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User:Mdd/Division of labor (chronological)

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Division of labor within a hunting group in the Stone Age.

Division of labor is the specialization of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and like roles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialization processes.

Quotes

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Quotes are arranged in chronological order in every single section

Ancient history

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  • Well then, how will our state supply these needs? It will need a farmer, a builder, and a weaver, and also, I think, a shoemaker and one or two others to provide for our bodily needs. So that the minimum state would consist of four or five men...
    • Plato The Republic, Page 103, Penguin Classics edition.
  • Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, plows and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts, Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best.

14th century

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  • Only those who were united by the same activity were left with the same language. There was one for master builders, another for all the stonerollers. … For all the different tasks that were present at that project there arose different languages which led to the disintegration of the unity of the human race.
    • Dante (1265-1321), describing the construction of the Tower of Babel, De vulgari eloquentia, 1.7.6, cited in Rhetoric As Philosophy (1980), p. 77
  • The power of the individual human being is not sufficient for him to obtain (the food) he needs, and does not provide him with as much as he requires to live. Even if we assume an absolute minimum of food...that amount of food could be obtained only after much preparation...Thus, he cannot do without a combination of many powers from among his fellow beings, if he is to obtain food for himself and for them. Through cooperation, the needs of a number of persons, many times greater than their own number, can be satisfied.
    • Ibn Khaldun 14th-century; cited in: A. Abdullahi & A. Salawu "Ibn Khaldun: A Forgotten Sociologist?". South African Review of Sociology. (2012) Vol 13.3. p. 24-40

18th century

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Plate on pin-making, from Diderot's Encyclopédie (1762)
  • But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously followed by every one of the Five.
  • When every individual person labours a-part, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employ’d in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability en creases: And by mutual succor we are less expos’d to fortune and accidents. ’Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous.
    • David Hume (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature . About "partition of employments"
  • The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.
  • To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker: a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth, part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.
  • There is nobody who is not surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how many different operations, most of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a good pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will supply as many articles which will make the division of this work... The first operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it.

19th century

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1800-1860s
  • The first application of this principle must have been made in a very early stage of society; for it must soon have been apparent that more comforts and conveniences could be acquired by one man restricting his occupation to the art of making bows, another to that of building houses, a third boats, and so on. This division of labor into trades was not, however, the result of an opinion that the general riches of the community would be increased by such an arrangement: but it must have arisen from the circumstances, of each individual so employed discovering that he himself could thus make a greater profit of his labour than by pursuing more varied occupations.
  • Thus we are brought to the third circle of this hell, which, perhaps, will some day find its Dante. In this third social circle, a sort of Parisian belly, in which the interests of the town are digested, and where they are condensed into the form known as /business/, there moves and agitates, as by some acrid and bitter intestinal process, the crowd of lawyers, doctors, notaries, councillors, business men, bankers, big merchants, speculators, and magistrates. Here are to be found even more causes of moral and physical destruction than elsewhere... Their genuine stupidity lies hid beneath their specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments...
  • The life that I aspire to live
No man proposeth me—
No trade upon the street
Wears its emblazonry.
  • Henry David Thoreau (1841), “Independence;” Cited in: Nancy Hale (1963), New England Discovery, p. 293
  • Condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too, be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands and is used (exploited) by this other. For this laborer in another’s service there is no enjoyment of a cultivated mind, at most crude amusements: culture, you see, is barred against him.
  • Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering.  Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs.  The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them.  Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges.  In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation.

    This natural organization is called society.

    The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs.  The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.

