps that this approach took in India, in the liberalisation policies begun in 1991. Broadly, such policies reflect a political vision of free enterprise: the conviction that markets, left to themselves, allocate resources better than governments can, and that the state’s regulations and subsidies get in the way.

That is a vision, not a law of nature. And once you see it as a vision, an important sociological point follows: the existing process of globalisation has a political vision as much as an economic one. What looks like a technical decision about tariffs or subsidies rests on a prior belief about what the state is for.

Q. Why does sociology call the removal of a subsidy a political matter rather than an economic one?

A. Because a subsidy is a decision about who is protected. Removing it does not merely ‘let the market work’; it transfers risk from the state to particular households — those who cannot pay the unsubsidised price. The choice about who carries that risk is political, whichever way it is made.

If globalisation carries a political vision, then a different vision is possible. The possibility of a globalisation which is different does exist, and this is the point of the idea of inclusive globalisation.

NoteDefinition

Inclusive globalisation is a globalisation that includes all the sections of society, rather than one whose benefits are confined to those already advantaged.

Notice what the term concedes and what it asserts. It concedes that globalisation is here; it asserts that its present shape is a choice and not a destiny.

New Levels of Political Collaboration

A second significant political development accompanying globalisation is the growth of international and regional mechanisms for political collaboration. States increasingly act together, in groupings that sit above the individual nation.

The European Union (EU), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) are only some of the examples that indicate the greater role of regional associations. Countries that once dealt with one another purely as separate sovereign units now negotiate as members of a bloc.

Two Kinds of Global Organisation

The other political dimension has been the rise of International Governmental Organisations (IGOs) and International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs).

NoteDefinition

An intergovernmental organisation is a body established by participating governments and given the responsibility for regulating or overseeing a particular domain of activity that is transnational in scope.

The World Trade Organisation, which you have met more than once in this chapter, is the clearest example. It increasingly has a major say in the rules that govern trade practices — rules which then reach, as we have seen, all the way down to a farmer’s field and a spinner’s household.

As the name suggests, INGOs differ from intergovernmental organisations in that they are not affiliated to government institutions. They are independent organisations, which make their own policy decisions and address international issues. Some of the best known INGOs are Greenpeace, whose work you will meet again in the chapter on social movements, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).

IGOs vs INGOs | Feature | International Governmental Organisations (IGOs) | International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) | |—|—|—| | Who establishes it | Participating governments | Private citizens and groups, independently of governments | | Affiliation | Affiliated to and answerable to member states | Not affiliated to government institutions | | Main function | Regulating or overseeing a domain of activity that is transnational in scope | Making their own policy decisions and taking up international issues | | Source of authority | Agreements between states, which member states are expected to follow | Public support, expertise, campaigning and moral pressure | | Examples | The World Trade Organisation | Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Medecins Sans Frontieres |

Fig. 6.13

Fig. 6.13 – The nation-state and the new global political actors.

Put the two developments together and a sociological question emerges. If trade rules are written in one forum, regional agreements in another, and campaigns run by organisations answerable to no electorate, then where exactly does a citizen go to argue about a decision that has changed her life? Globalisation has not abolished the state, but it has crowded the space in which the state used to stand alone.

Choose any one INGO — Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Medecins Sans Frontieres — and find out what it does, how it is funded, and one campaign or operation it has run. Present it to the class in five minutes, and end by asking your classmates one question: who does this organisation answer to?

6.8 Globalisation and Culture

There are many ways in which globalisation affects culture, and this is the dimension about which people in India argue most fiercely. Debates about tariffs are left to experts. Debates about clothes, music, films, language and manners are conducted by everybody.

We have already seen that over the ages India has had an open approach to cultural influences, and has been enriched because of it. The last decade, however, has seen cultural changes on a scale that has led to a fear that our local cultures will be overtaken.

That fear deserves to be taken seriously rather than mocked — and also examined. Recall the kupamanduka, the well-frog of the old Sanskrit texts, of which our own cultural tradition has been wary: the creature that knows nothing beyond its well and suspects everything outside it. Fortunately for us, we retain that ‘traditional’ open-ended attitude to this day.

So there are heated debates in our society, not only about political and economic issues, but about changes in clothes, styles, music, films, languages and even body language. You will recall from the chapters on structural and cultural change how nineteenth-century reformers and early nationalists also argued about culture and tradition. The issues today are in some ways the same, in some ways different. What is perhaps most different is the scale and the intensity of change.

Homogenisation Versus Glocalisation of Culture

A central contention is that all cultures will become similar — that is, homogeneous. On this view, the same films, the same brands, the same food and the same music are spreading everywhere, and local ways of life are being flattened into one global way of life.

Others argue that what is actually happening is an increasing tendency towards glocalisation of culture.

NoteDefinition

Glocalisation refers to the mixing of the global with the local. It is not entirely spontaneous, and it is not entirely delinked from the commercial interests of globalisation.

Read the second sentence of that definition carefully, because it is the sociological part. Glocalisation is not simply a happy meeting of two cultures. It is often a strategy adopted by foreign firms while dealing with local traditions, in order to enhance their marketability. The local is not merely respected; it is used.

