Breaking down the question
The command word is describe, so the answer should set out, in an organised way, the defining features of how work is arranged in an industrial society. The object is the social organization of work — not technology as such, but the patterned social relations, roles and controls through which production is carried on. The note on the social organization of work frames the discussion.
The intelligent approach contrasts industrial work with the pre-industrial forms it displaced, since the "nature" of industrial work is best conveyed by what makes it distinctive — the factory, the detailed division of labour, wage labour, mechanisation and bureaucratic control. A brief evaluative note on alienation lifts a description into sociology.
How to approach it
Anchor the answer with the shift from agrarian and craft production to factory-based industry. Then describe the core features in sequence: separation of workplace from home, detailed division of labour, wage labour and the market, mechanisation and time-discipline, and hierarchical bureaucratic and managerial control. Illustrate control through Taylorism. Close with the sociological consequence — alienation and its later modification.
Model answer
The social organization of work refers to the patterned social relationships, roles, rules and forms of control through which production is carried on. In industrial society, work is organised in ways that break decisively with the agrarian and craft production that preceded it, and its nature can be described through several defining features.
Separation of home and workplace. Industrialism removed work from the household and the land to the factory, a specialised site where labour, machinery and raw materials were concentrated under one roof and one authority. Production became public and collective rather than domestic.
Detailed division of labour. The craftsman who once made a whole product was replaced by many workers each performing a narrow, repetitive task. Adam Smith's pin factory and Durkheim's organic solidarity both register this minute specialisation, which raised productivity but fragmented the labour process.
Wage labour and the market. Work became a commodity. The propertyless worker sold labour-power for a wage in a labour market, and the relationship between employer and employed became contractual and impersonal — Marx's relationship of capital and wage labour — rather than the customary, personal ties of the feudal order.
Mechanisation and time-discipline. Human effort was subordinated to the machine and the clock. The rhythm of work was set no longer by season or task but by the factory bell, imposing a new time-discipline and standardising the pace of labour.
Bureaucratic and managerial control. Authority was organised hierarchically. Frederick Taylor's scientific management separated the conception of work from its execution, timing and prescribing each movement so that control passed decisively to management. Weber's bureaucracy supplied the administrative frame — rules, offices, hierarchy — within which large enterprises were run.
The sociological consequence of this organisation is captured by Marx's alienation: divorced from the product, from the act of working, from fellow workers and from human potential, the industrial worker is estranged from labour itself. Later developments — the human relations school after the Hawthorne studies, and post-Fordist teamwork and flexible production — modified but did not abolish these features. The nature of industrial work thus remains one of specialised, mechanised, wage-based and hierarchically controlled production.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for a structured account of features, not a vague essay on industrialisation. The strongest answers list the defining characteristics clearly — factory, division of labour, wage labour, mechanisation, bureaucratic control — and give each a line of explanation.
What separates a good script from an average one in ten marks is the sociological framing: contrasting industrial work with pre-industrial forms, and closing with a theorist — Marx on alienation, Taylor on control, Durkheim on the division of labour. That analytical dimension shows the examiner the candidate is describing a social organisation of work, not merely a technical arrangement.