Complex Division Of Labor Research Articles

Cultural Conventions as Group-Makers

Abstract In most literature on human cultural evolution and the emergence of large-scale cooperation, the main function of cultural conventions is described as providing group-markers. This paper argues that cultural conventions serve another purpose as well that is at least as important. Large-scale cooperation is characterized by complex division of labour and by a diversity of social roles associated with cultural institutions. This requires ubiquitous ‘role-interaction coordination’ – as it will be labelled. It is argued that without cultural conventions this type of coordination would be cognitively intractable. Thus, apart from functioning as group markers, they are first and foremost important group-makers.

Species- and Caste-Specific Gut Metabolomes in Fungus-Farming Termites.

Fungus-farming termites host gut microbial communities that contribute to the pre-digestion of plant biomass for manuring the fungal mutualist, and potentially to the production of defensive compounds that suppress antagonists. Termite colonies are characterized by complex division of labor and differences in diet between termite size (minor and major) and morphological (worker and soldier) castes, and this extends to the composition of their gut microbial communities. We hypothesized that gut metabolomes should mirror these differences and tested this through untargeted LC-MS/MS analyses of three South African species of fungus-farming termites. We found distinct metabolomes between species and across castes, especially between soldiers and workers. Primary metabolites dominate the metabolomes and the high number of overlapping features with the mutualistic fungus and plant material show distinct impacts of diet and the environment. The identification of a few bioactive compounds of likely microbial origin underlines the potential for compound discovery among the many unannotated features. Our untargeted approach provides a first glimpse into the complex gut metabolomes and our dereplication suggests the presence of bioactive compounds with potential defensive roles to be targeted in future studies.

Measuring the impacts of labor in the platform economy: new work created, old work reorganized, and value creation reconfigured

Abstract Though economists have examined labor displacement due to digitization, few have considered the new work and value created. Unlike employment relations that brought workers together on the assembly line or in an office in a previous era, platforms enable a greater, more dispersed, and complex division of labor. New and reconfigured types of labor enabled by platforms create identification and measurement challenges. Previous studies of platforms invariably focused on specific organizational forms such as sharing or gigs. They built taxonomies based on the platform's organization – few considered the scope and scale of platform-enabled value creation. To better understand changing labor arrangements in the 21st century, this article introduces a taxonomy to systematically understand work, employment, and value creation in the platform economy. We consider all of the platform-enabled value creation activities including old work displaced or reorganized to new work created. We provide suggestive evidence for the utility of our framework through case studies of Etsy and Amazon Self-Publishing in the United States.

How do team experience and relationships shape new divisions of labour in robot-assisted surgery? A realist investigation.

Safe and successful surgery depends on effective teamwork between professional groups, each playing their part in a complex division of labour. This article reports the first empirical examination of how introduction of robot-assisted surgery changes the division of labour within surgical teams and impacts teamwork and patient safety. Data collection and analysis was informed by realist principles. Interviews were conducted with surgical teams across nine UK hospitals and, in a multi-site case study across four hospitals, data were collected using a range of methods, including ethnographic observation, video recording and semi-structured interviews. Our findings reveal that as the robot enables the surgeon to do more, the surgical assistant's role becomes less clearly defined. Robot-assisted surgery also introduces new tasks for the surgical assistant and scrub practitioner, in terms of communicating information to the surgeon. However, the use of robot-assisted surgery does not redistribute work in a uniform way; contextual factors of individual experience and team relationships shape changes to the division of labour. For instance, in some situations, scrub practitioners take on the role of supporting inexperienced surgical assistants. These changes in the division of labour do not persist when team members return to operations that are not robot-assisted. This study contributes to wider literature on divisions of labour in healthcare and how this is impacted by the introduction of new technologies. In particular, we emphasise the need to pay attention to often neglected micro-level contextual factors. This can highlight behaviours that can be promoted to benefit patient care.