The examples are all around you. In India, all the foreign television channels — Star, MTV, Channel V, Cartoon Network — use Indian languages. McDonald’s sells only vegetarian and chicken products in India, and not the beef products that are popular abroad; it goes vegetarian during the Navaratri festival. In music, one can see the growth in popularity of ‘Bhangra pop’, ‘Indi pop’, fusion music and remixes.

Fig. 6.14

Fig. 6.14 – Examples of glocalisation in media, food and music.

what glocalisation looks like A young man in a small town grows up listening to the folk songs his grandmother sings at weddings. He learns to use music software on a second-hand laptop, and begins uploading tracks that set those same songs to an electronic beat. His listeners are in three countries. An advertising agency later licenses one track for a campaign, asking him to keep the folk melody but shorten the verses. The song that results is neither the grandmother’s nor the agency’s. This demonstrates glocalisation — the global and the local reshaping each other, with commerce never far away.

What is globalisation doing to culture? View 1 — Homogenisation: cultures across the world are becoming similar. Its strongest evidence is the sheer reach of a small number of global products, channels, brands and styles, and the fear that local forms cannot survive competition on this scale. View 2 — Glocalisation: the global is being mixed with the local rather than replacing it. Its strongest evidence is that global firms themselves adapt to local languages, tastes and festivals in order to sell, and that new hybrid forms — fusion music, remixes — keep appearing. What both agree on: that the meeting of the global and the local is driven substantially by commercial interests, and that no culture emerges from the encounter unchanged.

Q5. If people everywhere begin to watch, wear and eat similar things, will all cultures slowly become one culture?

A. That is the homogenisation thesis, and it is one serious answer. But it is not the only one. What we actually observe in India is that global products arrive and are altered — channels broadcast in Indian languages, a global food chain turns vegetarian for a festival, a folk tune is set to an electronic beat. Cultures are not empty vessels waiting to be filled by whichever culture is strongest. They absorb, adapt and answer back, and the result is new forms that are neither purely global nor purely local.

Q4. Why do foreign television channels speak in Indian languages, and why do global food chains change their menus in India?

A. Because glocalisation is, among other things, a business strategy. A firm that arrives with an unaltered foreign product finds a limited market; a firm that speaks the local language and respects local food practices finds a much larger one. The adaptation is real, and it changes the product genuinely — but it is not a gesture of cultural respect alone. It is also a way of selling.

Culture is not a museum piece

We have already seen that the strength of Indian culture has been its open-ended approach, and that through the modern period our reformers and nationalists actively debated tradition and culture.

The mistake in the whole ‘will our culture survive?’ debate is a hidden assumption: that a culture is an unchanging, fixed entity, which, when faced with social change, must either collapse or remain exactly as it was. Cultures do neither. They change, and they have always changed, which is precisely what the history of reform in India demonstrates.

What is more likely today is that globalisation will lead to the creation not just of new local traditions, but of global ones too.

Identify other instances of glocalisation around you and discuss them in class. Then look at films: at one time Hindi cinema shot scenes in foreign countries while the story stayed local; later there were stories in which characters returned to India even though part of the story was set abroad; now there are stories set entirely outside India. What does this sequence tell you about how the global is being absorbed into a local form?

Gender and Culture

There is a use of ‘culture’ in these debates that a sociologist must watch closely.

Very often, defenders of a fixed traditional idea of cultural identity use it to defend undemocratic and discriminating practices against women in the name of cultural identity. Such defences have ranged from a defence of sati to a defence of the exclusion of women from education and from participation in public matters.

Globalisation can then be taken up as a bogey — a convenient external threat — to defend unjust practices against women. The argument runs: any change in the position of women is a foreign import, and resisting it is a defence of our culture.

Notice how the argument works. It first freezes culture into a single fixed thing, then declares that anything which alters it comes from outside, and finally treats the women who ask for change as agents of that outside. Every step is contestable, and the first step is where the trick is done.

Fortunately for us in India, we have been able to retain and develop a democratic tradition and culture, one that allows us to define culture in a more inclusive and democratic fashion — a definition in which women’s equality is not an import but a demand made from within.

Q. Is every criticism of a custom an attack on culture?

A. No. Cultures have always contained their own critics — the reformers of the nineteenth century were not foreigners. Treating internal criticism as foreign interference is a way of silencing members of one’s own society, most often those with the least power in it.

Culture of Consumption

Often, when we speak of culture, we refer to dresses, music, dances and food. But culture, as you know, refers to a whole way of life. Two uses of the word deserve special mention in any discussion of globalisation: the culture of consumption and corporate culture.

Look first at the crucial role that cultural consumption now plays in shaping the growth of cities. Till the 1970s, it was manufacturing industry that played the major role in a city’s growth: a city grew where the mills were. At present, cultural consumption — of art, food, fashion, music and tourism — shapes the growth of cities to a large extent.

This is evident in the spurt in the growth of shopping malls, multiplex cinema halls, amusement parks and ‘water worlds’ in every major city in India. The city is increasingly built around what people do with their leisure and their money, not around what they produce.

