Social Division Of Labor Research Articles

Tacitness, codification of technological knowledge and the organisation of industry

This paper investigates the wave of codification of technological knowledge which has occurred over the last two decades due to the availability at low cost of electronic automation and measurement instruments. During this process, traditional tacit skills of workers have become largely obsolete and modern operators on the shop floor are mainly process controllers and low-level problem solvers. Alongside this, the acceleration of innovation has made high-level problem solvers increasingly important. Tacit knowledge has thus remained crucial, but it has become complementary to a codified knowledge base and concerns problem solving heuristic, interpretation of data, etc. After illustrating the benefits and costs of codification and the nature of tacit skills, three case studies are presented regarding the steel, semiconductor and mechanical sectors. The last part of the paper discusses the impact of codification/automation/complexity and increased burden of fixed costs on industrial organisation. A story of co-evolution of technological knowledge, cost structures, transaction costs and social division of labour emerges.

Remaking Work, Remaking Space: Spaces of Production and Accumulation in the Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1865–1920

The era of US capitalist development between 1865 and 1920 offers a good opportunity to analyze the relational nature of social change at multiple scales precisely because it was a time of transition, for US and world capitalism alike. Existing accounts of the transition to monopoly capitalism in the US have focused on one or two geographical scales, such as the national economy or the shop floor. In this literature, scales are essentially treated as “containers” within which social change occurs. The possibility that the containers themselves may be fundamentally altered is not addressed. In contrast, this paper views labor process transformations, and transformations of the social division of labor, as dialectically bound. In particular, I seek to explain how the American transition to monopoly capitalism shaped, and was shaped by, class conflict and competitive pressures at multiple scales—the shop floor, the region, and the national and global divisions of labor.

The Size of the Firm and Social Division of Labour

This paper develops a formal model with transaction costs and economies of specialisation to address the size of the firm and the level of social division of labour. It is shown that the increase of the level of social division of labour and the decline of firm size may concur, and that the size of the firm crucially depends on, among other things, the relative transaction efficiency of the labour market with that of the markets for intermediate products.

The Size of the Firm and Social Division of Labor

We develop a formal model with transaction costs and economies of labor specialization to address the firm size and the level of social division of labor. We show that the decline of firm size and the increase of the level of social division of labor may concur. We also demonstrate that an economically meaningful description of the production technology of the firm could be given by a sensible combination of individual-specific production functions. The (dis)integration of the industrial production process crucially depends on, among other things, the relative transaction efficiency of the labor market with that of the markets for intermediate products.

Amos and the Officialdom in the Kingdom of Israel: The Socio-Economic Position of the Officials in the Light of the Biblical, the Epigraphic and Archaeological Evidence

