Images of industrial society

Look at Mumbai: film stars and mill owners live in Juhu by the sea; film extras and textile workers live in Girangaon, the old mill area. Work divides a city: where you live, what you earn and whom you meet all depend on your job.

Who does which job is also a social pattern, not just personal choice. More women work in nursing and teaching, few in engineering. Upper castes are over-represented in well-paid professions like medicine and law. These patterns come from history, education and expectations.

The founders of sociology, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, all linked industry with big social changes: the growth of cities, and impersonal, professional relationships in place of close personal ties of village life.

Industry brings a detailed division of labour: each worker does one small, repetitive part of making a product, never the whole thing. Marx called the result alienation: workers do not enjoy their work or feel it is theirs; they do it only to survive.

Industry and equality: industrial life weakens some old inequalities. On trains and buses, in factories and offices, people of all castes sit and work together, so caste matters less in public places.

But new inequalities grow: income gaps between managers and workers widen, and old forms of discrimination can persist in hiring and promotion.

So work is social: what jobs exist, who gets them and what they feel like are shaped by society, not just by individual choice.