Arrogance and Humility in the Governance of Human Interaction: A Reflection on Roger Koppl's <i>Expert Failure</i>

Prevailing ideology holds that democracy is a system of government where people govern themselves. This ideology clashes with the unavoidable recognition that in any but small towns and villages governance is an activity wherein a few govern and the many are governed. This situation is an unavoidable feature of contemporary life with its elaborate and complex division of labor and knowledge. All of us are in the position of knowing a lot about a few things and little about most things. The central question Roger Koppl raises in Expert Failure is whether experts employ their expertise to the advantage of the general public or to the expert’s own advantage. Koppl advances strong reasons for being suspicious about the influence that experts exercise over the social organization of economic activity. In doing so, he brings us face-to-face with a perplexing conundrum: experts are indispensable, and yet operate within an environment that enables their biased use of that expertise.

Why Have Only Humans and Social Insects Evolved a Complex Division of Labor

Social species, those that have a complex division of labor, comprise a large proportion of the earth’s biomass. These social species – humans and social insects – are located at extreme points of the set of possible evolutionary paths. The queens of small social insects produce thousands of small larvae, whereas human females invest heavily in their children, who are born already with a very large brain. In spite of these and many other evident differences, social insects and humans have conquered the earth because they share two characteristics: a highly developed system of social cooperation, and a complex division of labor. These observations prompt two questions: If there are evident evolutionary advantages of cooperation and specialization, why have only few species been able to increase their fitness in this way? Why have these characteristics emerged as such extremely different forms of life? In order to answer these two questions, we will focus on possible “transition societies” in the evolutionary paths towards social species. We will argue that, in both the human and social insect cases, sexual selection had a crucial role in the development of the division of labor and entailed that the division of labor required either minimum or maximum unitary investments in the offspring. The species located in between these two extremes could not exploit the advantages of specialization.

Learning, gustatory responsiveness and tyramine differences across nurse and forager honeybees.

Honeybees are well known for their complex division of labor. Each bee sequentially performs a series of social tasks during its life. The changes in social task performance are linked to gross differences in behavior and physiology. We tested whether honeybees performing different social tasks (nursing versus foraging) would differ in their gustatory responsiveness and associative learning behavior in addition to their daily tasks in the colony. Further, we investigated the role of the biogenic amine tyramine and its receptors in the behavior of nurse bees and foragers. Tyramine is an important insect neurotransmitter, which has long been neglected in behavioral studies as it was believed to only act as the metabolic precursor of the better-known amine octopamine. With the increasing number of characterized tyramine receptors in diverse insects, we need to understand the functions of tyramine on its own account. Our findings suggest an important role for tyramine and its two receptors in regulating honeybee gustatory responsiveness, social organization and learning behavior. Foragers, which were more responsive to gustatory stimuli than nurse bees and performed better in appetitive learning, also differed from nurse bees in their tyramine brain titers and in the mRNA expression of a tyramine receptor in the brain. Pharmacological activation of tyramine receptors increased gustatory responsiveness of nurse bees and foragers and improved appetitive learning in nurse bees. These data suggest that a large part of the behavioral differences between honeybees may be directly linked to tyramine signaling in the brain.

Disengaging from the ultrasocial economy: The challenge of directing evolutionary change.

We appreciate the depth and breadth of comments we received. They reflect the interdisciplinary challenge of our inquiry and reassured us of its broad interest. We believe that our target article and the criticisms, elaborations, and extensions of the commentators can be an important contribution to establishing human ultrasociality as a new field of social science inquiry. A few of the commentators questioned our definition of ultrasociality, and we begin our response with an elaboration of that definition and a defense of our argument that human ultrasociality began with agriculture. We then respond to the second major area of controversy, namely, our use of group selection to explain the economic drivers behind the agricultural transition. We then focus on the issue of human intentionality raised by the phenomenon of collective intelligence. The intriguing question is to what extent can an entire culture change its own destiny? We then address the issue of the division of labor raised by a number of commentators. The complex division of labor was both a driver and a defining characteristic of ultrasociality, even though it was present in simpler forms in earlier societies. The remaining issues addressed include energy and complexity, expansion and sustainability, and the accelerating evolution of human ultrasociality. These were raised by only a few commentators, but their importance warrants further elaboration.

