Social Division Of Labor Research Articles

Strong growth in weakly-developed networks: Producer–user interaction and knowledge brokers in the Greater Shanghai chemical industry

This paper investigates the developing spatial and social division of labor in the Greater Shanghai chemical industry. This industry experienced strong growth after the Asian financial crisis, when policy support was extended beyond “new economy” industries to include traditional manufacturing sectors. Based on a conceptualization that emphasizes the role of producer–user networks and interactive learning as a basis for ongoing innovation and business success, an explorative study was designed to investigate the supplier and customer linkages in different locations of the Greater Shanghai region. The results suggest that inter-firm networks are not extensive and often involve limited producer–user interaction. Important chemical firms in the region concentrate on business with their established international customer basis, use state-controlled distribution channels or rely on intermediaries that act as knowledge brokers. Neither of these practices of market interaction includes intensive information exchange and feedback on products, customer experience and demand changes. As such, these practices do not provide a sound basis for self-sustained growth or innovation in the future. The paper concludes that regional policy needs to support the establishment of combined “bonding” and “bridging” relations between chemical producers and their user industries.

Decompartmentalizing the sociology of activist commitment. A critical survey of some recent trends in French research

This article is a critical survey of a field of research that for 20 years has been particularly active in France and is once again gaining momentum: the sociology of activist commitment. An outcome of this sociological current was the inter-actionist paradigm, i.e. how activists’ careers are embarked upon and evolve. The notion of how to reward activism has been refined and reconsidered. Theoretical debates relating to the surfacing – or not – of “new forms” of activism – or even “new activists” – are replaced in perspective and the two challenges that confront research today stressed. Both concern the social division of labor: how to account more thoroughly for the link between macro-social transformations and individual commitment, on one hand, how organizations are instrumental in formatting activism, on the other.

Mars is close to venus – Female reproductive proteins are expressed in the fat body and reproductive tract of honey bee ( Apis mellifera L.) drones

Vitellogenin (Vg) and lipophorin (Lp) are lipoproteins which play important roles in female reproductive physiology of insects. Both are actively taken up by growing oocytes and especially Vg and its receptor are considered as female-specifically expressed. The finding that the fat body of in honey bee ( Apis mellifera) drones synthesizes Vg and is present in hemolymph has long been viewed as a curiosity. The recent paradigm change concerning the role played by Vg in honey bee life history, especially social division of labor, has now led us to investigate whether a physiological constellation similar to that seen in female reproduction may also be represented in the male sex. By means of Western blot analysis we could show that both Vg and Lp are present in the reproductive tract of adult drones, including the accessory (mucus) glands, but apparently are not secreted. Furthermore, we analyzed the transcript levels of the genes encoding these proteins ( vg and lp), as well as their putative receptors ( Amvgr and Amlpr) in fat body and accessory glands. Whereas lp, vg and Amlpr transcript levels decreased with age in both tissues, Amvgr mRNA levels increased with age in fat body. To our knowledge this is the first report that vitellogenin and its receptor are co-expressed in the reproductive system of a male insect. We interpret these findings as a cross-sexual transfer of a social physiological trait, associated with the rewiring of the juvenile hormone/vitellogenin circuitry that occurred in the female sex of honey bees.

The Rural Market in Late Imperial China

The rural market was an important constituent of marketing system, and formed an un-vertical congruent relationship with urban market in late imperial China. There were different types of rural fair in the imperial China. Xu, Chang, Ji, Dian, Shi, Hui, all of them were the regular fairs. Their number was huge. They distributed widely, played a distinct role, and became the base of rural market development. During Tang and Song dynasties, county seat, town or village had some regular fairs. They were more and more developed during Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. In the late imperial China, the establishment or abolishment of rural regular fair must been approved by local magistrate, such as magistrate of a county. Equally important, the clan and Gentleman played the crucial role in rural market. On the whole, the network of rural fairs began to take shape in the most regions from Qianlong to Daoguang reigning years of the Qing Dynasty. The professional markets in rural society included two kinds: professional town and professional fair. The emergence of professional markets in rural society was the inevitable result of enlargement of cash crops planting and development of social division of labor, and helped in the shaping of specialized region which centered on cash farming.

