(a) Explain how economic globalization has brought changes in the patterns of employment in the 21st century. (20 marks) (b) Do…

(a) Economic globalisation and changing employment patterns

Globalisation, meaning the integration of trade, finance, production and information, has restructured work in the twenty-first century. Global value chains, offshoring and outsourcing have split production across countries, and firms have moved from stable Fordist jobs to flexible "just-in-time" labour (Castells's informational capitalism). Main changes follow.

Informalisation and casualisation. Formal jobs are replaced by contract, temporary and subcontracted work; in India about nine-tenths of workers remain informal, and organised firms use contract labour. Precarity. Guy Standing's "precariat" describes workers without job security, benefits or occupational identity. The platform or gig economy. Delivery and ride-hailing platforms classify workers as partners, without wage protection; India's Code on Social Security (labour codes in force since 21 November 2025) for the first time defines gig and platform workers and provides for welfare contributions, and Rajasthan and Karnataka have state laws. Sectoral shift. Growth of services, IT-BPO and global capability centres, alongside jobless growth in manufacturing. Feminisation. Women are drawn into export industries, garments and care work on lower pay and with weak protection. Technology. Automation and AI displace routine jobs, polarise the labour market and raise demand for skills, while remote work creates offshore digital labour. Labour-market effects. Bargaining power of unions falls, and outsourcing pushes down wages.

Globalisation has also created new jobs and export earnings, so the effect is polarising, not uniformly negative.

(b) Social media and forms of protest

Yes, social media has changed the forms of protest substantially, though not their causes. It lowers the cost of organisation, spreads information instantly and lets leaderless networks form. Bennett and Segerberg call this "connective action", organised through personalised sharing and hashtags, in contrast to "collective action" led by organisations. The Arab Spring (2011), Occupy and Black Lives Matter showed this globally. In India, the 2011 anti-corruption movement, the Jallikattu protests (2017), #MeToo (2018), the anti-CAA protests (2019-20) and the farmers' protest (2020-21) used WhatsApp, Twitter and YouTube to mobilise, to coordinate, to counter mainstream media and to reach the diaspora. Marginal voices such as Dalit activists gained a public platform.

But the change has limits. Gladwell and Morozov warned of "slacktivism", where online support does not become commitment. Zeynep Tufekci argues that fast mobilisation can leave movements without the organisation to bargain or sustain pressure. Algorithms and echo chambers polarise, disinformation spreads, and the state responds with surveillance, takedowns and internet shutdowns, of which India has had many. Access also depends on caste, class and gender divides. Street presence, organisation and institutional bargaining remain decisive. Social media has thus altered the repertoire of protest without replacing it.

(c) Frank's "development of underdevelopment"

Andre Gunder Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, 1967) argued against modernisation theory that underdevelopment is not an original stage of tradition but a product of the same historical process of capitalist expansion that produced development elsewhere. A chain of metropolis-satellite relations links world metropoles to national and regional centres and down to local peasants, and surplus is extracted up the chain. Satellites develop only when their links with the metropolis weaken, as in the Great Depression or the world wars; Latin American colonialism shows the pattern.

Strengths. It challenged the idea that poor countries only lag behind, brought history and imperialism into development studies, and inspired dependency and world-systems analysis.

Criticisms. Laclau and Brenner said it focuses on exchange and trade rather than modes of production and class relations within countries; it neglects internal factors such as domestic elites and state policy (Cardoso and Faletto's "associated-dependent development"); it is deterministic and cannot explain the rise of South Korea, Taiwan and later China, which integrated with the world economy and developed. It also offers a weak account of exit from dependence. The theory remains valuable on structure, but not as a full explanation.