Division of labour

The concept and implementation of division of labour has been observed in ancient Sumerian (Mesopotamian) culture, where assignment of jobs in some cities coincided with an increase in trade and economic interdependence.

So that the minimum state would consist of four or five men....Silvermintz (2010) noted that "Historians of economic thought credit Plato, primarily on account of arguments advanced in his Republic, as an early proponent of the division of labour.

In small towns the same man makes couches, doors, ploughs and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself.

In a brief passage of his The City of God, Augustine seems to be aware of the role of different social layers in the production of goods, like household (familiae), corporations (collegia) and the state.

The similarity of the examples provided by these scholars with those provided by Adam Smith (such as al-Ghazali's needle factory and Tusi's claim that exchange, and by extension the division of labour, are the consequences of the human reasoning capability and that no animals have been observed to exchange one bone for another) led some scholars to conjecture that Smith was influenced by the medieval Persian scholarship.

[5] Sir William Petty was the first modern writer to take note of the division of labour, showing its has worth in existence and usefulness in Dutch shipyards.

He says: 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 labors apart, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labor being employed 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.

By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employments, our ability increases: And by mutual succor we are less exposed to fortune and accidents.

- David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature In his introduction to The Art of the Pin-Maker (Art de l'Épinglier, 1761),[6] Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau writes about the "division of this work":[6] There is nobody who isn't 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.

In the first sentence of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith foresaw the essence of industrialism by determining that division of labour represents a substantial increase in productivity.

However, in a further chapter of the same book, Smith criticised the division of labour, saying that it makes man "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" and that it can lead to "the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.…unless government takes some pains to prevent it.

[8] Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with Smith: "Nothing tends to materialize man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor.

[11] Smith uses the example of a production capability of an individual pin maker compared to a manufacturing business that employed 10 men:[12]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.

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.Smith saw the importance of matching skills with equipment—usually in the context of an organisation.

Babbage wrote a seminal work "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures" analysing perhaps for the first time the division of labour in factories.

[17] That is, some forms of labour co-operation are purely due to "technical necessity", but others are a result of a "social control" function related to a class and status hierarchy.

He also argues that in a communist society, the division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human development occurs where people fully express their nature in the variety of creative work that they do.

[18] Henry David Thoreau criticised the division of labour in Walden (1854), on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large, including nature.

[19] Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, criticised the division of labour in his "The American Scholar" speech: a widely informed, holistic citizenry is vital for the spiritual and physical health of the country.

"[22] Since Durkheim's division of labour applied to all organisms, he considered it a "natural law" and worked to determine whether it should be embraced or resisted by first analysing its functions.

[22] Durkheim hypothesised that the division of labour fosters social solidarity, yielding "a wholly moral phenomenon" that ensures "mutual relationships" among individuals.

"[27] Marx's theories, including his negative claims regarding the division of labour, have been criticised by the Austrian economists, notably Ludwig von Mises.

The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilisation.

[30][31] The OECD advised in June 2005[32] that: Efficient policies to encourage employment and combat unemployment are essential if countries are to reap the full benefits of globalisation and avoid a backlash against open trade... Job losses in some sectors, along with new job opportunities in other sectors, are an inevitable accompaniment of the process of globalisation...

The challenge is to ensure that the adjustment process involved in matching available workers with new job openings works as smoothly as possible.Few studies have taken place regarding the global division of labour.

The industry sector accounted for 21.3 per cent of total employment.In the modern world, those specialists most preoccupied in their work with theorising about the division of labour are those involved in management and organisation.

[36] It is widely accepted among economists and social theorists that the division of labour is, to a great extent, inevitable within capitalist societies, simply because no one can do all tasks at once.

[37] This claim, however, is often disputed by various sources, particularly: Adam Smith famously said in The Wealth of Nations that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.

These entailments do not restrict how much work for any given task could be done by men (e.g., in cooking) or by women (e.g., in clearing forests), but are only least-effort or role-consistent tendencies.

Modern communication technologies, particularly the Internet, gave rise to the sharing economy, which is orchestrated by online marketplaces for various kinds of disaggregated work.