Geography and the Division of Labour

Abstract

The concept of the division of labour in production has a long genealogy stretching back to the seventeenth century and before, and it recurs repeatedly in the writings of economists and other social theorists down to the present time. In economics, the concept plays a major role in studies of industrial organization, productivity, and trade. In sociology, it has been of major significance as the linchpin of the distinction Wrst proposed by Durkheim (1893) between mechanical and organic solidarity in society. More recently, sociologists have also made considerable use of the concept in studies of the ways in which the division of labour is intertwined with phenomena like race, class, and gender (e.g. Mies 1998; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). Over the last couple of decades, geographers, too, have made numerous forays into questions of the division of labour and much research has been accomplished on how it ramifies with various kinds of spatial and locational outcomes (Massey 1984; Sayer and Walker 1992). In brief, the concept is of much importance in a wide range of investigations of social structure and dynamics, and it appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance at the present time as social scientists discover or rediscover how profoundly it ramifies with all aspects of modern life. For geographers, the division of labour has special interest and meaning because, in its role as a mechanism of economic and social differentiation, it is also a fundamental factor in moulding the economic landscape. A peasant society with only weakly developed divisions of labour is not likely to evince much in the way of spatial differentiation except as a function of dissimilarities from place to place in agricultural potentials (themselves related to such variables as soil, climate, and topography). By contrast, economically advanced societies with deep and wide divisions of labour, as in the case of the United States today, exhibit enormous degrees of spatial variation. With the passage of time, moreover, less and less of this variation seems to bear any relationship whatever to underlying conditions of physical geography.