The economic origins of ultrasociality

Ultrasociality refers to the social organization of a few species, including humans and some social insects, having a complex division of labor, city-states, and an almost exclusive dependence on agriculture for subsistence. We argue that the driving forces in the evolution of these ultrasocial societies were economic. With the agricultural transition, species could directly produce their own food and this was such a competitive advantage that those species now dominate the planet. Once underway, this transition was propelled by the selection of within-species groups that could best capture the advantages of (1) actively managing the inputs to food production, (2) a more complex division of labor, and (3) increasing returns to larger scale and larger group size. Together these factors reoriented productive life and radically altered the structure of these societies. Once agriculture began, populations expanded as these economic drivers opened up new opportunities for the exploitation of resources and the active management of inputs to food production. With intensified group-level competition, larger populations and intensive resource exploitation became competitive advantages, and the "social conquest of Earth" was underway. Ultrasocial species came to dominate the earth's ecosystems. Ultrasociality also brought a loss of autonomy for individuals within the group. We argue that exploring the common causes and consequences of ultrasociality in humans and the social insects that adopted agriculture can provide fruitful insights into the evolution of complex human society.

Newcastle's long nineteenth century: a world-historical interpretation of making a multi-nodal city region

ABSTRACTWe describe and analyse how Newcastle was transformed from a relatively stagnant British city at the dawn of the nineteenth century to one of the most vibrant cities in the world by the early twentieth century. We use two frameworks to chart and explain this momentous change: Wallerstein's model of hegemonic cycles to locate Newcastle's late development in a world-historical context, and Jacobs’ theory of city economic growth to understand the processes of change within the city and its region. These lead to an empirical focus on three investigations: first, how Newcastle grew geographically to become a multi-nodal city region (Tyneside plus Wearside); second, how the Newcastle city economy grew and developed into a very complex division of labour; and third, how this generated a new modern metropolitan cultural world.

Softer: Looking for oxytocin in art therapy

Mentalising-based therapy approaches have advanced understanding of the role of the attachment system as a mechanism of change in verbal therapy. This paper outlines a neurobiological basis of attachment and identifies a comparative deficit in mentalising theory concerning the same in group art therapy. This highlights how problems of practice description for group art therapy might impact negatively on the potential for a future practice-congruent neurobiological sampling strategy. The paper details an exploratory experiment art therapists conducted on themselves using observational research methodology as a way of starting to address this deficit. Moments of trust were identified in art therapy as points where oxytocin may be activated. The interpersonal actions involving art-objects that facilitated those moments were then analysed as recorded on video. Mentalising through art-objects in a group appeared to involve a complex division of labour between participants but resulted in identified moments of therapeutic action. It is proposed that the description of this might form the basis for future neurobiological sampling and theorisation.

Dufour’s gland secretion, sterility and foraging behavior: Correlated behavior traits in bumblebee workers

Bombus terrestris colonies go through two major phases: the “pre-competition phase” in which the queen is the sole reproducer and aggression is rare, and the “competition phase” in which workers aggressively compete over reproduction. Conflicts over reproduction are partially regulated by a group of octyl esters that are produced in Dufour’s gland of reproductively subordinate workers and protect them from being aggressed. However, workers possess octyl esters even before overt aggression occurs, raising the question of why produce the ester-signal before it is functionally necessary?In most insect societies, foragers show reduced aggression and low dominance rank. We hypothesize that ester production in B. terrestris is not only correlated with sterility but also with foraging, signaling cooperative behavior by subordinate workers. Such a signal helps to maintain social organization, reduce the cost of fights between reproductives and helpers, and increase colony productivity, enabling subordinates to gain greater inclusive fitness. We demonstrate that foragers produce larger amounts of esters compared to non-foragers, and that their amounts positively correlate with foraging efforts. We further suggest that task performance, potential fecundity, and aggression are interlinked, and that worker–worker interactions are involved in regulating foraging behavior.B. terrestris, being an intermediate phase between primitive and derived eusocial insects, provides an excellent model for understanding the evolution of early phases of eusociality. Our results, combined with those in primitively eusocial wasps, suggest that at early stages of social evolution, reproduction was regulated by a “primordial division of labor”, that comprised foragers and reproducers, which further evolved to a more complex division of labor, a hallmark of eusociality.

