Breaking down the question
The question has a definitional core and an applied demand. First, it asks what is labour commitment — a concept from industrial sociology concerning the extent to which workers become bound to, and stabilised within, the industrial way of life and work. Second, the command word discuss is qualified by with reference to studies of manufacturing industry, so a competent answer must marshal empirical studies, not merely define the term.
The concept of commitment matters especially in the sociology of industrialising societies, where the central problem is how a workforce drawn from agrarian, peasant or craft backgrounds is transformed into a stable, disciplined industrial labour force. Labour commitment thus straddles two questions: the worker's performance of industrial roles and their acceptance of the norms of industrial society.
You should therefore define commitment carefully, distinguish its dimensions, and then ground the discussion in classic studies — Moore and Feldman's comparative work, the debates on the Indian factory worker, and related findings — before drawing a measured conclusion. For the wider context, see the note on labour and society.
How to approach it
Begin with a precise definition. Labour commitment refers to the process by which workers come to accept and sustain the discipline, routines and norms of industrial employment — attending regularly, staying in the workforce, and internalising the demands of factory life. Distinguish performance (doing the job) from commitment proper (accepting the industrial way of life), and note the classic distinction between the committed and the uncommitted or oscillating worker.
Then structure the empirical discussion around manufacturing-industry studies. Wilbert Moore and Arnold Feldman's comparative framework on labour commitment in developing areas is the anchor. Supplement it with the long debate on the Indian industrial worker — whether ties to village, caste and kin impede commitment — drawing on the findings that questioned the assumption of a permanently unstable, village-bound workforce.
Close by weighing the factors that promote or retard commitment — economic necessity, wages, housing, welfare, urban settlement, and the loosening of rural ties — and note that commitment is better seen as a matter of degree and process than an all-or-nothing state.
Model answer
Labour commitment is a central concept in the sociology of industry and of industrialising societies. It refers to the extent to which workers accept, and become stably bound to, the norms, discipline and way of life demanded by industrial employment. A committed worker is one who has severed, or substantially loosened, ties to alternative modes of livelihood — chiefly agriculture and the village — and who attends work regularly, remains in the industrial labour force, and internalises the routines of factory time, supervision and productivity. Commitment therefore has both a behavioural aspect, expressed in regular attendance and low turnover, and a normative aspect, expressed in acceptance of the values of industrial society.
The concept was given systematic form by Wilbert Moore and Arnold Feldman in their comparative studies of labour commitment in developing areas. They distinguished between the worker's mere performance of the tasks of an industrial role and the deeper commitment to industrial life as a whole. Performance can be secured by economic compulsion alone; commitment requires that the worker accept the new social order — its impersonal authority, its separation of work from home, its calculative discipline — as legitimate and permanent. Moore and Feldman traced a continuum from the uncommitted worker, who oscillates between factory and village and treats industrial work as a temporary expedient, through the semi-committed, to the fully committed worker for whom industrial employment has become a settled way of life. Commitment, in their account, is a process rather than a fixed state, generated as workers are progressively detached from traditional structures and absorbed into urban-industrial ones.
The manufacturing industries of industrialising societies provided the empirical testing ground for these ideas, and India furnished a rich and much-debated case. An influential early view held that the Indian factory worker remained essentially a peasant at heart — a bird of passage who kept one foot in the village, returned for harvests and festivals, remitted wages home, and never fully committed to industrial life. On this reading, the persistence of ties to land, caste and kin produced a chronically unstable, high-turnover, absentee-prone workforce, and traditional social structure was an obstacle to industrial commitment.
Later empirical studies of manufacturing complicated this picture. Detailed investigations of industrial workers — in textile and engineering establishments and in industrial cities — found that many workers were in fact settled, that turnover and absenteeism owed as much to conditions of employment, housing and wages as to any inherent village-mindedness, and that ties to the village could coexist with genuine industrial commitment rather than negating it. Scholars pointed out that maintaining a rural connection was often a rational response to insecurity — a form of social security in the absence of adequate urban welfare — rather than evidence of an uncommitted temperament. The village link, on this view, was a support for the worker's industrial existence, not merely a drag upon it. Studies also showed that caste and kinship networks could actually assist recruitment and adjustment to factory life, channelling workers into jobs and easing their integration into the urban setting.
From these studies several determinants of commitment emerge. Economic necessity and the level of wages are basic: workers commit more firmly where industrial employment offers a viable and secure livelihood. Stable urban housing and settled family life in the city loosen the pull of the village. Welfare provisions, job security and opportunities for advancement raise commitment, while insecurity, low pay and poor conditions sustain the oscillating pattern. Over time, generational change matters: the children of the first industrial generation, born and raised in the city, are typically more fully committed than their migrant parents. Commitment thus deepens as industrialisation matures and as the institutions of urban-industrial life become capable of supporting a settled workforce.
In conclusion, labour commitment names the degree to which workers accept and are stabilised within the industrial way of life, and the studies of manufacturing industry show it to be a matter of process and degree rather than a simple presence or absence. The early thesis of the eternally village-bound, uncommitted worker has been substantially qualified: traditional ties may impede commitment, but they may equally support the worker's industrial adjustment. Commitment is best understood as the outcome of an interplay between the worker's social background and the concrete conditions — economic, residential and institutional — that industrial employment offers.
Examiner's perspective
The examiner is looking for two things in balance: a clear grasp of the concept and a genuine engagement with empirical studies of manufacturing. Answers that define commitment abstractly and then generalise about industrial workers without citing studies miss the explicit instruction — with reference to studies of manufacturing industry — and forfeit marks.
The strongest scripts anchor the discussion in the Moore and Feldman framework, distinguish performance from commitment, and then use the debate over the Indian factory worker — the bird-of-passage thesis and its later empirical revision — to show that the relationship between traditional ties and industrial commitment is contested and complex. Noting the concrete determinants of commitment, and treating it as a process that deepens across generations, demonstrates analytical control. At twenty marks the answer should be substantial and well-illustrated, but empirical grounding and a clear line of argument matter more than length.