    • Gustave de Molinari, Huston McCulloch (tr.) (1977/2009) The Production of Security, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1977. Originally in French, 1849.
1870s
  • Those who tirelessly use the modem cry of battle and sacrifice “division of labour! Fall into line!” are for once to be told clearly and bluntly: if you want to further science as quickly as possible you will destroy it as quickly as possible; as the hen will perish if artificially forced to lay eggs too quickly. Granted, science has been furthered surprisingly quickly in the last decades: but just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens. They truly are no “harmonious” natures; they can only cackle more than ever because they lay eggs more often: of course, the eggs have become ever smaller (even if the books ever bigger).
    • Friedrich Nietzsche (1874), "On The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life", Untimely Meditations, P. Preuss, trans. (1980) § 7
1880s
  • Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, first published in 1886. I. Johnston, trans., § 212
  • The dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giant can indeed see further than his supporter, especially if he puts on spectacles; but to such a lofty survey is wanted the elevated feeling, the giant-heart, to which we cannot lay claim.
  • Life is diseased, thanks to this dehumanised piece of clockwork and mechanism, thanks to the “impersonality” of the workman, and the false economy of the “division of labour.” The object, which is culture, is lost sight of: modern scientific activity as a means thereto simply produces barbarism.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche (1888), Ecce Homo, A. Ludovici, trans., “Thoughts out of Season,” § 3.2.1
1890s
  • At this point, an urgent question arises: … Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?
    • Émile Durkheim (1893) , The Division of Labor in Society, G. Simpson, trans. (1933), p. 41
  • Nowadays, the phenomenon (of division of labor) has developed so generally it is obvious to all. We need have no further illusions about the tendencies of modern industry; it advances steadily towards powerful machines, towards great concentrations of forces and capital, and consequently to the extreme division of labor. Occupations are infinitely separated and specialized, not only inside the factories, but each product is itself a specialty dependent upon others. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill still hoped that agriculture, at least, would be an exception to the rule, and they saw it as the last resort of small-scale industry. Although one must be careful not to generalize unduly in such matters, nevertheless it is hard to deny today that the principal branches of the agricultural industry are steadily being drawn into the general movement. Finally, business itself is ingeniously following and reflecting in all its shadings the infinite diversity of industrial enterprises; and, while this evolution is realizing itself with unpremeditated spontaneity, the economists, examining its causes and appreciating its results, far from condemning or opposing it, uphold it as necessary. They see in it the supreme law of human societies and the condition of their progress.
Undetermined
  • Lately people are saying that the reason for the success of manufacturing is the division of labor. We say "division of labor," but this term is incorrect. In our society it is not labor that is divided, but human beings — these are divided into human particles, broken into small pieces, ground into dust: in a factory one man makes only one minute portion of an article, because that tiny fragment of reason which he retains is insufficient to make a complete pin or a complete nail, and is exhausted in the task of pointing the pin or heading the nail. It is true that it is good and desirable to make as many pins daily as possible, but if we realized the material with which we finish them, we would realize how unprofitable it all is. It is unprofitable because we polish them with the dust of the human soul.
It is this humiliating transformation of men into machines [caused by the “division of labor”] that causes workers to dumbly, destructively, and vainly fight for a freedom whose essence they themselves do not understand. Their hatred of wealth and the ruling classes is not evoked by the pangs of hunger nor by the pinpricks of offended pride. … It is not that people do not have enough to eat, but that they do not get any satisfaction out of the work they do to earn their bread. Therefore, they regard money as the only means of achieving satisfaction. It is not that people suffer from the contempt of the upper classes, but that they cannot stand their own self-contempt based on their feeling that the work to which they are condemned denigrates and deforms them into something less than human.
  • John Ruskin (1819–1900), as cited in Tolstoy, Path of Life, M. Cote, trans. (2002), p. 79
  • Division of labor is a justification for sloth.
    • Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Path of Life, M. Cote, trans. (2002), p. 79

20th century, first half of the 20th century

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1910s
  • Early British economists held that the application of the principle of division of labor was the basis of manufacture.... Charles Babbage, believed ... in [an] "Economy of Machinery and Manufacture." It appears, however, that another principle is the basic one in the rise of industry. It is the transference of skill. The transference of skill from the inventor or designer to the power-driven mechanism brought about the industrial revolution from handicraft to manufacture. It will be necessary to refer to this principle frequently throughout this report, in showing the meaning and position of management in industry.
No better single illustration of the application of this principle can be found than in the invention of the lathe slide rest by Henry Maudslay in 1794. This has been ranked as second only to the steam engine in its influence on machinery building, and thus on industrial development. The simple, easily controlled mechanical movements of the slide rest were substituted for the skilful human control of hand tools. So complete has been this transference of skill that today hand tooling is a vanished art in American machine shops.
  • The underlying principle of specialization is division of labor; but the term division of labor has become associated with the individual worker, whereas specialization is, in general, far reaching in its effects, and influences industrial enterprises of all kinds.
    • Dexter S. Kimball, Principles of industrial organization. New York : McGraw-Hill, 1913; 1919, p. 37
  • The term division of labor has, from long usage, become associated in the public mind with manual processes. But productive labor is, in general, both manual and mental and just as there may be division of manual labor so there may be division of mental labor or division of thought. Modern productive methods tend constantly to separate mental labor from manual labor and then to subdivide each into smaller and smaller parts. The subdivision of manual labor is greatly furthered, as has been seen, by the extended use of tools. Subdivision of mental labor on the other hand is hastened by an increase in the amount of knowledge and mental development necessary to successfully perform the work in hand. Thus the mental labor of designing machinery is performed largely apart from the actual production; and this mental labor has become very closely specialized as the scientific basis of engineering has grown. This process of subdivision is greatly hastened in both manual and mental operations by increased quantity since this, of itself, enables the manager to avail himself of the inherent advantages of division of labor already discussed.
    • Dexter S. Kimball, Principles of industrial organization. New York : McGraw-Hill, 1913; 1919
1940s
  • The more heavily the process of self-preservation is based on the bourgeois division of labor, the more it enforces the self-alienation of individuals, who must mold themselves to the technical apparatus body and soul.
  • With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, be synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.

