division of labor

(idea) by legbagede Wed May 31 2000 at 15:23:46

One of the main methodologies of industrial capitalism. By breaking down the mode of production into smaller units of work, which are easier to monitor and mechanize, the creation of complex material goods can be accomplished by the most de-skilled (and therefore unthreatening) worker possible. The process is particularly insidious when combined with the management streamlining of Taylorism, who took the assembly line ideas of Ford and added time-motion studies.

(...how many times can you turn that bolt in a minute? an hour? a day? Corporate consultants eat, breathe & snort Taylorism)

This break-up of work was initially applied to craft industries during the Industrial Revolution, then heavy & light industry through the late 19th & early 20th centuries, then many white-collar financial sectors beginning in the 1960s. These same processes are now being applied to the 'knowledge-based' industries by breaking coding down into tiny individual tasks, while also removing 'gatekeepers' of information (disintermediation).

Old example: The division of fry -cookers, drive-thru servers & burger flippers in every franchised fast food kitchen on the planet. Extra points to Burger King for actually taking the numbers & words off their cash registers so that they needn't even have people who can read.

New example: Major database vendors shipping HTML coding off to Singapore or the Philippines (because data entry people don't need to be able to read what they key-punch).

Further reading:

  1. Exploitation (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press International, 1997)
  2. Geographies of global change : remapping the world in the late twentieth century (Oxford : Blackwell, 1995)
  3. Commodity chains and global capitalism (Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1994)
(idea) by Loinen Thu Jul 05 2001 at 17:53:52
The division of labour is a bipolaric thing. It is the source of wealth but on the other hand it's also the source of alienation.

The division of labour enables people to specialize on certain things -- an occupation really comes a profession. Some people are more effective than others on certain things and they can exchange services creating more wealth (or create it in shorter time). There are thousands and thousands different jobs to do and it should be obvious that no one can master all of them. Therefore people are more and more interconnected and dependant on each others. This dependancy is highlighted every time when there's a strike.

If the division of labour was introduced in positive sense by Adam Smith, Karl Marx was one of them who offered a negative viewpoint. The division of labour is the most important concept in German Ideology. Marx claimed that the prevailing division of labour defines the prevailing relations of possession. For Marx communism meaned the end for the division of labour and thus work becomes spontaneous joy. A worker isn't just an extension of machine anymore but the work becomes the process of self-improvement.
All this is to say that a worker loses all interest in work if she is involved in the working process only by the tiny, specialized amount. A worker is alienated from final product and from the work itself as well. The work is nothing but the mean to earn money for her.
(We can again note that this is yet another Marx's concept that clashes with the official truth of soviet-communism..)

(idea) by creases Sat Jan 12 2002 at 20:38:36

Define your terms.

The division of labour is the distribution, be it spontaneous or centrally imposed (within the state or within the household), of different tasks to different people. "Division of labour" is simply a technical term in economics to describe the phenomenon of cooperation. Some people are better at defending the community, some people are better at agriculture, some people are better at crafts. Technologically advanced societies need to be complexly organized, thus creating a class of bureaucrats, managers, and entrepreneurs, but division of labour occurs in every society. In fact, it is the definition of "society."

As Ludwig von Mises points out in Human Action, there are three specific conditions that makes this arrangement desirable (157):

1: Different people have different abilities.

2: Different areas have different resources.

3: Some jobs require an effort beyond the capacity of a single person.

Because the first two conditions hold almost universally with respect to almost any endeavour, and because the third condition holds for most of those tasks which are required to maintain and advance our standard of living, we can expect the division of labour to be almost universal to human behaviour. And, in fact, it is: Every society, from "late capitalism" America to the simplest Eskimo band, has a division of labour of some sort. In simple societies, where economic tasks fall into broadly different types, the division occurs along lines of age, lineage or, above all, gender – this latter division being particularly convenient for a species with gender dimorphism as pronounced as humanity's.

It is tempting to say that a wealthier society demands a much more complicated division of labour, but this is getting the causal chain backwards. A more complex division of labour permits a much higher standard of living. At a certain point – very early on – a society will find itself with the potential to move beyond the point where any one person or central authority can organize it methodically. Historically, civilizations which reached this point have responded in only one way: by trying to organize it centrally anyway.

The results have invariably been civilizations that were frozen, unable to advance. The longest-lived civilizations, like ancient Egypt and classical China, remained at the same technological level for hundreds of years without significant technological or social change. They're the lucky ones; the unlucky ones fell rather quickly – getting conquered, unable to reorganize for war against a more fluidly organized opponent (Egypt, Rome, Aztec) or simply fading into mediocrity because their new policies make it impossible for subject/citizens to compete with foreign business (China, Britain). These societies did not do away with division of labour – they flash-froze it. This imposition made it a liability rather than a strength.

The whole point of capitalism is to make the division of labour a spontaneous response to the predicted rewards of the general public rather than the fiat of any oligarchy or ochlocracy, regardless of whether they claim to act in the interests of said public. This is effected via the market. In a free market, entrepreneurs, speculating as to the desires of consumers, offers the fruits of their labour; consumers offer credit in the form of money. A price is negotiated, and the entrepreneur uses the credit acquired to secure their own desires which, because of the time it took for their enterprise and because of their own natural deficiencies, they could not through their own labour. That's the theory, anyway.

