Complex Division Of Labor Research Articles

R&D ecology: using 2-mode network analysis to explore complexity in R&D environments

It has been demonstrated that a complex division of labor provides for the diversity of knowledge that is critical for organizational innovation and productivity [Hage, J., 1999. Organizational innovation and organizational change. Annual Review of Sociology 25, 597–622]. This article examines the impact of complexity in an R&D setting and adopts the approach that collaborative research involves a range of specialties and skills, which can be viewed separately from the individuals involved in the collaboration process. To explore this hypothesis, the use of 2-mode network analysis allows for an examination of the interrelationships of these competencies within a cluster of R&D projects in a large multi-disciplinary national laboratory. These networks of competencies are shown to have structural characteristics, which impact on the productivity of research projects. It is argued that the interrelationship of network structure and complexity should be given consideration in the management of R&D projects.

Harnessing Corporate Power: Lessons from the UN Global Compact

Corporations are immensely powerful – and often abuse their power. Yet, Andrew Kuper argues, it is time to take corporate agency seriously as a central component of development theory and practice. This article draws out important lessons from the United Nations Global Compact with corporations, showing how corporate power can be harnessed and restrained to render globalization more just and inclusive. Kuper shows that we should change our approach to development in two ways. First, we need to redistribute responsibilities: Instead of assuming that the state is necessarily the most capable agent for delivering justice and reducing poverty, we can recognize the distinctive competences and responsibilities of non-state actors in advancing human rights and human capabilities. Second, we need to reconfigure representation: Instead of relying on elections alone, we can recognize and empower non-state actors to check and balance elected representatives in a number of ways. In contexts where states and elections are ineffective, or less effective than non-state actors, these innovations make it possible to allocate obligations more successfully, so as to create a new balance of powers. Within this complex division of labour, corporations can become agents of development.

O sistema econômico nas sociedades indígenas Guarani pré-coloniais

Reconstitui-se a modalidade doméstica da produção econômica entre os Guarani pré-históricos, integrando as informações arqueológicas e etno-históricas relativas ao passado, com os dados obtidos pela Etnografia e pela Etnologia sobre grupos Guarani mais atuais. Estas informações são avaliadas desde os referenciais da Antropologia econômica, permitindo reconhecer o sistema econômico Guarani como fundado nas relações familiares de produção, circulação e consumo de serviços/recursos/bens, subordinados pela lógica do dom e da reciprocidade. Analisa-se a economia guarani como um campo não-emancipado do campo social, estando a produção voltada principalmente ao abastecimento alimentar do núcleo doméstico, fundada sobre tecnologia simples, sem complexa divisão do trabalho e com relativa liberdade na utilização dos recursos. Conceitos de autores como Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, Maurice Godelier e Marshal Sahlins são avaliados em sua propriedade de aplicação ao caso da economia Guarani.

Levels of behavioral organization and the evolution of division of labor.

The major features of insect societies that fascinate biologists are the self-sacrificing altruism expressed by colony members, the complex division of labor, and the tremendous plasticity demonstrated in the face of changing environments. The social behavior of insects is a result of complex interactions at different levels of biological organization. Genes give rise to proteins and peptides that build the nervous and muscular systems, regulate their own synthesis, interact with each other, and affect the behavior of individuals. Social behavior emerges from the complex interactions of individuals that are themselves far removed from the direct effects of the genes. In order to understand how social organization evolves, we must understand the mechanisms that link the different levels of organization. In this review, we discuss how behavior is influenced by genes and the neural system and how social behavior emerges from the behavioral activities of individuals. We show how different levels of organization share common features and are linked through common mechanisms. We focus on the behavior of the honey bee, the best studied of all social insects.