Amos and the Officialdom in the Kingdom of Israel: The Socio-Economic Position of the Officials in the Light of the Biblical, the Epigraphic and Archaeological Evidence, by Izabela Jaruzelska. Seria Socjologia 25. Poznan: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1998. Pp. 240. N.P. This book examines the functions and behaviors of the royal state officials to whom the book of Amos presumably alludes in 3:9-11, 12b-15; 4:1-3; 5:11; and 6:1-7. The author, a sociologist/biblicist at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, addresses this study to the ways and means by which state officials financially prosper during the gilded age of northern Israel under Jeroboam II. Relying heavily on materialistic sociological models (K. Marx, M. Weber, S. Kozyr-Kowalski), this study presupposes sharp distinctions between the phenomenon of ownership and the right of property, between direct and indirect means of production, and between upper and lower classes in the ancient world. Its goal is to explain the putative enrichment (p. 13) of Israel's state officials by determining first and foremost the social matrix out of which they operate: Once position within the social division of labour... and the socio-economic ownership of means of production and labour power has been determined, the identification of classes and social estates can proceed (p. 21). Thus, where T. N. D. Mettinger (Solomonic State Officials: A Study of the Civil Government Officials of the Israelite Monarchy [Lund: Gleerup, 1971]) overviews the work of civil servants in the united monarchy, and J. A. Dearman (Property Rights in the Eighth Century B.C. [Atlanta: Scholars, 1988]) asks pertinent questions about eighthcentury officials generally, Jar-uzelska brings to the text of Amos a remarkable amount of archaeological and epigraphic data to formulate more specific questions about more specialized functionaries. This study is dominated by the redactoral hypotheses of Hans Walter Wolff, the epigraphic and historical work of Andre Lemaire, and the sociological theories of Jaruzelska's Doktorvater, Stanislaw Kozyr-Kowalski (also of Adam Mickiewicz University). Following a clear, brief introduction, chapter I offers an engaging sociohistorical analysis of eighth-century Israel. Highlighting state-economy relationships, Jaruzelska sidesteps religious questions entirely (without dismissing them as unimportant, p. 198). Chapter 2 attempts to list eighth-century Israel's important economic developments, addressing factors such as agricultural production (including viticulture and oil production) and international trade (particularly with Phoenicia, and, to a lesser extent, southern Arabia). A highlight of the chapter is its fascinating socioeconomic discussion of the Samaria ivories. Chapter 3 presents the biblical, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence proper. Extrapolating from the Solomonic data, Jaruzelska supplements it with an enormous amount of epigraphical data gathered by A. Lemaire and other epigraphers in order to visualize more precisely the power-contours of Jeroboam II's cabinet (p. 101). It is an ambitious goal-one which the author admits can generate only a tentative portrait (p. 198). Yet even with the present lack of data, the picture painted here is nevertheless based on a painstaking synthesis of a large amount of hard-to-find information. Nothing quite like this is available anywhere else in contemporary Amos studies. One of its most important accomplishments is its successful move beyond the simplistic charisma-vs..office dichotomies of a previous scholarly age, and for this alone Jaruzelska should be praised. …

Género, trabajo y exclusión social en México

Partiendo de una visión integral del trabajo femenino, en este artículo se analiza la centralidad de los procesos de división sexual y social del trabajo en la comprensión de las diversas formas de exclusión socioeconómica que padecen las mujeres. A través de la vinculación analítica entre los conceptos de exclusión social y segregación laboral se exponen, en la primera parte, algunos de los mecanismos sociales que subyacen en estas formas de inequidad. En un segundo momento se examina la división sexual del trabajo en la familia como un modo básico de segregación social. En la tercera parte se analizan las distintas modalidades de la segregación laboral a través de dos ejes de diferenciación: el carácter asalariado o no del trabajo, y su duración (de tiempo completo o de tiempo parcial). Se señalan, por último, las implicaciones de los procesos de segregación laboral sobre la discriminación salarial.

Social Theory and the Transformation of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century

industrialization is identified with many of the great theorizers of economic development in the twentieth century: Schumpeter, Veblen, Trotsky, Lux emburg, Keynes, Rostow, Gerschenkron, Chandler, Galbraith, and Schon field. Each of these thinkers, while differing amongst themselves on a broad array of issues of theory, shared in common the view that there was an epochally specific social system of capitalism, founded on private property and free markets for labor power. In its early phases, this system operated according to a very specific logic of task- and product-specialization, guided by rational market exchange, that led to increases in the scale of production. This dynamic yielded a process of centralization and concentration in the organizational and property forms governing the social division of labor which, as the system matured, ultimately led to the displacement of market rationality by a rationality of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Naturally, these unitary theorists of capitalism held that different societies would experience this common process in different ways, owing to the contingencies of timing and the greater and lesser tractability of tradition. But that there was one process and that it had a single and determinable directionality was never doubted. Indeed, it was taken to be one of the great discoveries of modern economic science. This unitary view of capitalism and its trajectory of development was also a core part of classical social theory as it emerged in the first fifty years of the twentieth century?in particular in the work of Weber, Polanyi, Parsons, Aron, Bell and the neo-Marxian tradition of critical social theory represented most notably by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock and Neumann.