Fig. 6.15

Fig. 6.15 – The interior of a modern shopping mall.

Most significantly, advertisements and the media in general promote a culture in which spending is important. Look at the moral reversal involved. To be careful with money was once a virtue, praised in every household; it is a virtue no longer. Shopping has been turned into a pastime, and one that is actively encouraged.

The reach of this culture can be traced. Successive successes in fashion pageants such as Miss Universe and Miss World led to a tremendous growth in the industries of fashion, cosmetics and health. Young girls began to dream of being an Aishwarya Rai or a Sushmita Sen. Popular game shows such as Kaun Banega Crorepati made it seem possible that one’s fortunes could turn over a few games — that wealth was a matter of luck and nerve rather than of work, inheritance or the structure of the economy.

Compare a traditional shop in your neighbourhood with a new departmental store. Then compare a mall with a traditional market, and discuss how it is not just the goods that change, but the meaning of shopping itself — who goes, why, for how long, and with whom. Find out about the new fast food restaurants that are global in their menu and their operation, and the new kinds of food now served in eating places.

Corporate Culture
NoteDefinition

Corporate culture is a branch of management theory that seeks to increase productivity and competitiveness through the creation of a unique organisational culture involving all the members of a firm.

A dynamic corporate culture — involving company events, rituals and traditions — is thought to enhance employee loyalty and to promote group solidarity. The term also refers to a way of doing things: the style of promoting and packaging products.

Notice what is happening here. Loyalty and solidarity are among the oldest concerns of sociology, and were once studied in families, villages and religious communities. Management theory now sets out to manufacture them deliberately inside a firm.

Culture of consumption vs Corporate culture | Feature | Culture of consumption | Corporate culture | |—|—|—| | What it refers to | A way of life in which spending, shopping and leisure become central values | A deliberately created organisational culture inside a firm | | Where it operates | In the city — malls, multiplexes, amusement parks, advertising, media | In the workplace — company events, rituals, traditions, styles of promotion and packaging | | Who drives it | Advertisers, media and the retail and entertainment industries | Management, drawing on management theory | | What it seeks to produce | Consumers, and the desire to spend | Employee loyalty, group solidarity, productivity and competitiveness | | Sociological interest | How consumption reshapes cities and personal values | How an organisation manufactures the solidarity that societies once produced on their own |

The spread of multinational companies, and the opportunities opened up by the information technology revolution, have created in India’s metropolitan cities a class of upwardly mobile professionals — in software companies, multinational banks, chartered accountancy firms, stock markets, travel, fashion designing, entertainment, media and allied fields. These high-flying professionals work to highly stressful schedules, receive exorbitant salaries, and are the main clientele of the booming consumer industry.

The two cultures thus meet in the same person. The professional produced by corporate culture is the consumer on whom the culture of consumption depends.

Threat to Indigenous Craft and Literary Traditions and Knowledge Systems

There is one more link between cultural forms and globalisation, and it is the least cheerful. It concerns the condition of many indigenous craft and literary traditions and knowledge systems.

Two things must be said in the same breath. It is important to remember that modern development, even before the stage of globalisation, had already made inroads into traditional cultural forms and into the occupations based on them. But the sheer scale and intensity of the change now is enormous.

Consider what happens to an art form when the audience that sustained it disappears. About 30 theatre groups, which were active around the textile mill areas of Parel and Girgaum in Mumbai city, have become defunct, because most of the mill workers in those areas are out of jobs. The theatre did not lose its skill. It lost its public.

The pressure on traditional crafts has in some places been severe. Some years back, there were reports of a large number of suicides by traditional weavers in Sircilla village of Karimnagar district and in Dubakka village of Medak district, both in Andhra Pradesh. These weavers, with no means to invest in new technology, were unable to adapt to changing consumer tastes and to competition from power looms.

The sociological point is a structural one, and it should be stated plainly. The weaver was not overtaken by a personal failing. A household that had for generations exchanged its skill for a livelihood found that the market no longer wanted what it made, and that the capital needed to make something else was out of reach. When an occupation dies, a whole way of life — its training, its status, its arrangements between generations — dies with it.

Fig. 6.16

Fig. 6.16 – A handloom weaver facing competition from power looms.

In a testimony recorded from the dombari community, a traditional performer described how television and radio had taken away their means of livelihood. The community performs acrobatics, but the circus and the television have reached even remote corners and villages, and audiences are no longer interested in their performances. However hard they perform, they receive next to nothing; people watch their shows purely as entertainment and pay them nothing; nobody considers that the performers are hungry. Their profession, the speaker concluded, is dying. (More 1970)

whose voice, and for what purpose A testimony like this is valuable precisely because the person speaks for herself rather than being spoken about. That places a duty on the researcher who records it. The account must not be used simply to move a reader, or reduced to a picture of pitiable poverty; consent matters, and so does the dignity of the speaker. Sociology’s task is to trace the structure that produced the hunger — the loss of an audience, the absence of an alternative occupation — not to display the hunger itself.

Who owns knowledge?