In the case of managers, the service they offer is the organization and administration of a highly complex enterprise involving multiple tasks and therefore multiple workers. There are many ways they can go about doing this, depending on the task at hand, the people involved in the project, and their own abilities and preferences. In the Western tradition, the received way of doing this has been hierarchical management.

Hierarchical management is a management strategy in which an enterprise is split into the most economically convenient tasks, with workers being assigned roles according to the predictions of a central executive. Hierarchical management was the modus operandi of the Industrial Revolution; in the early 20th Century it was considered to have been perfected by Frederick Taylor.

As Michel Foucault points out in Discipline & Punish, hierarchical management was not invented by capitalists; it was invented by monks. During the "Classical" era of our civilization – ie., the "Enlightenment" – this particular technique for the division of labour came to be applied to almost every sector of life: the workhouse, the army, the orphanage, and above all the prison.

But surprise surprise: What was a great technique for the craft manufacture of diligent ascetics turned out to be mind-numbingly boring and demeaning for workers, and dehumanizing for orphans and prisoners. The constant examinations, the condescending managers who can't be bothered to reward initiative but who are all too eager to punish the slightest deviation from the prescribed regimen – these hallmarks of modern industry have caused so much suffering that the whole conceptual system with which they are associated, rightly or wrongly, has come under attack.

Capitalism is the name of the system which uses the free market as a tool for organizing a division of labour in a new, less wasteful, more peaceful manner than any other historical model. Hierarchical management, as it has been implemented in our civilization, is a grim tool for social control, a playground for petty people to trip out on power. It is one form of the division of labour, which is a precondition for the existence of society, but it is neither the best example, nor the only historical example. Other divisions of labour are possible within a free market. Confusing them is equally disasterous for supporters and critics alike, and attacking the "division of labour" on the basis of the flaws of hierarchical management is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(idea) by Tlogmer Thu Aug 15 2002 at 5:42:11

Alfred C. Méni's eyes, undimmed by the years, stared down at the scrap of paper his sweaty hands held, and slowly, slowly, a smile began to find itself among the folds of his face. Peters could see the thin lips part into an expectant grin, the creased lines stretch backwards and the eyebrows rise; and then, with a cry of absolute jubilation, the 80-year-old form of the world-famous physicist leapt two feet straight upwards onto the pressed leather chair and shouted, "Eureka!"

"What is it?" Jolston Peters had been leaning nonchalantly against the doorframe, but now he glanced up with a small amount of genuine curiosity accompanying his universal cynicism. He began to pick his way across the book-strewn floor.

Two years before, the standard model of physics had been shaken to its foundations by the first experimental evidence to contradict the basic assumptions of quantum mechanics, and the science world was in an uproar. The 5 minutes that passed from the moment the small, gnarled Salverson Dantham took to the podium, to the moment the thickly accented words, "Einstein and Bohr were wrong!" filled the listening ears of 500 physicists and the halls of the Geneva Academy, were the most momentous since Newton's brief experience under an apple tree.

Dantham's results were, quite simply, unexplainable. It had been a double slit experiment like any other, like the thousands that had come before, with 2 simple exceptions: This time, the experiment was performed at atrociously high energy levels. And this time, the pattern on the photograph was not one of wave interference, but the simple two slits of light indicating particle interaction.

The new results were not easily melded with existing knowledge. In fact, the scientific community could not find a single way to incorporate the data into the standard model; it was apparent that something was missing.

The experiment indicated an undiscovered particle, or force, or something affecting the behavior of light in that thin realm between the quantum and the relative - and it seemed that not a scientist in the world could figure out what to look for.

"I've done it, my boy." The bright glow of discovery had yet to leave, and Méni was scrambling down from the chair. He looked like Michael Jordan winning a game, like Charlie Parker finishing a solo; his face was alive with mathematical euphoria.

"Here, let me see that." Peters stepped over and looked across the shoulder of his teacher. The half-crumpled page was a jumbled scrawl of formulas and proofs, symbols that looked Greek but weren't, graphs and diagrams and charts and separations. Méni grinned and watched him catch the basic gist, watched him forget for a moment his carefully molded bearing and merely stare. Then, with a flash, the 22-year-old face lit up like an Olympic torch.


Eight months later, the new particle was discovered.

It was named after its renowned predictor, named in honor of the man who had died the week before, named the Ménian (Méni + suffix -an, for the particle was so fundamentally different from any previously found that its discoverers forewent the usual -on ending; pronounced with the nasal an in hand, accented on the last syllable). A grant typo called it the Méni-an, with the hyphen intact, and the name stuck.

And now the world knew.

Now it knew the truth, the revelation, it knew of the latest piece in the quantum jigsaw puzzle.

Now the world knew:

Méni-ans make light work.


To the late, great Isaac Asimov.
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