Statism, Pluralism and Social Control

As we enter the twenty-first century it is appropriate to question whether social control through the legal order and institutionalized policing is effective and appropriate. As national societies have attempted to control and to protect against a wider range of contingencies, arising from a more complex division of labour, from changing social standards leading to higher expectations of health and welfare, and from new contingencies such as the threats of environmental pollution or the need to regulate information technology, so they have produced more and more elaborate laws. What Carl Schmitt called motorized legislation' has become a reality. It threatens the rule of law because the sheer volume of laws, their complexity and interconnection, and their constantly changing nature make the application of rules uncertain and knowledge of them, even by specialist lawyers, doubtful. Laws and subsidiary regulations cover kilometres of shelf space, and the operation of law becomes ever costlier--so much so that major companies are writing arbitration clauses into their contracts. At the same time most western societies have become more and more heterogeneous. In major cities diverse ethnic and lifestyle groups lead separate lives. Rules for one group about acceptable conduct will seldom entirely agree with another's--Born Again Christians and gays are unlikely to agree, for example. Outside of a thin core of public morality--almost everyone will agree that murder, theft and fraud are crimes--groups would be better off setting and policing their own standards. Citizens would have to accept that different rules applied to different communities with informal self-regulation and arbitration. Basing modern societies on communities of choice, democratically self-governing, would reduce the load of central inspection and rule making. This would both check rule proliferation and allow different groups to follow their own affairs. Laws could be simplified and, applied to a thinner core of common social life, could be more effective. Far from undermining formal law, community self-regulation could restore public confidence in it and by reducing the scale and scope of common rule-making and policing, make both more effective. Basing societies around plural self-governing communities of choice would enable individuals to exercise the option of doing things differently, but also offer the constraint of exit over excessive community regulation, since such obligations would be voluntary. Greater community self-control would tend to reduce inter-community friction, because individuals would not feel threatened that they would be the subject of legislation in matters of morals and lifestyles by artificial political majorities. The political doctrine for such a system of groups or community self-governance is called associationalism or associative democracy. Allied with the organization of public services and welfare on an associationalist model, community self-governance would strengthen the roots of modern social organization and make a virtue of increasing moral and value pluralism.

Inequality and the division of labor: the Davis-Moore theory reexamined

Social inequality has long been subject to theoretical dispute with moral and political overtones. The most recent debate was over the argument of American sociologists Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore that unequal rewards were ‘functionally’ necessary to maintain a complex division of labour. Their theory has gained new credibility as a market model of occupational selection assuming competition among self-interested individuals. Its abstractness and limited scope need recognition, but it remains a valuable starting point for the consideration of inequality.

ORGANIZATIONAL INNOVATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

▪ Abstract Three ideas—a complex division of labor, an organic structure, and a high-risk strategy—provoke consistent findings relative to organizational innovation. Of these three ideas, the complexity of the division of labor is most important because it taps the organizational learning, problem-solving, and creativity capacities of the organization. The importance of a complex division of labor has been underappreciated because of the various ways in which it has been measured, which in turn reflect the macroinstitutional arrangements of the educational system within a society. These ideas can be extended to the study of interorganizational relationships and the theories of organizational change. Integrating these theories would provide a general organizational theory of evolution within the context of knowledge societies.

The Baffling Case of the Smoking Gun: The Social Ecology of Political Accounts in the Iran-Contra Affair

Drawing on media coverage and the Tower Commission Report, this paper analyzes the social construction of political accounts in the United States Iran-Contra scandal. The scandal illuminates the dynamics of accounting within a political, organizational context. The analysis demonstrates how information management, a complex division of labor, and boundary control cloud governmental responsibility for the initiatives. Moreover, coverage of political accounts within established news frames highlights questions of individual responsibility and motivation. The political accounts are based on and reinforce underlying assumptions about the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements. Together, these dimensions form a social ecology of political accounts.

International trade and domestic politics: improving on Rogowski's model of political alignments

Ronald Rogowski's work offers valuable insight into the impact of changing trade exposure on domestic politics. Exploring the political implications of the well-known factor endowments model of international trade theory, Rogowski argues that owners of relatively abundant productive factors will form a free-trading coalition against owners of relatively scarce productive factors, who will align in favor of protection. Rogowski's parsimonious three-factor version of the factor endowments theory—although offering valuable insight into the politics of less developed economies, including today's developed economies in earlier centuries—produces significant anomalies when applied to advanced economies. Intuitive logic and empirical research, especially the Leontief paradox, suggest that the highly complex division of labor found in developed countries will confound the simplicity of the three-factor model. Edward Learner's multifactor model suggests solutions to the anomalies that afflict Rogowski's simpler model when applied to recent politics in the United States and Europe.