Smiling down the line: info-service work in the global economy

List of Tables and Figures List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments 1. New Workplaces: The Call Centre 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The Three Changes 1.2.1 ICTs and the Technical Division of Labour 1.2.2 Globalization and the Social Division of Labour 1.2.3 Beyond Consent? Managerialism and Human Resource Management 1.3 The Rest of the Book 2. The Call-Centre Case Studies 2.1 Studying Call Centres: Methodological Matters 2.2 The Centres 2.3 Summary 3. Making a New Occupation 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The Recruitment and Selection of Call Centre Labour 3.3 Employment Status 3.4 Training 3.5 'Shall I Stay or Shall I Go?': Attrition and Retention in Call Centres 4. The Call-Centre Labour Process (1): The Division of Labour, Work Effort, and Job Skill 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Experiencing the Labour Process: Work Intensity and the Effort Bargain 4.3 Call Centres and Job Skills 4.4 Emotional Labour in Call Centres 4.5 Conclusions 5. The Call-Centre Labour Process (2): Technological Selection and the Means of Communication in Info-Service Work 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Theoretical Issues 5.3.1 The Case Study: What Did Management Want? 5.3.2 Between the Cup and the Lip: The Adoption of CMS 5.4 Conclusions 6. HRM and Call Centres: Culture and Identities 6.1 Introduction 6.2 HRM in Call Centres 6.3 Identity in the Call Centre 6.4 Accounting for Organizational Identities 6.5 Conclusions 7. Globalizing Info-Service Work: Outsourcing to India (with Mohan Thite) 7.1 Introduction 7.2 The BPO Case Studies 7.3 Skills and the Global Division of Labour 7.4 Work Intensity 7.5 HRM and Identity in BPO 7.6 The Contradictions of BPO 7.7 Conclusions 8. Discontent, Resistance, and Organizing in Info-Service Work 8.1 Introduction: Work Relations in Call Centres 8.2 From Partners to Pariahs: Unions in Australian Employment 8.3 From Resistance to Organizing, or Organizing as Resistance: Unions in Call Centres 8.4 Unionization in the Australian Case-Study Sites 8.5 A Postscript from Australia: Work Choices and Beyond 8.6 A Note on Resistance and Organization in Indian BPOs 9. Concluding Remarks Notes References Index

Agricultural intensification: food insecurity to income security in a mid-hill watershed of Nepal

A shift from cultivating cereal crops towards vegetables and other cash crops has evolved through the process of agricultural intensification in the hills of the Himalayan region. Agricultural intensification has attracted the attention of researchers in Nepalese agriculture due to its potential impacts on the environment and socio-economic status of farmers. Nevertheless, socio-economic drivers of agricultural intensification are as yet poorly studied in the Himalayan region. Farmers' perceptions of the effects of agricultural intensification on society and the environment are analysed in the Ansikhola watershed of Kavre district, Nepal. Before the onset of agricultural intensification, food sufficiency was the primary measure of the economic condition of farmers. However, in recent years agricultural income and profits have become key socio-economic measures. This study reveals that intensive agricultural practices shifted need-based cereal farming to market-oriented vegetable-based production systems, thereby improving socio-economic conditions for farmers. Positive changes in wealth and social status, migration from rural to urban areas, and shift in social division of labour are other important impacts.

Flies in Our Eyes

In this article, I put three works into conversation: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War. I do this in order to interrogate the foundations and sources of social violence, both within societies and between them. I compare Golding’s and Hobbes’s stories of ‘origins’ to illustrate how, on the one hand, fairly straightforward notions of supply and demand, production and reproduction, and a social division of labour belie the possibility of a pre-social state. Indeed, that both Hobbes and Golding were commenting on English society and its history, rather than a mythical anarchy, only reinforces this often-ignored point. No one would call Golding a theorist, yet there is a great deal of social theory to be found in the novel. No one would call Thomas Hobbes a political economist, yet there is a great deal of political economy to be found in Leviathan . Waltz, of course, wrote about the conditions outside of societies rather than within them, but we may take the sources of violence that concern him to lie not in the anarchy he posits but in the lessons learned, by both statesmen and schoolboys, as they are socialised into ‘proper’ behaviour towards their inferiors.

Labour, exchange and recognition: Marx contra Honneth

This article explores Marx’s contention that the achievement of full personhood and, not just consequently, but simultaneously, of genuine intersubjectivity depends upon the attainment of recognition for one’s place in the social division of labour, recognition which is systematically denied to some individuals and groups of individuals through the capitalist organization of production and exchange. This reading is then employed in a critique of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition which, it is argued, cannot account for the systematic obstacles faced by some struggles for recognition.