Various forms of traditional knowledge systems, especially in the fields of medicine and agriculture, have been preserved and passed on from one generation to the next. They belong to no single person; they are the accumulated work of communities over centuries.

This is exactly why recent attempts by some multinational companies to patent the use of Tulsi, Haldi (turmeric), Rudraksha and Basmati rice caused such disquiet. A patent gives a company the exclusive right to a use. When the use in question has been common knowledge in India for generations, the patent does not reward an invention; it encloses a commons. These attempts highlighted the need to protect the base of India’s indigenous knowledge systems.

Q. How can a company claim to own something people have used for centuries?

A. Because patent law rewards whoever documents and registers a use first, in a particular legal form. Knowledge that was transmitted orally, freely and communally has no such paperwork — and so the very features that made it a shared inheritance are what make it vulnerable to being claimed by someone else.

Where This Leaves You

It is no easy task to sum up the diverse and complex ways in which globalisation is affecting our lives, and this chapter will not attempt it. That task is left to you.

Note also what has been left out here. The impact of globalisation on industry and on agriculture has not been discussed in any detail in this chapter; you have to draw on the chapters on rural society and on industrial society to build up the full story of globalisation and social change in India.

In the recounting of that story, use your sociological imagination — which, as you now know, means refusing to treat any private trouble as if it had no public cause.

6.9 Summary

Globalisation and the sociological imagination (6.1)

  1. Globalisation means the growing interconnection between people, regions and countries; the term is used loosely in public debate, and sociology begins by asking what it actually refers to.

  2. Different disciplines study different aspects of it — economics looks at capital flows, political science at the changing role of governments — but the process is so far-reaching that disciplines must now borrow from one another.

  3. Sociology’s distinctive contribution is the sociological imagination: the ability to connect the micro with the macro, the personal with the public, the local with the global.

  4. Since 1 April 2001, all quantitative restrictions on imports were withdrawn, and imported goods appeared in ordinary neighbourhood shops. The same policy gives an affluent urban consumer more choice and may give a farmer a crisis of livelihood.

  5. Society can no longer be studied as an isolated entity: the compression of space and time means that villages, families, work, castes and organisations must all be studied with global interconnection in view.

  6. The impact of globalisation is uneven. Women silk spinners and twisters in Bihar lost work to cheaper Chinese and Korean yarn; large fishing vessels displaced Indian fishing vessels, affecting women fish sorters, dryers, vendors and net makers; women gum collectors in Gujarat lost work to cheaper gum imported from Sudan; rag pickers in Indian cities lost earnings to imported waste paper.

  7. Views on globalisation are sharply divided: some see it as heralding a better world; others see the already excluded getting worse off; still others argue it is not new at all.

Are global interconnections new? (6.2)

  1. India was not isolated even two thousand years ago: the Silk route linked it to China, Persia, Egypt and Rome, and people arrived as traders, conquerors and migrants.

  2. Amartya Sen’s examples — Panini’s Afghan origin, Yi Jing learning Sanskrit in Java — and the parable of the kupamanduka, the well-frog, show a long tradition of openness and a long warning against isolationism.

  3. Modern capitalism had a global dimension from its inception; colonialism supplied it with capital, raw materials, energy, markets and a global network.

  4. Large-scale movement of people is not new either: European settlement in the Americas and Australia, indentured labour taken from India to Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the slave trade that carried thousands of Africans away.

  5. Independent India retained a global outlook inherited from the nationalist movement: overseas education and work, ongoing migration, trade in goods and technology, and foreign firms operating in India.

Understanding globalisation (6.3)

  1. The question is not whether interconnection existed, but whether today’s changes in production, communication, labour, capital, technology, culture, governance and social movements are significant. They are — even though some patterns appeared in the early stages of capitalism.

  2. Globalisation refers to the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries in the world, as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide.

  3. Economic forces are integral but not sufficient; the process has been driven above all by information and communication technologies, and it grew within a political context.

  4. Its economic, political and cultural dimensions are separated only for convenience; in reality they are closely interconnected.

The economic dimension (6.4)

  1. Liberalisation is the set of policy decisions taken by the Indian state since 1991 to open the economy to the world market; it broke with the earlier policy of protecting Indian business, which assumed that a former colony would be at a disadvantage in a free market.

  2. Since July 1991 there have been reforms in all major sectors — agriculture, industry, trade, foreign investment and technology, the public sector and financial institutions — on the assumption that integration with the world market would benefit India.

  3. Liberalisation involved loans from institutions such as the IMF, given on conditions of structural adjustment, which usually means cuts in state spending on health, education and social security; institutions such as the WTO gained a greater say.

  4. Liberalisation is a policy; globalisation is the wider process. They are related but not the same.

  5. Transnational corporations produce goods or market services in more than one country; they are oriented to global markets and profits even when they have a clear national base. Some Indian corporations are becoming transnational.

  6. The electronic economy allows banks, corporations, fund managers and investors to move money internationally at the click of a mouse — with great risks, as sudden stock market dips show.

  7. The weightless economy has its products based in information (software, media and entertainment, internet services); the knowledge economy employs people in design, development, technology, marketing, sale and servicing rather than in physical production. New occupations such as the event manager have appeared.