20th century, Second half of the 20th century

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1950s
  • The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist.
    • Theodor Adorno (1951), Minima Moralia, E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1
  • The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.
    • Theodor Adorno (1951), Minima Moralia, E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 1
1960s
  • The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group.
  • The last of Smith’s regrettable failures is one for which he is overwhelmingly famous – the division of labor. How can it be that the famous opening chapters of his book, and the pin factory he gave immortality, can be considered a failure? Are they not cited as often as any passages in all economics? Indeed, over the generations they are. The failure is different: almost no one used or now uses theory of division of labor, for the excellent reason that there is scarcely such a theory. … there is no standard, operable theory to describe what Smith argued to be the mainspring of economic progress. Smith gave the division of labor an immensely convincing presentation – it seems to me as persuasive a case for the power of specialization today as it appeared to Smith. Yet there is no evidence, so far as I know, of any serious advance in theory of the subject since his time, and specialization is not an integral part of the modern theory of production, which may well be an explanation for the fact that the modern theory of economies of scale is little more than a set of alternative possibilities.
    • George Stigler (1976). “The Successes and Failures of Professor Smith”. Journal of Political Economy, 84, 1199-1213
1970s
  • This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
    Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
  • According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal, by contrast, Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.
1980s
  • The prevailing situation of criticism ... This has given rise to a cult of professional expertise whose effect in general is pernicious. For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society. This is the trahison des clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 1920s. Expertise in foreign affairs, for example, has usually meant the legitimization of the conduct of foreign policy and, what is more to the point, a sustained investment in revalidating the role of experts in foreign affairs. The same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertise is based upon noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called “the world.” We tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place. ...
Humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that ... cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.
  • Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 2-3
  • The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ...
Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.
  • Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4
1990s
  • I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and that you couldn't replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do things that no number of average people could do.
    • Steve Jobs, quoted in Steve's Two Jobs, Time (Michael Krantz, Oct. 18, 1999); cited in: QFinance, the ultimate resource London: Bloomsbury. 2009. p. 1760.
  • International specialization and division of labor requires institutions and organizations to safeguard property rights across international boundaries so that capital markets as well as other kinds of exchange can take place with credible commitment on the part of the players.
    • Douglass C. North (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance p. 121
  • If a man is trained, purely and simply, to be expert and contented in a particular task he will not innovate; Freud would have remained an anatomist, Marx a philosopher, Darwin a field-naturalist.

21st century

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  • As a result of this continuous improvement of productivity through the division of labor and technical advancement, one hour's labor today is worth about 25 times more than it was in the mid-19th century [....] Growth and productivity alone are capable of raising real wages in the long run.
  • A second, related assumption of modern progress-philosophy is that intellectual production functions in essentially the same way as economic production: the progress of both results from “teamwork,” from the practice of the division of labor or specialization within a group. And just as the essential precondition of the economic division of labor is exchange, so the precondition of intellectual specialization is the efficient exchange of knowledge—through publication.
    • Arthur Melzer (2007) “On the Pedagogical Motive for Esoteric Writing” The Journal of Politics, Volume 69, Issue 4, pp. 1015 - 1031
  • The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorized that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. … But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask … how meaningful the lives might feel as a result.
    • Alain de Botton, describing a biscuit manufacturer in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 76-77
  • The love of wisdom in its wholeness requires exploration of the sources of the things we take for granted, including the thinking that has sorted out all the various disciplines, making demarcations between fields as well as envisioning what is to be done within them.

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
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