(a) Explain how the pattern of patriarchy is being altered in a family and at the workplace in the present context. 20 (b)…

Contemporary socio-economic transformations reveal a dual dynamic where structural forces alter traditional institutions while entrenched hierarchies adaptively reproduce themselves across gender relations, global political economy, and ethnic configurations.

Patterns of Patriarchy in Family and Workplace

In the family, economic modernization causes a structural transition from joint to nuclear families and dual-earner households, granting women greater financial agency. Marriage patterns are altering as evidenced by delayed age at marriage and rising inter-caste unions. Demographically, while sex ratios at birth continue to decline in specific regions due to sex-selection technologies, daughter preference is emerging in urban middle-class pockets due to state incentives and welfare schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao. However, Sylvia Walby's shift from private to public patriarchy remains visible: national Time Use Surveys consistently reveal an asymmetric domestic division of labour, where women continue to shoulder an unequal unpaid care economy burden despite their employment status.

At the workplace, institutional interventions such as the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act and collective mobilisations like the #MeToo movement challenge corporate glass ceilings and workplace harassment. Yet patriarchy adapts through the feminisation of the workforce in low-wage informal sectors. In the emerging platform economy and gig work, algorithmic management often reproduces gender disparities, isolating female workers in flexible, precarious, and low-paid home-based service niches.

Dependency Theories in the Contemporary Global Scenario

Classical dependency theories, including the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis and Andre Gunder Frank’s concept of the "development of underdevelopment," alongside Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems analysis, explain how unequal terms of trade lock the periphery into structural subordination to the core. In the contemporary context, this explains modern phenomena such as digital colonialism by multinational tech monopolies, global value chains that concentrate high-value design in the core while shifting low-value extraction to the periphery, and climate debt, where environmental externalisations and ecological damage are shifted disproportionately onto developing nations.

However, dependency theory overstates core-periphery rigidity and neglects internal class dynamics and domestic institutional failures. It fails to explain the rapid industrialisation of East Asian Newly Industrialised Countries (NICs), China's manufacturing rise, or the counter-hegemonic economic coordination of the BRICS grouping. Alternative frameworks—such as W.W. Rostow’s modernisation stages and Amartya Sen’s capability approach—demonstrate that development can be driven internally through targeted human capital investments, governance reforms, and individual capability expansion rather than being perpetually constrained by external dependency.

Growing Salience of Ethnicity in the Contemporary World

Ethnicity increasingly acts as an effective political resource rather than a fading pre-modern remnant. In sociological theory, this reflects the instrumentalist perspective, where ethnic identities are mobilised by elites for material and political gains, countering primordialist assumptions of fixed cultural attachments. This is visible in ethnic nationalism and secessionist assertions in Kashmir and Northeast India, violent ethnic conflicts involving Sri Lankan Tamils and the Rohingya in Myanmar, and institutional accommodations like ethnic federalism in Nepal.

Under globalisation, instead of generating cultural homogenisation, hyper-connectivity stimulates ethnic resurgence. It fuels transnational ethnic networks, diaspora politics influencing homeland policies, and ethnic entrepreneurship in global markets. Concurrently, heightened migration has triggered a sharp backlash against multiculturalism in Western democracies, giving rise to nativist identity politics and defensive ethnic mobilisations.

These contemporary transformations across family structures, global trade, and ethnic identities demonstrate significant operational changes; however, they largely represent the adaptive reproduction of underlying patriarchal, core-periphery, and ethno-political hierarchies rather than their fundamental structural dissolution.