  8. Mainly due to the information technology revolution, finance has been globalised: globally integrated markets trade billions of dollars within seconds, round the clock, with New York, Tokyo and London as key centres and Mumbai as India’s financial capital.

Global communications (6.5)

  1. Advances in telecommunications have transformed global communication, but access is unequal — this is the digital divide.

  2. In 1998 there were 70 million Internet users worldwide, of whom the USA and Canada accounted for 62 per cent and Asia 12 per cent; by 2000 there were 325 million, with India having 3 million subscribers and 15 million users, now grown to 700 million.

  3. A study in 2017–18 found that one in ten households had a computer and about a quarter had Internet connectivity through a mobile phone or other device; rural areas, with erratic power, widespread illiteracy and poor infrastructure, remain largely unconnected.

  4. These technologies allow the compression of time and space, giving rise to a network and media society; the Government of India’s ‘Digital India’ programme aims at a ‘digitally empowered society’ and a ‘knowledge economy’.

  5. India’s telephone network expanded from 84,000 lines in 1947 to over 25 million lines by 1999 — the ninth largest in the world — with about 650,000 PCOs by 2000. The PCO met a strong sociocultural need to stay in touch with family, not merely a commercial one.

  6. The cell phone moved in about twenty years from being an object of distrust, to a taxable luxury, to a necessity that students went on strike to defend.

Globalisation and labour (6.6)

  1. A new international division of labour has emerged, in which routine manufacturing production is done increasingly in Third World cities.

  2. Nike’s production moved from Japan in the 1960s to South Korea in the mid-1970s, to Thailand and Indonesia in the 1980s, and to India since the 1990s — following cheaper labour, and making workers vulnerable and insecure.

  3. Production has shifted from mass production at a centralised location (Fordism) to flexible production at dispersed locations (post-Fordism).

  4. Of the $20,000 showroom price of a Pontiac Le Mans, only $7,600 goes to Americans; 48 per cent of the rest goes to South Korea for labour and assembly, 28 per cent to Japan, 12 per cent to Germany, 7 per cent to Taiwan and Singapore, 4 per cent to the United Kingdom and about 1 per cent to Barbados or Ireland.

  5. Globalisation has opened new careers for urban middle class youth — call centres, BPO firms, malls, restaurants — but the broader employment trend is disappointing: between 2003 and 2004 employment in Asia and the Pacific grew by only 1.6 per cent, against economic growth of over 7 per cent.

Globalisation and political changes (6.7)

  1. The collapse of the erstwhile socialist world hastened globalisation and shaped the neo-liberal economic measures that underpin it — a political vision of free enterprise, critical of both state regulation and state subsidies.

  2. Because globalisation carries a political vision, a different globalisation is possible: hence the idea of inclusive globalisation, which includes all sections of society.

  3. International and regional mechanisms for political collaboration have grown: the EU, ASEAN and SAARC.

  4. Intergovernmental organisations are established by participating governments to regulate a transnational domain — the WTO increasingly governs trade rules. INGOs, such as Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres, are independent of governments and set their own policies.

Globalisation and culture (6.8)

  1. India’s culture has long been open to influences; today’s fear is that local cultures will be overtaken, and the debates cover clothes, styles, music, films, languages and body language. What is different now is the scale and intensity of change.

  2. One view holds that all cultures will become homogeneous; the other holds that glocalisation — the mixing of the global with the local — is occurring. Glocalisation is neither spontaneous nor free of commercial interest: foreign channels use Indian languages, McDonald’s sells vegetarian and chicken products and goes vegetarian during Navaratri, and ‘Bhangra pop’, ‘Indi pop’, fusion and remixes flourish.

  3. Culture is not a fixed entity that must either collapse or stay unchanged; globalisation is likely to produce new local and new global traditions.

  4. A fixed idea of cultural identity is often used to defend undemocratic and discriminating practices against women, with globalisation raised as a bogey; India’s democratic tradition allows culture to be defined more inclusively.

  5. Cultural consumption — art, food, fashion, music, tourism — now shapes the growth of cities more than manufacturing does, visible in malls, multiplexes, amusement parks and water worlds; advertising promotes spending, and thrift is no longer treated as a virtue.

  6. Corporate culture is a branch of management theory that seeks productivity and competitiveness by creating a distinctive organisational culture, with company events, rituals and traditions to build employee loyalty.

  7. Indigenous crafts, performing traditions and knowledge systems are under pressure: theatre groups around Parel and Girgaum became defunct as mill workers lost jobs; traditional weavers in Sircilla and Dubakka could not compete with power looms; and attempts to patent Tulsi, Haldi, Rudraksha and Basmati rice showed the need to protect indigenous knowledge systems.

  8. The chapter does not cover globalisation’s impact on industry and agriculture; that story must be built from the chapters on rural and industrial society, using the sociological imagination.

6.10 Key Terms

  1. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) — Firms that carry out business processes, such as customer service or data handling, on behalf of companies located in other countries.

  2. Capitalism — An economic system based on private ownership, wage labour and production for profit, which has had a global dimension from its very inception.

