Henry David Thoreau

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 431.

Karl Marx

Marx argued that increasing the specialization may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work. He described the process as alienation: workers become more and more specialized and work becomes repetitive, eventually leading to complete alienation from the process of production. The worker then becomes "depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine".

Marx's most important theoretical contribution is his sharp distinction between the economic and the social division of labor. That is, some forms of labour co-operation are purely due to "technical necessity", but others are a result of a "social control" function related to a class and status hierarchy. If these two divisions are conflated, it might appear as though the existing division of labour is technically inevitable and immutable, rather than (in good part) socially constructed and influenced by power relationships. He also argues that in a communist society, the division of labour is transcended, meaning that balanced human development occurs where people fully express their nature in the variety of creative work that they do.

Thoreau criticized the division of labour in Walden (published in 1854), on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large, including nature. He claimed that the average man in a civilized society is less wealthy, in practice, than one in a "savage" society. The answer he gave was that self-sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.

Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, criticized the division of labour in "The American Scholar"; a widely-informed, holistic citizenry is vital for the spiritual and physical health of the country.

Émile Durkheim

In his seminal work, The Division of Labor in Society, Émile Durkheim observes that the division of labor appears in all societies and positively correlates with societal advancement because it increases as a society progresses. Durkheim arrived at the same conclusion regarding the positive effects of the division of labor as his theoretical predecessor, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of the Nations, Smith observes the division of labor results in "a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labor." While they shared this belief, Durkheim believed the division of labor applied to all "biological organisms generally" while Smith believed this law applied "only to human societies." This difference may result from the influence of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species on Durkheim's writings. For example, Durkheim observed an apparent relationship between "the functional specialization of the parts of an organism" and "the extent of that organism's evolutionary development," which he believed "extended the scope of the division of labor so as to make its origins contemporaneous with the origins of life itself…implying that its conditions must be found in the essential properties of all organized matter."

Since Durkheim's division of labour applied to all organisms, he considered it a "natural law" and worked to determine whether it should be embraced or resisted by first analyzing its functions. Durkheim hypothesized that the division of labor fosters social solidarity, yielding "a wholly moral phenomenon" that ensures "mutual relationships" among individuals.

As social solidarity cannot be directly quantified, Durkheim indirectly studies solidarity by "classify[ing] the different types of law to find...the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it." Durkheim categorizes: criminal laws and their respective punishments as promoting mechanical solidarity, a sense of unity resulting from individuals engaging in similar work who hold shared backgrounds, traditions, and values; and civil laws as promoting organic solidarity, a society in which individuals engage in different kinds of work that benefit society and other individuals. Durkheim believes that organic solidarity prevails in more advanced societies, while mechanical solidarity typifies less developed societies. He explains that, in societies with more mechanical solidarity, the diversity and division of labor is much less, so individuals have a similar worldview. Similarly, Durkheim opines that in societies with more organic solidary, the diversity of occupations is greater, and individuals depend on each other more, resulting in greater benefits to society as a whole.

Durkheim's work enabled social science to progress more efficiently "in … the understanding of human social behavior."