The Economic System, Work and Occupation

The social importance of work and occupation

What work is, sociologically

Work is the exertion of effort to produce goods or services. Sociologically, three points follow immediately and are frequently missed.

Not all work is paid. Domestic and care work is work, and its exclusion from measures of production is a well-recognised gap, which is why time-use surveys exist.

Not all paid activity is regarded as work by those who do it, and the boundary between work and leisure is socially drawn.

Work is a social activity even when performed alone, since it is organised, evaluated and rewarded by others.

Why work matters beyond the wage

The list is what an examiner is asking for when the topic says "social importance".

1. Income, and therefore access to almost everything else.
2. Identity. The first question asked of a stranger in most societies is what they do. Occupation supplies a large part of how a person is described and how they describe themselves.
3. Status. Occupations are ranked, and the ranking is remarkably stable across societies and over time. It is a principal component of class, as [Class] shows.
4. Structuring of time. Work organises the day, the week and the year, and its absence disorganises them, which is one of the best-documented effects of unemployment.
5. Social contacts. For most adults the workplace is the main source of relationships outside the family.
6. Purpose and self-worth.
7. Socialisation. Occupational socialisation shapes outlook, vocabulary and values, as [Socialization] describes.
8. Social order. Work absorbs energy and time, and a society with a large number of unoccupied young adults is understood everywhere to be unstable.

The strongest evidence for all of this is unemployment, and it is what the topic is really about. Studies of unemployment consistently find effects far beyond loss of income: loss of time structure, of contact, of status and of purpose. A person given the same money without the work is not restored to the same condition, which is the clearest demonstration that work is not merely a means of earning.

Occupation as a social position

An occupation is not just a set of tasks. It carries a status, an occupational culture of shared language and values, a network, and often a regulatory body that controls entry, which is where the law student should notice the connection to [Sociology of the Legal Profession].

In India occupation has a further dimension: the traditional caste system assigned occupations by birth, so that occupation and ritual status were joined. The link has weakened greatly, and it has not disappeared, particularly at the bottom, where stigmatised occupations remain heavily associated with particular communities. Legislation prohibiting manual scavenging and providing for the rehabilitation of those engaged in it exists precisely because an occupation had become hereditary and degrading, which is a matter of caste as much as of employment.

Mechanization and the decline of traditional skills

What mechanization does

Mechanization is the replacement of human and animal effort by machines. Its social effects are the subject here, and there are six.

1. Deskilling. A craft that required years of training is broken into simple operations a machine performs or an unskilled worker feeds. Harry Braverman's argument that capitalist production systematically degrades skill is the reference.
2. The decline of traditional occupations. Handloom weaving, hand pottery, oil pressing, hand-made footwear, village blacksmithing and countless others have contracted sharply in India. The skill dies with the generation holding it, because there is no reason for a child to learn it.
3. Displacement and migration. The displaced move, usually to cities and to insecure work.
4. Change in the workplace and in authority. Work moves from home to factory, from kin to employer, from custom to contract, which is the movement described in [The Family: Meaning and Functions].
5. New skills and new occupations. Mechanization destroys occupations and creates others, usually requiring different and often formal qualifications, which is why the losers and the gainers are rarely the same people.
6. Alienation. Dealt with in [Work and Alienation].

The Indian case, stated carefully

India's handicrafts and handloom sector declined severely under colonial industrialisation, and the artisan communities affected were pushed towards agriculture and casual labour. The state's response since independence has included protective measures for the handloom sector, cooperatives, and the promotion of craft, and there is now also a market that values hand production precisely because it is scarce.

Two propositions can be stated with confidence, and the numbers should be left to a named source. First, the direction is one of long-term decline in traditional artisanal employment relative to the workforce. Second, what is lost is not only income but a body of knowledge, since a craft is transmitted by apprenticeship and cannot be recovered from a description once the chain of transmission breaks. The second is the sociologically interesting loss and the one an examiner rewards.

A worked example

A potter's household in a Gujarat village. The grandfather's household produced pots for a defined set of client families, receiving grain at harvest under a customary arrangement, and the skill passed from father to son by apprenticeship from childhood. Work and home were the same place, and occupation, caste and community were the same thing.

The father's generation met plastic and metal vessels made in factories. Demand fell, the customary arrangement broke down, and income became cash and irregular.

The son works in a ceramics factory in a town, operating a machine. He earns more, and reliably. He does not know how to make a pot by hand, and his father's skill will not outlive his father.

Read the change against the six effects listed above and every one appears: deskilling, decline of a traditional occupation, migration, the shift from custom to contract, a new occupation requiring different skills, and the separation of home from work. And note what has been gained, because an answer that laments only is a poor answer: the son has a higher and more reliable income, is not bound to hereditary clients, and is not tied by his birth to one occupation.

Quick revision

1. An economic system decides what is produced, how, who owns the means of production, and how the product is distributed.
2. Polanyi's three modes of integration: reciprocity, redistribution, exchange. Most societies use all three.
3. The economy is embedded in social relations (Granovetter): caste, kinship, community and norms shape employment, credit and consumption.
4. Work matters for income, identity, status, the structuring of time, social contacts, purpose, socialisation and social order. Unemployment proves it: money without work does not restore the person.
5. Occupation carries status, an occupational culture, a network, and often a body regulating entry.
6. In India occupation was historically assigned by caste, and the link survives most strongly in stigmatised work.
7. Mechanization: deskilling (Braverman), decline of traditional occupations, displacement and migration, custom to contract, new occupations for different people, and alienation.
8. When a craft's chain of apprenticeship breaks, the knowledge is lost and cannot be recovered from description.

Test yourself

1. What is an economic system and what must every one of them decide? The organised set of institutions, norms and relationships through which a society produces, distributes, exchanges and consumes goods and services. Every economic system must decide what is produced and for whom, how it is produced and with what division of labour, who owns the means of production, and on what principle the product is distributed, whether by need, status, contribution, ownership or force.

2. What is meant by saying that the economy is embedded in society? That economic activity is not a separate sphere governed only by calculation of advantage, but is shaped throughout by social relations. Whom an employer hires is affected by caste, kinship and language; whom a trader extends credit to depends on community and reputation; what people buy is governed by norms of what befits their standing; and in India entry to occupations was historically regulated by birth.

3. State the social importance of work beyond earning. Work confers identity, since occupation is how people are described and describe themselves; it confers status, occupations being ranked in a strikingly stable order; it structures time across the day, the week and the year; it supplies most adults with their main source of social contact outside the family; it provides purpose and self-worth; it socialises, transmitting an occupational culture; and it absorbs the energies of the population, which is why unemployment is treated everywhere as a threat to social order.

4. What are the social effects of mechanization? Deskilling, as crafts requiring long training are broken into simple operations; the decline of traditional occupations and the loss of the skills attached to them; displacement of workers and migration to cities and insecure work; the movement of work from home to factory and from customary relations with kin to contractual relations with an employer; the creation of new occupations requiring different and often formal qualifications, so that those displaced are rarely those who gain; and alienation from the work itself.

5. Why is the loss of a traditional craft more than the loss of an income? Because a craft is a body of knowledge transmitted by apprenticeship, learned by watching and doing over years rather than from a description. When demand falls and no one in the next generation learns it, the chain of transmission breaks and the knowledge cannot be reconstructed from written accounts. What disappears is therefore a technique, an occupational culture and a community identity, not merely a source of earnings.