  3. Colonialism — The system of rule by which one country controls another and reorganises its economy, resources and markets to serve its own; historically, part of the global network that sustained modern capitalism.

  4. Communication revolution — The transformation of communication brought about by satellites, computers, the Internet and mobile telephony, which has enormously increased the speed and scope of interaction.

  5. Compression of space and time — The shrinking of the distance and delay that once separated places, so that people far apart can interact almost instantaneously.

  6. Corporate culture — A branch of management theory that seeks to raise productivity and competitiveness by creating a distinctive organisational culture — company events, rituals and traditions — to build employee loyalty and group solidarity.

  7. Culture of consumption — A way of life in which shopping, spending and leisure become central values, and which increasingly shapes the growth of cities.

  8. Digital divide — The gap between those who have access to computers, the Internet and reliable connectivity and those who do not, and who are therefore excluded from the opportunities these carry.

  9. Electronic economy — The economy in which banks, corporations, fund managers and individual investors shift funds internationally at the click of a mouse.

  10. Fordism — A system of mass production of standardised goods at a large, centralised location.

  11. Globalisation — The growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries in the world, as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide.

  12. Globalisation of finance — The emergence, mainly due to the information technology revolution, of globally integrated financial markets that trade round the clock, with key centres in New York, Tokyo and London.

  13. Glocalisation — The mixing of the global with the local; often a strategy used by foreign firms to adapt to local traditions and enhance their marketability.

  14. Homogenisation of culture — The claim that cultures across the world are becoming similar, as the same products, images and styles spread everywhere.

  15. Inclusive globalisation — A globalisation that includes all sections of society, rather than benefiting only those already advantaged.

  16. Indentured labour — Workers bound by long contracts and carried in ships from India to distant parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas to work under colonial rule.

  17. Indigenous knowledge systems — Bodies of knowledge, especially in medicine and agriculture, developed and passed on across generations within communities, and now in need of protection against patenting by outside firms.

  18. Knowledge economy — An economy in which much of the workforce is engaged not in physically producing or distributing goods but in their design, development, technology, marketing, sale and servicing.

  19. Kupamanduka — The well-frog of old Sanskrit texts, which lives its whole life in a well, knows nothing else and suspects everything outside it; a traditional Indian warning against isolationism.

  20. Liberalisation — The range of policy decisions taken by the Indian state since 1991 to open the Indian economy to the world market by removing the rules that regulated trade and finance.

  21. Migration — The movement of people from one place to another to live and work, whether as traders, settlers, workers or refugees.

  22. Neo-liberal economic measures — Policies that give free rein to market forces in the belief that markets are both efficient and fair, and that are therefore critical of state regulation and state subsidies.

  23. Network and media society — A society in which work, information and relationships increasingly run along electronic and media networks.

  24. New international division of labour — The arrangement in which routine manufacturing production is done increasingly in Third World cities, while design, finance and marketing remain concentrated in richer countries.

  25. Outsourcing — The practice by which a firm in one country has part of its work, such as customer service or data processing, carried out by workers in another country.

  26. Post-Fordism — A system of flexible production at dispersed locations, in which firms can shift production to wherever costs are lower, making labour vulnerable and insecure.

  27. Sociological imagination — The capacity, named by C. Wright Mills, to connect personal experience to wider social structures and historical processes — the micro to the macro, the personal to the public.

  28. Structural adjustment — The set of economic measures a government commits to when taking loans from international institutions such as the IMF; it usually involves cuts in state expenditure on health, education and social security.

  29. Transnational corporations (TNCs) — Companies that produce goods or market services in more than one country, oriented to global markets and global profits even when they have a clear national base.

  30. Weightless economy — An economy in which products have their base in information, as with computer software, media and entertainment products, and internet-based services.

6.11 Points to Ponder

  1. If global interconnection is two thousand years old, what exactly would have to be true for us to say that globalisation is genuinely new? Is speed alone enough to make a difference in kind rather than a difference in degree?

  2. The chapter shows that the same policy can mean greater choice for one household and the loss of a livelihood for another. Can a society ever adopt a change that has no losers — and if not, what does it owe to the people who lose?

  3. Glocalisation is described as neither entirely spontaneous nor entirely free of commercial interest. When a global firm adapts to Indian languages, festivals and food, is that a genuine cultural synthesis, or is it the market wearing local clothes?

  4. The well-frog of the Sanskrit texts stands for a closed mind. But is there a defensible difference between being closed to the world and being cautious about what one takes from it? Where would you draw that line, and on what sociological grounds?

  5. A culture is often defended as though it were a fixed thing that must be protected from change. Yet the reformers of the nineteenth century changed it from within. Who, then, has the authority to say what a culture is — and whose voices within a community tend to be left out of that decision?

  6. Advertising has made thrift look old-fashioned and shopping look like a pastime. If a society’s idea of a good life can be reshaped this thoroughly by an industry, how much of what we call ‘personal taste’ is actually social?

  7. The weaver who could not invest in new technology and the software designer working for clients abroad both live in the same economy. What does it tell us about that economy that it can expand rapidly while offering security to so few?