The Early Institutionalization of Congress

This study applies Nelson Polsby's conceptualization of an institutionalized organization to the first U.S. Congress. Polsby argued that the modern Congress is relatively well bounded; internally complex, with a clear division of labor; having well defined and universalistically applied rules of action. In a substantial way these characteristics also were present at the creation of Congress. Most importantly, it began with legislatively socialized members. Congress quickly developed a complex division of labor to produce sound legislation. Fair rules and even-handed presiding officers allowed minority views and majority rule. While substantial changes in its institutionalization have occurred in the two centuries since its founding, Congress assumed the characteristics of an institutionalized organization from the outset of its history.

Crime, Justice, And Underdevelopment: The Palestinians Under Israeli Control

Orthodox theories of crime in the Third World and in regions of uneven economic development offer a unilinear explanation of the relationship between economic development and increased crime rates. Simply stated, this Durkheimian position views the transition from traditional to modern society as being associated with the weakening of mechanical forms of solidarity and the emergence of secular and impersonal role structures based on a complex division of labor. Universalistic and achievement criteria replace ascriptive and particularistic values, and deviance-derived social control models based on formalized coercive sanctions substitute for traditional and community-based forms of control. Anomic behavior, frustration of expectations, and norm violation are considered an expected, if transitory, outcome of social change, and are explained on the basis of a clash between modern and traditional value systems.

Recent Neo-Marxist Urban Analysis

Despite Castells's (1976a,b,c) critique of the concept of and his call for a major reformulation of the subfield, many of the phenomena and issues studied by conventional urban researchers are also central to neo-Marxist urban research. These are studied with different analytical concepts, and often new results are produced; but as will be shown, there are also areas of agreement and convergence with conventional work. Neo-Marxist urbanists are critical of studies done by others, especially when the city or some aspect of it is viewed as separate from and independent of the larger society, when urban problems are viewed as discrete isolated phenomena, or when certain urban forms or processes are considered inevitable or universal. According to the neo-Marxists, conventional urban social science explains urban phenomena only partially, failing to identify fundamental causes. For example, a conventional explanation of US urban growth (Borchert 1967) emphasizes two factors, major changes in technology and population migrations, as principal causes of urban structural change. In a neo-Marxist analysis, however, these are not the underlying causes but instead are intermediate factors produced by something more fundamental, the basic requirements and social relations of capitalist production. In a neo-Marxist interpretation, important technological innovations, mass migration, and the urban transformations that accompanied them are all explained as results of capitalists' need for a large, cheap, easily controlled labor force and ever increased production. Another difference between conventional and neo-Marxist urban sociology lies in the latter's stress on the importance of class conflict. Conventional sociologists have emphasized urban communities' complex division of labor, which differentiates the population into interest groups, vocational types, and

Specialization, Market Exchange, and the Aztec State: A View From Huexotla [and Comments and Reply

Archaeological data from Huexotla, an Aztec-period site in the Valley of Mexico, are used to test the proposition that Mexican states arose and expanded to facilitate specialization and market exchange. By and large, this proposition is not supported by the Huexotla data. During Early Aztec times, the Valley of Mexico was divided into a number of small, autonomous city-states. The Huexotla data suggest that the local economies of these city-states were not characterized by a complex division of labor. Thus, their existence does not seem to have depended upon their facilitating specialization and exchange at the local level. During Late Aztec times, most of Central Mexico came to be dominated by the territorially extensive, administratively complex Aztec empire. The Huexotla data provide evidence of more intensive participation in market exchange, but they also suggest that urban demand for rural foodstuffs and urban control of imperial tribute goods were factors of primary importance in determining the La...

Sex Roles and Social Change in the Kibbutz

This paper asks what happened to the ideology of equality and why did men and women revert to traditional sex roles in the kibbutz. It suggests that in any society the most important single variable in explaining sex-role differentiation is the level of the division of labor in that society. In a simple economy, sex roles will be clearly defined, separating men's work from women's work, while in a society with a more complex division of labor, specializations will be created which will be filled by both men and women. Data comparing divisions within the labor force by sex in the kibbutzim and in Israel at large support this idea, showing that the gap between sex roles increased in the kibbutzim and decreased in Israel at large. This increase or decrease depended on the complexity of the division of labor in each society. Other historicalforces which affect the definition of sex roles also are discussed, raising the question of the future role of women in the kibbutz.