Collective Indigenous Rights and Global Social Movements in the Face of Global Development

Most traditional indigenous peoples continue to value collective rights and mutual obligations in contrast to the growing efforts of various global and national organizations to promote individual human rights and ostensible economic development projects. Under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, global corporations impose economic profit over sacred places, precious time and human dignity. Evidence from traditional indigenous people suggests that acceptance of human rights and global diversity is indeed limited when it is built within the constraints of current law and narrow meanings of diversity, which often view development as deviance if it does not conform to modern ideas and definitions via neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is examined as extending far beyond the West, as a major force in the world system, which contains an ongoing, extensive, relatively complex social division of labor with an integrated set of production processes that are intimately related to the resources and lives of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

Educação de jovens e adultos trabalhadores no Brasil atual: do simulacro à emancipação

A educação dos trabalhadores jovens e adultos, no Brasil atual, vem recebendo especial destaque no âmbito das políticas do governo federal. Para além da aparente "democratização" das oportunidades de elevação de escolaridade e, sobretudo, de acesso às bases do conhecimento científico e tecnológico, tal processo é dotado de funcionalidades que requerem ser desveladas. Com esse objetivo, serão apresentados alguns dos principais condicionantes socio econômicos das atuais ações governamentais voltadas para a elevação de escolaridade da classe trabalhadora, tomando como referência a atual divisão social do trabalho na sociedade brasileira. Serão abordadas, ainda, as relações que os movimentos sociais estabelecem com essas políticas, que tanto podem se voltar para a busca da emancipação, que se constrói explorando o caráter contraditório do real, quanto estar marcadas pela adesão mítica e conformadora. Compreender tais processos, em sua complexidade, exige que sejam estabelecidas distinções entre os chamados movimentos sociais "tradicionais" e os "novos movimentos sociais", o que constitui, também, objetivo deste trabalho.

Knowledge Ecologies and Ecosystems? An Empirically Grounded Reflection on Recent Developments in Innovation Systems Theory

Recent academic and policy debate on innovation indicates that there has been some shift from a more traditional systems approach to ecologies and ecosystems. The latter are concepts transferred from the world of biology to the social world in order to explain the evolutionary nature of interrelations between different individuals, their innovative activities, and their environment. We evaluate the concept of knowledge ecology and the theory of innovation ecosystem on two fundamental grounds; firstly, on the grounds of theoretical plausibility and conceptual consistency; secondly, on empirical grounds of the case of public–private interrelations of biotech innovation in Cambridge. The argument is that the concept of knowledge ecology and the theory of innovation ecosystems can lead to problems of reductionism and functionalism. This is due to their development in abstraction from more grounded analysis of historical processes of the social division of labour. Knowledge and innovation need to be looked at in the context of historically founded processes of socioeconomic development.

Explanations of the Earth's features and origin in pre-Meiji Japan

Abstract Pre-Meiji Japan was a religiously rich and intellectually varied country, where a large number of theories and beliefs about the origin of the Earth and its features coexisted. The history of science, and the history of geology in particular, lacks an account of this fertile and stimulating socio-cultural system and intellectual environment. The present paper aims to contribute to its understanding, by providing an overview of the most influential religious and scholarly approaches to geological topics in Japan from the eighth century to 1868. The comparison of explanations and beliefs on subjects such as fossils, volcanic eruptions, mountains and the origin of the Earth, and the analysis of geological expertise confirm the heterodox and holistic tendency of the Japanese intellectual and religious environment, which has had positive and negative outcomes for scientific thinking. It also reveals the importance of power structures, and of the social division of labour and knowledge, in the shaping of the Japanese intellectual and religious history.

Revolution or passing fashion? Reassessing the precautionary principle

Precaution has been for years a controversial issue. Some regard it as a major regulatory innovation, others as an inherently flawed concept. Some consider it an approach still in its infancy, others believe it is a passing fashion. A narrow understanding of its relationship with knowledge and its distributional effects may explain why discussions on the US-EU divergence and on Europe's own ambivalence about precaution fail to provide a consistent picture. This paper makes a case for a broader perspective: the issue of precaution is related to the social division of labour, namely the intimate connection between knowledge and power. The modern narrative, drawing a sharp divide between (science-based) production and use of knowledge, has faced growing public criticism. The controversy on precaution mixes up tradition and innovation in an ambiguous way, gaining special saliency in Europe vis-a-vis the elaboration of its social model. If tradition is increasingly in trouble, innovation has perils of its own.

Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister

This book examines the construction of gender and patriarchy in Iran duringthe onset of modernity, the Islamic revolution of 1979, and the post-revolutionera. Among the many works published by prominent scholars of Islamand Iranian women’s studies, Minoo Moallem’s investigation of the constructionof gender by neo-colonial modernity and political movements of anationalist or fundamentalist orientation deserves special attention.Inspired by Michel Foucault as well as Caren Kaplan and InderpalGrewal, Moallem incorporates a post-modern and a transnational feministapproach by arguing that post-modernity should be used as a framework tostudy the growth of modernity (p. 20). Challenging the popular belief thatfundamentalism is a return to the roots and early periods of a tradition or aculture, she finds it “in dialogue with modernity” (p. 13) and thus arguesthat the Islamic fundamentalism observed in the twentieth century is a postmodernizationphenomenon; in her words, “a by-product of the process ofmodernization” (ibid.). Nevertheless, she does not actually consider fundamentalismto be a truly post-modern phenomenon, since it does not respectthe “concept of difference,” as is the case with nationalism.Moallem questions the stereotypes presented by the travelers and foreigndiplomats of the late-eighteenth to early-twentieth centuries concerningthe harem, the veil, women, and so on. She challenges their vantage point increating “otherness” and portraying Islam as barbaric. Although manyworks deal with women, patriarchy, and the construction of gender under thePahlavis, the author offers a new reading and shows how the two rulers’forceful steps in the name of modernization and progress led to the establishmentof a nation-state in which each individual – man or woman – wassocialized to perform his/her role according to the “natural and social divisionof labour” (p. 74).Her work is timely, especially now when Islamic fundamentalism isdefined and analyzed by the politics of power through the global media. Inthe case or jihad, for instance, the author states that for fundamentalists, andmore specifically in Ayatullah Khomeini’s view, there are two types of jihad: ...

ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE THROUGH TIME: A GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of economic performance through time. The model incorporates four main determinants of economic performance: technology, capital investment, the division of labor and quality of institutions. It demonstrates that growth is not automatic even with technological progress. In order to maintain economic growth, it is important to continuously implement new technologies through capital investment. It also shows that institutional improvement promotes the social division of labor, which is an independent source of economic growth.

Social Division of Labor, Construction of Centers and Institutional Dynamics

Social Division of Labor, Construction of Centers and Institutional Dynamics

The Uses of the Stranger: Circulation, Arbitration, Secrecy, and Dirt

Little attention has been paid to the role of strangers in the social division of labor that is otherwise a key concept in sociological theory. Partly drawing upon Simmel, this article develops a general framework for analyzing the “uses” of “the stranger” throughout history. Four major domains in which strangers have often been employed are identified: (1) circulation (of goods, money, and information); (2) arbitration; (3) management of secret/sacred domains; and (4) “dirty jobs.” The article also explores how these activities relate to the characteristics of stranger-relations. It is suggested that such an inquiry, in addition to helping us to understand how the presence of strangers in a society affects the processes of social differentiation, might equip us with a conceptual framework often lacking from purely political and ethical considerations of stranger-relations.

ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC ROLES AND SPECIALISATION

Xiaokai Yang's theory of economic specialisation under increasing returns to scale is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labour. In this theory specialisation—and thus the social division of labour—is firmly embedded in a system of perfectly competitive markets. This leaves unresolved whether and how such development processes are possible in economies based on more primitive, non-market organisations. In this paper we discuss a general relational model of economic interaction. Within this non-market environment we discuss the emergence of economic specialisation and eventually of economic trade and a social division of labour. We base our approach on three levels in organisational development: the presence of a stable relational structure; the presence of relational trust and subjective specialisation; and, finally, the emergence of objective specialisation through the institution and social recognition of economic roles.

STABILITY, SPECIALIZATION AND SOCIAL RECOGNITION

Yang's theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale (Yang, 2001) is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor. In this theory, specialization — and thus, the social division of labor — is firmly embedded within a system of perfectly competitive markets. This leaves unresolved whether and how such development processes are possible in economies based on more primitive, non-market organizations. In this paper we introduce a general relational model of economic interaction. Within this non-market environment we discuss the emergence of economic specialization and ultimately of economic trade and a social division of labor. We base our approach on four stages in organizational development: a primordial stage of chaos; the emergence of a stable relational structure; the emergence of relational trust and subjective specialization; and, finally, the emergence of objective specialization through the social recognition of subjectively defined economic roles. In turn, this paves the way for the introduction of market institutions.

Spécialisation individuelle et division sociale du travail : Une lecture dynamique d'A. Smith, A. Marshall et A. Young

Résumé Smith a considéré la spécialisation individuelle comme une conséquence négative à subir en matière de développement humain. Cette approche a été reprise par le courant marxiste autour du thème de l’aliénation. Pour Marshall au contraire, la mécanisation de l’industrie permet progressivement une réduction du degré de spécialisation individuelle. Pour Young, l’expansion des systèmes mécanisés est lui-même un processus de division du travail entre industries et elle est devenue la principale source des rendements croissants. Suivant cette approche, la division sociale du travail, contrairement à l’idée de Smith et de Marx, permet de sortir du déterminisme de l’aliénation.