The US Recorded Music Industry: On the Relations between Organization, Location, and Creativity in the Cultural Economy

A description of the US recorded music industry is offered stressing (a) the two-tier structure of the industry divided as it is into majors and independents, and (b) the complex social division of labor that characterizes the overall production system. The locational characteristics of the recorded music industry are discussed, and it is shown that, although there is a wide scattering of companies across the entire United States, the main centers of production are in Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville. It is then demonstrated that Los Angeles and New York have a capacity to produce hit records that far exceeds their relative significance in terms of number of recording companies, even after abstracting away the effects of the majors. This capacity is conceptualized in terms of the creative field that is brought into existence by the dense agglomeration of many different specialized firms and workers interacting together in one place in the tasks of economic and cultural production.

Urban Restructuring Revisited: Organizational and Labor Market Changes during the 1980S

This research revisits the structural determinants of changing job prospects at the bottom of urban labor markets during the 1980s, measured in terms of employment instability, earnings inequality, and low-income jobs. In addition to the deindustrialization thesis, hypotheses are drawn from recent perspectives on new industrial districts, global cities, and the “new” social division of labor. Statistical analyses reveal that the organization, rather than the size, of the local manufacturing base, the proliferation of small establishments, and industrial diversification are among the most crucial processes for understanding the shifting contours of urban inequality during the 1980s. The implication is that social scientists must continue to look beyond quantitative shifts in employment from manufacturing to services to the qualitative reorganization of production in order to make sense of the structural underpinnings of today's urban inequality.

Bringing Social Action and Situated Rationality Back in

The social order and the organizational forms in our so-called capitalist era did not emerge from a tabula rasa. What Marx labeled capitalism never emerged in any ideal or pure form but was itself a result of specific historical processes in social contexts where social groups already had social positions in relation to the production and trade of goods, as well as the regulation of these activities. Indeed, the capitalist era and its specific forms of economic institutions, organizational forms, social division of labor, and positions of social groups in society took root in, rebuilt, and transformed existing social formations. However, in each social context, the emerging institutionalized standard of capitalism got its own face or color. Today, specific versions of the universal capitalistic institutions such as the market economy, the private ownership, and the political superstructure, are taking root in and creating new social orders in Russia, in the former East European countries, in China, and in Africa. In these social systems, existing social groups, social positions, and the production of trade and goods are not deleted overnight but provide the very background for building new forms of capitalism, or new business systems. The contemporary role of the Russian mafia and the political-bureaucratic elite provides one of many examples of how the past social structures shape the future even if there is a radical shift in the regime type (see also Michailova, 1997). Another example

The Long Shadow of Work: Education, the Family, and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor

The Long Shadow of Work: Education, the Family, and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor

The Impact of Natural Disaster on Urban Economic Structure

This paper discusses the effects of a natural disaster upon regional economic structure. The case of Miami and Hurricane Andrew is examined. Analysis of the post-Andrew situation in Miami shows a temporary disruption at the aggregated level, but differential spatial impacts which will affect the long-run relationships within the urban economy and the social division of labor.

Capital, knowledge and ownership: The ‘information society’ and intellectual property

The argument that the information society represents ‘something new’ is predicated on the claim that its use of a new resource — knowledge/information — fundamentally differentiates it from previous systems of capitalism. However the actual organization of the posited information society constructs a widespread recognition of the legitimacy of intellectual property. The article examines the two central claims for transformation made in the information society discourse: that information is a new resource, and that increasingly it is theoretical or symbolic knowledge that is valued. However, neither shift has produced a change in the relations of production, and much that is claimed as new in information society is actually the fragmentation of the social division of labour. Though there have been changes in the forms of production, the relations of production remain organized on the basis of property, though often now intellectual property. This reveals the discourse of information society as a justification for the intensification of capitalism, not an account of its transformation.