One More Time: Theories of Occupational Choice

Occupational Choice Personnel Planning and Occupational Choice The way in which people get into, stay in or leave occupations interests us all. Not least because each and every one of us is part of the work‐world: we have all experienced and gone through the process of entering an occupation. In addition our interest arises from an academic viewpoint. Western industrialized society is characterized by a complex division of labour. Associated with this form of social organization is the principle that types of work are related to the execution of specific tasks. The division of labour depends on the allocation of people into occupations: there must be a match between jobs or tasks and individuals possessing skills appropriate to the execution of such tasks.

China's Continuing Revolution: Will It be Permanent?

Research Article| January 01 1970 China's Continuing Revolution: Will It be Permanent? Gordon A. Bennett Gordon A. Bennett Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1941) 10 (1): 2–17. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642140 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gordon A. Bennett; China's Continuing Revolution: Will It be Permanent?. Far Eastern Survey 29 January 1941; 10 (1): 2–17. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642140 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Professional Pluralism in an Industrial Organization

Large, technologically-based industrial organizations are composed of many-specialist functions whose interests are frequently seen to be in conflict with those of management. Conflict within such organizations occurs over mutually dependent claims to shares of limited resources necessary to further specialist aims and programs. To understand the management process—the allocation of these resources—that takes place in such organizations the following points are crucial: (1) The technology-based organization generally has many “managements” that pursue goals relevant to their specialties (e.g. engineering or manufacturing). (2) Conflict occurs among managements over specialist interests that have often been described as professional interests. (3) Where specialties have become bureaucratized, where projects have a complex division of labor over both individuals and time, specialist interests will be protected not by professionals or the “profession” but rather by someone with formal executive authority who is responsible for a work force of specialists. For not only is the work force one of both managers and specialists, but their tasks are group tasks. Survey and interview data from one large technologically-based company illustrate the existence of horizontally contending factions rather than the customarily envisioned management-specialist schism. Specialists become managers and executives in order to perform “professional” functions.

Social Stratification and Membership in Instrumental - Expressive Voluntary Associations

PARSONS CONTENDS that every social system has two problems (functions) it must solve to survive.' One of these is to cope with the physical environment (the instrumental function), the other to control deviant behavior (the expressive function). In systems having a highly complex division of labor, the instrumental function becomes further differentiated into policy-making (goal attaining) and production (adaptive) functions. The expressive function often subdivides into pattern-maintenance (socialization of the young) and integrative (formal means of control) functions. Thus, subsystems develop and become organized around the fulfillment of these functions.

The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico.

Evolution of Urban Societyis concerned with presentation and analysis of regularities in two best-documented examples of early, independent urban society: Mesopotamia and central Mexico. It provides a systematic comparison of institutional forms and trends of growth that are to be found in both of them. Emphasizing basic similarities in structure rather than many acknowledged formal features by which each culture rendered distinguishable from all others, it demonstrates that both societies can usefully be regarded as variants of a single process. Generalizing, comparative analyses of origins of ancient civilizations in early anthropological studies emphasized diversity of their cultures rather than their similarities. As this volume illustrates, early societies, in actuality, provide a significant example of broad regularities in human behavior. emergence of states--of stratified, politically organized societies based upon a complex division of labor--is one of those great transformations that have punctuated human civilization. Adams shows why study of societal evolution so significant, and why it has remained a durable and attractive anthropological focus of interest. Originally published in 1966, The Evolution of Urban Society is based on a series of lectures University of Rochester in honor of esteemed anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. It remains required reading for students of anthropology, ethnography, ancient civilizations, and world history. As Elizabeth Carter noted in Science at time: Adams's The Evolution of Urban Society set the agenda for contemporary research into early urbanism in [Mesopotamian] region.

The Functional Theory of Stratification: Some Neglected Considerations

The functional theory of stratification advanced by Davis and Moore attempts to explain the universality and the necessity of inequality in with a complex division of labor, a task that is independent of efforts to explain the division of labor itself or the intergenerational perpetuation of inequalities along family lines. The theory is so general, however, that it excludes none of the Utopian models of classless societies proposed by Western thinkers and, its critics to the contrary notwithstanding, says nothing whatsoever about the range of inequality and the determinants of the range in concrete societies. The theory appears to understate the degree to which positions are inherited by failing to view in long-range historical perspective. In common with the arguments of its critics, it also ignores the possible disruptive consequences of mobility and equality of opportunity, a theme notably neglected by American sociologists.