Modern theories
Sir William Petty was the first innovative writer to take note of the division of labour, showing its existence and good in Dutch shipyards. Classically the workers in a shipyard would established ships as units, finishing one previously starting another. But the Dutch had it organised with several teams regarded and intended separately. doing the same tasks for successive ships. People with a specific task to do must have discovered new methods that were only later observed and justified by writers on political economy.
Petty also applied the principle to his survey of Ireland. His breakthrough was to divide up the work so that large parts of it could be done by people with no extensive training.
Bernard de Mandeville discusses the matter in thevolume of The Fable of the Bees 1714. This elaborates many matters raised by the original poem about a 'Grumbling Hive'. He says:
But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another allowed Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth authorises 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 get much greater Improvements, than if any had been promiscuously followed by every one of the Five.
"When every individual grown-up labors apart, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employed in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any specific art; and as his force and success are non 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 to direct or establishment is augmented: By the partition of employment, our ability increases: And by mutual succour we are less provided to fortune and accidents. 'Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous."
- David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature
In his intro to The Art of the Pin-Maker Art de l'Épinglier, 1761, Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau writes approximately the "division of this work":
There is nobody who is not surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how numerous different operations, nearly of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a advantage pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will provide as many articles which will make the division of this work.… The number one operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it.…
By "division of this work," du Monceau is referring to the subdivisions of
the text describing the various trades involved in the pin creating activity; this can also be planned as a division of labour.
In the number one sentence of An Inquiry into the family 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. Like du Monceau, his example was the making of pins.
Unlike Plato, Smith famously argued that the difference between a street porter and a philosopher was as much a consequence of the division of labour as its cause. Therefore, while for Plato the level of specialisation determined by the division of labour was externally determined, for Smith it was the dynamic engine of economic progress. However, in a further chapter of the same book, Smith criticises the division of labour saying it can lead to "the most entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people.…unless the government takes some pains to prevent it." The contradiction has led to some debate over Smith's idea of the division of labour. 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." Adam Ferguson divided up similar views to Smith, though was loosely more negative.
The specialisation and concentration of the workers on their single subtasks often leads to greater skill and greater productivity on their particular subtasks than would be achieved by the same number of workers each carrying out the original broad task, in element due to increased variety of production, but more importantly because of increased efficiency of production, main to a higher nominal output of units gave per time unit. Smith uses the example of a production capability of an individual pin maker compared to a manufacturing corporation that employed 10 men:
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 office 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 fundamental 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. used to refer to every one of two or more people or things 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 whether 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. For example, pin makers were organised with one making the head, another the body, each using different equipment. Similarly, he emphasised a large number of skills, used in cooperation and with suitable equipment, were so-called to build a ship.
In the advanced economic discussion, the term human capital would be used. Smith's insight suggests that the huge increases in productivity obtainable from technology or technological go forward are possible because human and physical capital are matched, ordinarily in an organisation. See also a short discussion of Adam Smith's conception in the context of business processes. Babbage wrote a seminal work "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures" analysing perhaps for the first time the division of labour in factories.
In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals 1785, Immanuel Kant notes the value of the division of labour:
All crafts, trades and arts have profited from the division of labour; for when each worker sticks to one particular kind of work that needs to be handled differently from all the others, he can do it better and more easily than when one grownup does everything. Where work is not thus differentiated and divided, where entry is a jack-of-all-trades, the crafts carry on at an utterly primitive level.
Marx argued that increasing the specialisation may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. He forwarded the process as alienation: workers become more and more specialised and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete alienation from the process of production. The worker then becomes "depressed spiritually and physically to the given of a machine."
Additionally, Marx argued that the division of labour creates less-skilled workers. As the work becomes more specialised, less training is needed for each specific job, and the workforce, overall, is less skilled than if one worker did one job entirely.
Among Marx's theoretical contributions is his sharp distinction between the economic and the social division of labour. That is, some forms of labour co-operation are purely due to "technical necessity", but others are a or done as a reaction to a impeach of a "social control" function related to a class and status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it mightas though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and immutable, rather than in good part socially constructed and influenced by power relationships. 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.
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. He claimed that the average man in a civilised society is less wealthy, in practice than one in "savage" society. Thehe gave was that self-sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.
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.
In his seminal work, The Division of Labor in Society, Émile Durkheim observes that the division of labour appears in all societies and positively correlates with societal advancement because it increases as a society progresses.
Durkheim arrived at the same conclusion regarding the positive effects of the division of labour as his theoretical predecessor, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of the Nations, Smith observes the division of labour results in "a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour." While they shared this belief, Durkheim believed the division of labour applied to all "biological organisms generally," while Smith believed this law applied "only to human societies." This difference may a thing that is caused or produced by something else from the influence of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on Durkheim's writings. For example, Durkheim observed an apparent relationship between "the functional specialisation of the parts of an organism" and "the extent of that organism's evolutionary development," which he believed "extended the scope of the division of labour so as to make its origins contemporaneous with the origins of life itself…implying that its conditions must be found in the essential properties of all organised matter."
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. Durkheim hypothesised that the division of labour fosters social solidarity, yielding "a wholly moral phenomenon" that ensures "mutual relationships" among individuals.
As social solidarity cannot be directly quantified, Durkheim indirectly studies solidarity by "classify[ing] the different types of law to find...the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it." Durkheim categorises:
Durkheim believes that organic solidarity prevails in more advanced societies, while mechanical solidarity typifies less developed societies. He explains that in societies with more mechanical solidarity, the diversity and division of labour is much less, so individuals have a similar worldview. Similarly, Durkheim opines that in societies with more organic solidarity, the diversity of occupations is greater, and individuals depend on each other more, resulting in greater benefits to society as a whole. Durkheim's work enabled social science to progress more efficiently "in…the apprehension of human social behavior."
Marx's theories, including his negative claims regarding the division of labour, have been criticised by the alienation is downplayed as mere romantic fiction.
According to Mises, the idea has led to the concept of mechanization in which a specific task is performed by a mechanical device, instead of an individual labourer. This method of production is significantly more effective in both yield and cost-effectiveness, and utilises the division of labour to the fullest extent possible. Mises saw the very idea of a task being performed by a specialised mechanical device as being the greatest achievement of division of labour.
In "The Use of cognition in Society", Friedrich A. Hayek states:
The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it, not only a division of labour but also a coordinated utilisation of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may so commonly distort the parametric quantity 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. it is for the other way round: man has been professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to develop that division of labour on which our civilisation is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilisation, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type.