6.12 NCERT Questions

  1. Choose any topic that interests you — cinema, work, marriage, or any other — and discuss how you think globalisation has affected it.

  2. What are the distinctive features of a globalised economy? Discuss.

  3. Briefly discuss the impact of globalisation on culture.

  4. What is glocalisation? Is it simply a market strategy adopted by multinational companies, or is a genuine cultural synthesis taking place? Discuss.

6.13 Objective Questions

  1. All types of quantitative restrictions (QR) on imports were withdrawn in India from:
    1. 1 July 1991
    2. 1 April 2001
    3. 1 January 1998
    4. 1 April 1991 [1 mark]
  2. The policy decisions taken by the Indian state since 1991 to open the economy to the world market are known as:
    1. Structural adjustment
    2. Glocalisation
    3. Liberalisation
    4. Post-Fordism [1 mark]
  3. A transnational corporation is best defined as a company that:
    1. is owned jointly by several governments
    2. produces goods or markets services in more than one country
    3. works only in the weightless economy
    4. has no national base at all [1 mark]
  4. Which of the following is an International Non-Governmental Organisation (INGO)?
    1. The World Trade Organisation
    2. The International Monetary Fund
    3. The Association of South East Asian Nations
    4. Medecins Sans Frontieres [1 mark]
  5. The mixing of the global with the local is termed:
    1. homogenisation
    2. glocalisation
    3. structural adjustment
    4. outsourcing [1 mark]
  6. Mass production of goods at a centralised location is called:
    1. post-Fordism
    2. the knowledge economy
    3. Fordism
    4. the electronic economy [1 mark]
  7. Within India, the city known as the financial capital of the country is:
    1. New Delhi
    2. Bengaluru
    3. Mumbai
    4. Kolkata [1 mark]
  8. An economy in which much of the workforce is engaged in design, development, technology, marketing, sale and servicing rather than in physical production is called:
    1. an industrial economy
    2. a knowledge economy
    3. a subsistence economy
    4. a colonial economy [1 mark]
  9. Assertion (A): Liberalisation and globalisation are related but are not the same thing. Reason (R): Liberalisation refers to a set of policy decisions taken by the Indian state, while globalisation refers to the worldwide stretching of social and economic relationships.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
    3. A is true, but R is false
    4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  10. Assertion (A): The rapid spread of computers has ended the digital divide in India. Reason (R): According to a study in 2017–18, one in ten households had a computer at home and about a quarter of all homes had Internet connectivity through a mobile phone or other device.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Assertion (A): Post-Fordism makes the labouring population vulnerable and insecure. Reason (R): Under a system of flexible production at dispersed locations, production centres can be shifted to wherever labour is cheaper.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Assertion (A): Structural adjustment is purely an economic matter with no social consequences. Reason (R): Structural adjustment usually involves cuts in state expenditure on health, education and social security.
  1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
  2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
  3. A is true, but R is false
  4. A is false, but R is true [1 mark]
  1. Match the term in Column A with its meaning in Column B.
Column A Column B
a. Weightless economy i. The well-frog of old Sanskrit texts, a warning against isolationism
b. Structural adjustment ii. Products that have their base in information
c. Kupamanduka iii. Management theory that builds a distinctive organisational culture within a firm
d. Corporate culture iv. Commitments to economic measures, usually including cuts in social sector spending, made when taking loans from international institutions

[1 mark]

  1. Match the organisation in Column A with its type in Column B.
Column A Column B
a. World Trade Organisation i. Regional association
b. Greenpeace ii. Intergovernmental organisation with a major say in trade rules
c. SAARC iii. International lending institution whose loans carry conditions
d. International Monetary Fund iv. International non-governmental organisation

[1 mark]

  1. Fill in the blank: In 1998, of the 70 million Internet users worldwide, the USA and Canada accounted for ______ per cent, while Asia accounted for 12 per cent. [1 mark]

  2. Fill in the blank: Of the showroom price of a Pontiac Le Mans, ______ per cent of the amount that does not go to Americans goes to South Korea for labour and assembly. [1 mark]

  3. Fill in the blank: The programme initiated by the Government of India to digitise every exchange and create a ‘digitally empowered society’ is called ______. [1 mark]

  4. True or False: Nike shoes were first manufactured in India in the 1960s. [1 mark]

  5. True or False: The large-scale movement of people across the world began only with globalisation. [1 mark]

  6. True or False: An intergovernmental organisation is established by participating governments to regulate or oversee a domain of activity that is transnational in scope. [1 mark]

6.14 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define globalisation as sociologists understand it. [2 marks]

  2. What is meant by the digital divide? [2 marks]

  3. State what makes a company a transnational corporation, and name any two such corporations mentioned in the chapter. [2 marks]

  4. What is the weightless economy? Give one example. [2 marks]

  5. What is meant by inclusive globalisation? [2 marks]

  6. Name any two ways in which the livelihoods of women workers in India were affected by the entry of cheaper imported goods. [2 marks]

