SOCIOLOGY AND STUDIES ON WOMEN 23 subjectivism. Thus variables and indices are chosen in a chaotic and arbitrary manner. Madan and Verma's comments are illustrative: "Because of its multi-dimensional character development does not lend itself to emprical investigation as a totality. A more manageable procedure is therefore to choose only one particular aspect of it for study and to add to that some other suitably selected dimension as an explanatory variable."5 Social analysis boils down to "manageable procedure" and "explanatory variables". The pity of it is that while American sociology has fallen prey to what Becker called "measurement fadism" using popular tools of measurement, Indian sociology cannot even claim to use any vigorous statistical measurement. Most studies thus become statistically insignificant and theoretically questionable. Since contemporary events are more likely to provide the kind of data needed, the approach involves a shift of emphasis from history to studies of human behaviour, which is afterwards reduced to what is called "psychologism", to the neglect of the social aspect. Statistical correlations are passed off as sociological explanation. Attitudinal responses are deemed more important than structural changes. The lapses of the modernisation model can be traced to the idealist tradition of Western epistemology. Bogged down in a structural functionalist framework (notably Parsons') it is obsessed with the mutual compatibility—the structural imperatives—of the various parts of society. For example, in a modernised society, the "instrumental role" of the man earning a living in the competitive world is set off with the "expressive role" of the woman providing "affectively" rewarding functions in the form of secure domesticity. This perhaps leads us to a clue as to why Indian women's studies are so full of 'role conflict5 studies. Its basic idealist premises also lead to an untenable emphasis on the 'values' of role incumbents as heralders of modernisation process. The methodological argument of modernisation theories, in other words, seems to be based on the assumption that a modern set of "pattern variables" initiating role change—action patterns—would in turn send reverberations through the entire social, cultural and political structure of developing societies. Women^s Studies: Choice of Research Area Abiding, as they do, by the basic tenet that 'modernisation' is all beneficial it is no surprise that the sociological literature on women gives the impression that the status of the Indian woman has undergone a marked improvement. Modernisation, it seems, has ushered in a new era for the Indian woman. The view tends to confirm certain widely held beliefs about the increasingly active role women are playing in various spheres of public and professional life. However, the only observable hitch appears to be the dual role of the