Permanent Part-Time Work: New Family-Friendly Standard or High Intensity Cheap Skills?

Permanent part-time (PPT) employment grew strongly in Australia between 1987 and 1997, remaining approximately 87 per cent female and ‘non-standard’. Whilst it relieves the insecurity of casualisation, its hours may or may not be family-friendly’. It is located in the career stream only in its minority parental leave form. As an employer initiative, PPT work may allow the ‘flexing’ of hours around monthly or annual averages, creating a finer-tuned temporal and numerical flexibility, and greater work intensification, than is achievable through casualisation. Employers of PPT labour are utilising the workforce re-entry of mature-aged women in jobs classified as base grade, to obtain complex but unacknowledged ‘articulation work’ skills at low cost. In the long run, PPT work may help entrench the standard working hours and social division of labour of the family wage era. A least-bad short-term coping device, PPT work needs to be part of a broader-based solution to the work/life dilemma.

On the Origins of Classical Economics: Distribution and Value from William Petty to Adam Smith

1. Introduction, 2.The Life of Petty in Relation to His Economics, 3.Economic Surplus and the Social Division of Labour, 4.Methodological and the Political Bases of Petty's Economics, 5.The Theory of Production and Distribution in Cantillon's Essai, 6.The Significance of Value and Parity in Petty and Cantillon, 7.Petty-Cantillon-Quesnay: the formation of the surplus approach, 8. Wages, Prices and Economic Surplus in Steuart's Principles, 9.Developments in the Theory of Distribution and Value, 1662-1767, 10.Adam Smith and After.

Picturing labor: A visual ethnography of the coal mine labor process1

Following Marx, Harry Braverman argued that it is not the technical nature of the machine that creates alienation but “invisible” social divisions of labor which produced and control machinery and the labor process. This paper marshals primary source material from a large visual ethnographic study of retired miners, juxtaposing photographs and oral histories in an analysis of coal mining. Photographs of the mining process, which represent the technological processes and divisions of labor are examined alongside coal miners’ accounts of the labor process which include discussions of social relationships including alienation and exploitation. In life, the social and technological relations of labor were inseparable, but only the technological could be photographed. I conclude that photography constitutes an operationalized language incapable of expressing alienation or negation, potential, irrationality, alternative meanings, and so on. This has profound implications in a world where photographic images mediate so much of our experience.

The politics of women's work: the Paris garment trades, 1750-1915

Few issues attracted more attention in the nineteenth century than the of work, and few industries posed that problem more urgently than the booming garment industry in Paris. The seamstress represented the quintessential girl, and the sewing machine the icon of femininity. The intense speculation and worry that swirled around both helped define many issues of gender and labour that concern us today. Here Judith Coffin presents a fascinating history of the Parisian garment industry, from the unraveling of the guilds in the late 1700s to the first minimum-wage bill in 1915. She explores how issues related to working women took shape and how gender became fundamental to the modern social division of labour and our understanding of it. Combining the social history of labour and the intellectual history of nineteenth-century social science and political economy, Coffin sets many questions in their fullest cultural context: What constituted women's work? Did women belong in the industrial labour force? Why was work equated with low pay? Should not a woman enjoy status as an enlightened homemaker/consumer? The author examines patterns of consumption as well as production, setting out, for example, the links among the newly invented sewing machine, changes in the labour force, and the development of advertising, with its shifting and often unsettling visual representations of women, labour, and machinery. Throughout, Coffin challenges the conventional categories of work, home, and identity.

Will We Maintain the Integrity of the Russian Economic Space?

Russia's economic space is an aggregate of regions that differ from one another in levels of economic development, branch specializations, and natural and climatic conditions. And despite this, they are closely interconnected not so much by trade as by modern, highly specialized high-tech production. After all, a definite social division of labor has developed among the regions over the course of their protracted joint development, and their branch specialization has become clearly discernible. This has objectively determined the high share of products produced in each region for other regions and of products received from them. At the end of the 1980s, the share of exports of produced products and of their imports in resources of consumption for eleven consolidated economic regions in Russia was characterized by the following data (see Table 1).

