Aardra Surendran
Global transformations in the organization of production and deployment of labour have generated newer questions within the sociology of work, accompanied by new concepts and theoretical approaches. However, confronted by the ever-expanding and hyper-dynamic ambit of capitalism and its tendency to selectively replicate, modify, or transform historical or familiar scripts, scholars are also contemplating the re-deployment of classical concepts and categories. In this chapter, I introduce and outline two important theoretical contributions to the understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the intent of facilitating a dialogue between the two. This will provide a more theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded platform to capture the complex world of women's work in India, mindful of both global shifts and local inequalities. In doing this, I first trace early feminist debates on the distinction between productive and reproductive labour within conventional analyses of capitalism, and their failure to adequately represent capitalism outside its historic epicentres. Within this literature, I then locate the renewed interest in social reproduction as central to understanding value generation within capitalism, manifest in current iterations of the social reproduction theory (SRT). As a second step, and in a similar vein, I catalogue developments within the labour process theory (LPT), a body of work that emerged within the political economy and sociology of industrial labour primarily in Europe and North America, which emphasizes the actual processes undertaken by capitalism for the extraction of labour power from the worker.