Tactile Conditioning And Movement Analysis Of Antennal Sampling Strategies In Honey Bees (<em>Apis mellifera</em> L.)

Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are eusocial insects and well known for their complex division of labor and associative learning capability1, 2. The worker bees spend the first half of their life inside the dark hive, where they are nursing the larvae or building the regular hexagonal combs for food (e.g. pollen or nectar) and brood3. The antennae are extraordinary multisensory feelers and play a pivotal role in various tactile mediated tasks4, including hive building5 and pattern recognition6. Later in life, each single bee leaves the hive to forage for food. Then a bee has to learn to discriminate profitable food sources, memorize their location, and communicate it to its nest mates7. Bees use different floral signals like colors or odors7, 8, but also tactile cues from the petal surface9 to form multisensory memories of the food source. Under laboratory conditions, bees can be trained in an appetitive learning paradigm to discriminate tactile object features, such as edges or grooves with their antennae10, 11, 12, 13. This learning paradigm is closely related to the classical olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER) in harnessed bees14. The advantage of the tactile learning paradigm in the laboratory is the possibility of combining behavioral experiments on learning with various physiological measurements, including the analysis of the antennal movement pattern.

Tactile Conditioning And Movement Analysis Of Antennal Sampling Strategies In Honey Bees (<em>Apis mellifera</em> L.)

Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) are eusocial insects and well known for their complex division of labor and associative learning capability(1, 2). The worker bees spend the first half of their life inside the dark hive, where they are nursing the larvae or building the regular hexagonal combs for food (e.g. pollen or nectar) and brood(3). The antennae are extraordinary multisensory feelers and play a pivotal role in various tactile mediated tasks(4), including hive building(5) and pattern recognition(6). Later in life, each single bee leaves the hive to forage for food. Then a bee has to learn to discriminate profitable food sources, memorize their location, and communicate it to its nest mates(7). Bees use different floral signals like colors or odors(7, 8), but also tactile cues from the petal surface(9) to form multisensory memories of the food source. Under laboratory conditions, bees can be trained in an appetitive learning paradigm to discriminate tactile object features, such as edges or grooves with their antennae(10, 11, 12, 13). This learning paradigm is closely related to the classical olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER) in harnessed bees(14). The advantage of the tactile learning paradigm in the laboratory is the possibility of combining behavioral experiments on learning with various physiological measurements, including the analysis of the antennal movement pattern.

The Wise University or The Worst Market Failure is in the Allocation of Resources to Systems Thinking

How should the university respond to the ever more complex global division of labour in the global economy? This paper argues that the appropriate response is to progress in an opposite direction. Instead of being a clever institution, with an ever more complex division of labour, the university should become a wise institution, with an ever greater capacity for systems thinking. The paper demonstrates that the costs of inadequate system understanding can be enormous, and a most striking example of this is the fallout from the credit crunch of 2007. It is arguable that there is a severe market failure in the allocation of resources to systems thinking. If the greatest priorities for public funding are those where the greatest market failures are found, then investment in system thinking should be a top priority for the wise university.

Nursing a Grievance? The Role of Healthcare Assistants in a Modernized National Health Service

The complex division of labour in health care has encouraged the analysis of occupational boundary disputes between separate professions. Less attention has been directed at the divisions in individual occupational groups but in a context of intensive health sector workforce reform there has been a growth in lower status occupations. This article extends debate about lower status occupations by exploring the manner in which nurses and healthcare assistants engage in boundary work to advance their occupational interests. The UK government's modernization agenda has encouraged a more prominent role for healthcare assistants and the findings confirm that this agenda has reinforced occupational boundary disputes between nurses and healthcare assistants. Tensions between nurses and healthcare assistants took particular forms influenced by gendered notions of caring work. The consequences of these boundary management strategies in terms of work undertaken, pay and status are also explored.

