In the broad sense of a significant participation of India in world textile trade, the Indian textile industry had been ‘globalized’ in the last 350 years. The early nineteenth century, and again the period 1950-85, when the level of participation in the international economy retreated, would appear as brief interludes rather than turning points. The global humankind of the present times, of course, is a vastly different one from that of the late eighteenth. Investment, for example, is far more mobile now than before, and therefore textile manufacturing more dispersed, and more competitive.

One of the lessons of my study is that the dominance of the weavers can be seen as a constant across time. If we take a long view, the development of the weaving units would seem like an anomaly, remarkably long-lived historically, but eventually revealing itself a special case rather than the norm.

There is a need for structural changes in the weaving industry of Bangalore to favor the employees and employers. Few of these changes has to be made by the weavers only for their betterment, the rest is the Government’s responsibility to make the weaver’s life easy and smooth. The human resource management in the weaving units is in a bad shape. There are no basic functions of management -planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling of the human resource are present in the management of these weaving factories. It is accepted that these units are small-scale enterprises, but any business for that matter needs the intervention of management to be successful.

Future research needs to deal with this slow, decisive and many-sided transition in the weaving units and its constituents – from family to wage-labor, women to men and back to women again, settled to migrant, personalized recruitment to market-based hiring and contractual employment, personalized knowledge to market purchased skills, informal to formal training, simple tools to complex tools, and so on. The related transformation of the labor market has not necessarily involved a drastic move from the home to the weaving units. More often, it has involved a rather graduated shift from the home to the small handloom/ power loom workshop. Yet, it invariably means significant and sometimes permanent adjustments in labor-time allocation by the artisan household.