  7. Differentiate between liberalisation and globalisation. [4 marks]

  8. Differentiate between Fordism and post-Fordism, with an example of each. [4 marks]

  9. Explain what is meant by glocalisation, using two Indian examples. [4 marks]

  10. Give reasons why independent India protected its market and its indigenous business from foreign competition. [4 marks]

  11. Explain how a policy of structural adjustment, agreed to in return for a loan, can change the everyday life of an ordinary household. [4 marks]

  12. Differentiate between an intergovernmental organisation (IGO) and an international non-governmental organisation (INGO), with one example of each. [4 marks]

  13. Study Table 6.2 in this chapter, on the expansion of telephone services in India. Describe the change between 1947 and 1999, and give two social reasons for the rapid spread of public call offices. [4 marks]

  14. Study Table 6.3 in this chapter. Of the $20,000 showroom price of a Pontiac Le Mans, $7,600 goes to Americans. Calculate what percentage of the showroom price this is, and explain what the distribution of the remainder tells us about the new international division of labour. [4 marks]

  15. Why does sociology insist that a rise in the growth rate of an economy is not the same as an improvement in people’s lives? Answer with reference to employment trends discussed in the chapter. [4 marks]

  16. “Globalisation affects us all, but it affects us differently.” Explain this statement in full, using examples from the chapter of those who gained and those who lost. [6 marks]

  17. How far do you agree with the view that globalisation is not a new phenomenon? Support your answer with evidence from India’s past, and state what, if anything, is genuinely new today. [6 marks]

  18. Evaluate the claim that globalisation is leading to the homogenisation of culture. Present the evidence on both sides and state what the two positions agree upon. [6 marks]

  19. Examine the political dimension of globalisation, explaining the neo-liberal vision that underpins it and the new levels of political collaboration that have grown alongside it. [6 marks]

  20. Discuss the impact of globalisation on labour in India, explaining the new international division of labour, the shift to flexible production, and the consequences for workers. [6 marks]

  21. “Culture cannot be seen as an unchanging, fixed entity.” Discuss this statement with reference to the debate over cultural identity and the position of women. [6 marks]

  22. Describe the pressures that globalisation has placed on indigenous crafts, performing traditions and knowledge systems in India, and explain why sociologists treat these as structural rather than individual failures. [6 marks]

6.15 Passage-Based Questions

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    In a weaving cluster in a small town, families have made cotton saris on handlooms for three generations. The skill passes from parent to child, and the loom stands in the front room of the house. Over the last decade, buyers have begun asking for lighter fabrics and printed designs that a power loom can produce far more cheaply and quickly. A few households borrow to buy a power loom; most cannot. Orders fall, and some younger members leave for construction work in the city. The weavers say that they have not forgotten how to weave; it is the market that has stopped asking for what they weave.

    1. Identify the sociological process at work in this passage, and explain what it means. (2 marks)
    2. Explain why sociologists describe the weavers’ situation as a structural problem rather than an individual failure. (2 marks)
    3. What is likely to happen to the skills, the status and the family arrangements of this community if the trend continues? (2 marks) [6 marks]

  2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    A large mall opens on the outskirts of a district town. It has a multiplex, a food court and outlets of national and foreign brands. Families begin to spend their Sunday evenings there; young people meet there rather than at the old market square. The mall’s advertisements describe shopping as a way of relaxing. In the same town, an old covered market continues, where buyers bargain, know the shopkeepers by name, and go only when they need something. Within two years, three shops in the old market close.

    1. Which use of the term ‘culture’ discussed in the chapter does the mall illustrate? Explain it. (2 marks)
    2. The passage says that the meaning of shopping itself has changed. Explain what has changed, and why a sociologist finds this significant. (2 marks)
    3. Suggest two reasons why the growth of cities today is shaped by cultural consumption more than by manufacturing. (2 marks) [6 marks]

  3. Study the table and answer the questions that follow.

    The table below gives figures collected in a survey of two blocks of a district — one urban, one rural.

    Facility Urban block Rural block
    Households with a computer at home 18 per cent 3 per cent
    Households with Internet on a mobile phone 46 per cent 14 per cent
    Households reporting more than 6 hours of power cuts a day 6 per cent 41 per cent
    1. Name the concept that this table illustrates, and define it. (1 mark)
    2. Using the figures, explain how infrastructure, and not merely the price of a device, produces this pattern. (2 marks)
    3. During a period of online classes, which children in this district would be at a disadvantage, and why? Answer sociologically. (3 marks) [6 marks]

  4. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    A firm in another country closes its customer service department and contracts the work to a company in an Indian city. Two hundred young graduates are hired, trained to speak to callers in a distant time zone, and put on night shifts. The pay is better than anything else available to them locally, and there is no long apprenticeship. The contract with the foreign firm runs for three years. If costs rise, the work may be moved to another country when the contract ends.

    1. Identify two processes discussed in the chapter that this passage illustrates. (2 marks)
    2. Explain why this arrangement is described as offering opportunity and insecurity at the same time. (2 marks)
    3. “Globalisation has been good for India’s youth.” How far does this passage support that claim? Give reasons for your answer. (2 marks) [6 marks]