Honey Bee PTEN – Description, Developmental Knockdown, and Tissue-Specific Expression of Splice-Variants Correlated with Alternative Social Phenotypes

BackgroundPhosphatase and TENsin (PTEN) homolog is a negative regulator that takes part in IIS (insulin/insulin-like signaling) and Egfr (epidermal growth factor receptor) activation in Drosophila melanogaster. IIS and Egfr signaling events are also involved in the developmental process of queen and worker differentiation in honey bees (Apis mellifera). Here, we characterized the bee PTEN gene homologue for the first time and begin to explore its potential function during bee development and adult life.ResultsHoney bee PTEN is alternatively spliced, resulting in three splice variants. Next, we show that the expression of PTEN can be down-regulated by RNA interference (RNAi) in the larval stage, when female caste fate is determined. Relative to controls, we observed that RNAi efficacy is dependent on the amount of PTEN dsRNA that is delivered to larvae. For larvae fed queen or worker diets containing a high amount of PTEN dsRNA, PTEN knockdown was significant at a whole-body level but lethal. A lower dosage did not result in a significant gene down-regulation. Finally, we compared same-aged adult workers with different behavior: nursing vs. foraging. We show that between nurses and foragers, PTEN isoforms were differentially expressed within brain, ovary and fat body tissues. All isoforms were expressed at higher levels in the brain and ovaries of the foragers. In fat body, isoform B was expressed at higher level in the nurse bees.ConclusionOur results suggest that PTEN plays a central role during growth and development in queen- and worker-destined honey bees. In adult workers, moreover, tissue-specific patterns of PTEN isoform expression are correlated with differences in complex division of labor between same-aged individuals. Therefore, we propose that knowledge on the roles of IIS and Egfr activity in developmental and behavioral control may increase through studies of how PTEN functions can impact bee social phenotypes.

The sociological citizen: Pragmatic and relational regulation in law and organizations

The sociological citizen: Pragmatic and relational regulation in law and organizations

Insights into the molecular basis of social behaviour from studies on the honeybee, Apis mellifera

The honeybee, Apis mellifera, has been the most important insect species for the study of social behaviour. With the recent release of its genome sequence, the honeybee has emerged as an excellent model for molecular studies of social behaviour. A key feature of eusocial species is a complex division of labour. Adult honeybees perform a series of tasks in the hive when they are young and then shift to foraging for nectar or pollen outside the hive when they are 2-3 weeks of age. This transition from working in the hive to foraging involves changes in the expression of thousands of genes. In this review, we focus first on recent advances in understanding of the widespread changes in gene activity that accompany the transition to foraging. Thereafter, we examine three genes in particular, foraging, malvolio and vitellogenin, all implicated in this striking behavioural change in the life of the honeybee.

Technology, Complexity and Information: The Evolution of Demand for Office Workers

This paper examines the effects of technology on information processing over more than a century, using industry-level variation in the demand for clerical office workers. Clerks are skilled workers who generate, store, and communicate information that is used by manufacturing firms to coordinate production. I find that production technology affects the demand for clerks. In particular, industries with a more complex division of labor employ relatively more clerks. I document this result using an early information technology (IT) revolution that took place around 1900, when telephones, typewriters, and improved filing techniques were introduced to the office. This IT revolution raised the demand for clerks in all manufacturing industries, but significantly more so in industries with a more complex division of labor. The increased demand for clerks raised the aggregate demand for skill, likely contributing to the onset of the High School Movement and to women's increased labor force participation. Interestingly, recent changes in IT have enabled firms to substitute computers for clerks, providing a concrete case in which technology and a specific set of skills are substitutes rather than complements.