(a) What is Taylorism? Analyze its merits and demerits. (20 marks) (b) What are new religious movements? Elaborate emphasizing…

Taylorism, formulated by F.W. Taylor in 1911, is a system of scientific management that seeks to make work rational by replacing rule-of-thumb methods with engineered procedures. Its four principles are: develop science for each element of work; scientifically select and train workers; cooperate with workers to ensure work is done scientifically; and divide work and responsibility between managers and workers. It relies on time-motion studies, standardisation, and the separation of conception from execution, whereby planning is centralised in management and execution is reduced to repetitive tasks. In practice, craft knowledge is replaced by managerial measurement.

Merits and demerits Its merits are clear: it raises efficiency and productivity, reduces waste, and creates standardised methods that can be taught and replicated. For Indian manufacturing and SMEs, such discipline can improve quality, reduce costs, and help small units compete in organised markets. It can make production predictable for Indian SMEs facing regular demand. Yet its demerits are equally serious. By breaking tasks into narrow operations, Taylorism deskills labour, a point Braverman develops in her analysis of labour process. It also produces alienation in Marx’s sense, because workers lose control over the whole process and become appendages of machines. The same separation that raises efficiency also produces deskilling and alienation. The system can become bureaucratically rigid, resisting local knowledge and innovation, and it often provokes worker resistance, as seen in historical trade-union opposition to speed-ups and piece-rate systems. Resistance may appear as strikes, slowdowns, or informal sabotage.

New religious movements New religious movements (NRMs) are religious groups that emerge outside established mainstream traditions and are often defined against the older church-sect typology. Wallis classifies them according to their relationship with the world: world-affirming, world-rejecting, and world-accommodating. World-affirming groups seek to transform society; world-rejecting groups withdraw from or oppose the existing order; world-accommodating groups work within society while maintaining distinct identity. World-affirming groups may seek social transformation; world-rejecting groups may form separate communities; world-accommodating groups may negotiate with institutions. NRMs have grown in post-industrial and globalised contexts, where individualism, mobility, and spiritual searching create demand for new meanings. In India, ISKCON, the Art of Living, Brahma Kumaris, and the growth of Pentecostal Christianity show this diversity. Their orientations are equally varied: some are fundamentalist, insisting on exclusive truth; some are syncretic, blending Hindu, Buddhist, or local elements; some are therapeutic, offering meditation, yoga, or counselling; and some follow the prosperity-gospel, linking faith with material success.

Science, technology and taboos Science and technology address age-old taboos and superstitions by producing what Weber called disenchantment: the replacement of magical explanations with testable, rational ones. In India, ASHA workers using mobile health applications can explain child mortality, vaccination, or nutrition in evidence-based terms, weakening fatalistic beliefs. Satellite-based crop advisories help farmers decide sowing and irrigation, countering ritual determinism in agriculture. ISRO’s weather prediction and disaster-warning systems reduce dependence on omens or ritual interventions during floods and droughts. These interventions matter because taboos regulate food, gender, and farming.

However, the limits are important. Science can itself become scientism, a belief system that treats technical solutions as morally superior. Technology may reinforce new hierarchies through the digital divide, where the poor lack access to devices, data, or literacy. Superstition also persists despite literacy: in Kerala, temple-entry debates and menstrual taboos in modern workplaces show that scientific knowledge does not automatically erase social habit.

Thus, Taylorism, NRMs, and scientific temper are not isolated phenomena. They represent modernising forces in contemporary India: rationalisation in work, religious transformation in meaning-making, and scientific temper in public life. The challenge is to combine rationalisation with dignity, religious renewal with tolerance, and scientific temper with social justice. A balanced view accepts their emancipatory potential while guarding against managerial exploitation, religious exclusivism, and new technological inequalities.