Another mythology for local development? Selling places with packaging techniques: A view from the Spanish experience on city Strategic planning

Abstract Since their origin, cities have been trading and somehow competing with each other. From the commerce of the East Mediterranean to Mesopotamia, through and within the Anatolia peninsula to the Indus Valley and the Yellow River. Greek city states made a substantial shift in city autonomy that marked their role thereafter. City rivalry arose again and was noticeable by the eleventh century, first through the development of Mediterranean sea ports and thereafter by inland and continental crossroads, whose strength lasted for centuries during medieval times, where strategic points in commercial axes became large urban settlements. The birth of the modern state forced them to lose their political notoriety but not their economic importance, mainly due to the fact that the dominant economic system, commercial and then industrial and financial capitalism, used the cities as their economic base and image of the new social system. Moreover, rapid changes in the social division of labour were taking place ...

Gender and Abortive Capitalist Social Transformation: Semi-Proletarianization of South Korean Women

The life cycle of a traditional Korean woman was characterized by her social and economic dependence on her father before marriage, on her husband upon marriage, and on her eldest son in her old age. However, under the rapid capitalist development in South Korea in recent decades, the social relations that Korean women form have expanded beyond the patrilineal family into the market and other public spheres. South Korean women have entered the structure as major economic actors, performing various economic functions needed for the capitalist transformation of South Korean society. This transition, however, did not significantly change their disadvantaged power relations with men. As in other societies that have experienced capitalist transformation, South Korean women continue to be the first oppressed class (Engels, 1942) in the capitalist social division of labor. Moreover, paternalistic labor relations, which are often praised as an important element of the productive capitalist economies in East Asia, have been selectively applied to mostly male, workers. The typical image of working women has been permanent casuals (Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1983) who are susceptible to unconditional exploitation due to their unstable and unorganized nature of employment. Korean women's exodus from the patriarchal family seems to have resulted in a society-wide gender stratification under which their feminine characteristics are rationalized as the basis for social and economic discrimination. As Boserup would have predicted, economic modernization has expanded South Korean women's social relations while at the same time enforcing a new system of gender stratification in the economy (cf. Boserup, 1970). The transformation of positions amid capitalist development has significantly differed for South Korean men and women.(1) More specifically, South Korean women's insertion into the capitalist economy has ironically led to a massive expansion and preservation of their partially transformed social relations outside the formal corporate industrial sectors. In this vein, the visible efficacy of the proletarian in its recent confrontations with the authoritarian developmentalist regime and its business allies by no means alludes to a fundamental improvement of South Korean women's positions. An overwhelming majority of South Korean women have been transformed into, and continue to be maintained as, semi-proletariat whereas a rapidly increasing number of South Korean men appear to realize the potential of effective proletarian action. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to provide some formal evidence on the systematic differences in South Korean men's and women's social transformation for 1960-80, a period when the country converted herself from a low-income economy to a solid middle-income one through rapid economic growth; second, to discuss the causes, characteristics, and transformative prospects for South Korean women's semi-proletarianized status in the overall context of capitalist economic development. By emphasizing the fundamentally different but structurally interlinked processes of South Korean men's and women's restructuring, this paper is intended to present a complementary, or somewhat critical perspective to the outlook that proletarianization most aptly demarcates the changing social relations of South Korean labor (e.g. Koo, 1990; Deyo, 1989a). South Korean Women: Proletarianization or Semi-Proletarianization South Korea has been considered one of the few exceptional cases of successful economic development in the Third World. In particular, along with her neighboring East Asian countries such as Japan and Taiwan, the country is often said to have experienced a with equity (Fei, Ranis and Kuo; 1979) model of development. Such customary indicators of development as GNP growth rate, GINI coefficient, and sectoral composition of production have undoubtedly illustrated the South Korean success story. …