The Division of Labor after Durkheim

Abstract

The “division of labor” is a concept referring to the way a society or social group organizes itself internally, but it is also used in contemporary terms to refer to Émile Durkheim’s seminal text on the subject, The Division of Labor in Society, originally published in 1893. In Durkheim’s analysis, the division of labor manifests in advanced societies such that professional groups do the work of separate sectors, and the group itself functions, it was assumed, more efficiently than if every individual had to perform every act on his or her own. The division of labor is not only the mark of an advanced society for Durkheim; he argues also that it is the very nature of social interaction, inherent in the workings of every social group and even in animal species. He suggests that the division of labor, or the separation of an organic whole into organized parts, is close to a biological imperative that enables the coherence and cohesion of a social order. Writing in the late 19th century, Durkheim does not dispute the evolutionary character of social groups, however; what differentiates different kinds of societies is the kind of division of labor they present. A primitive, or less differentiated, society relies on its relative internal sameness to produce what he calls mechanical solidarity; an advanced, or more individuated, society creates (through the difference between not only individuals but also between different subgroups, or occupational groups, within the larger social order) what he calls organic solidarity, in the sense that it may more naturally form an organic whole. The ways in which human societies come together form the mainstay of Durkheimian thought, and the discipline of sociology more generally. Durkheim’s concern with the relative strength or weakness of that social bond—always based upon the division between individuals, linked mechanically or organically—would remain the primary focus for his study of society, beginning with an analysis of difference and fragmentation in The Division of Labor in Society and moving, over the course of his intellectual development for the next two decades, to an analysis of the transcendence of those divisions. Society as a whole was understood as incorporating both individuals in their differences and social groups in their wholes: this project still grounds contemporary sociology, which attempts to understand the nature of collective formation at different levels and scales, through its analyses of solidarity and morality; law; economics and exchange; gender and the family; class and caste; and the nation, the state, and transnational forces as they respond to and produce the now global division of labor.