Sociology Plus
Division of Labor Definition
The division of labor is the specialization of productive activity, whereby individuals carry out only part of the activities needed for survival and sustenance. In its basic social form it is visible in the emergence of occupations, so that society’s needs are met by many different people performing specific jobs. This arrangement creates interdependence among individuals while reducing the similarity of their experiences — a combination that can generate problems of social integration as divisions of labor grow more complex. As chains of interdependence lengthen and relations become more impersonal, coordination between individuals becomes harder, increasing the need for constraint over individual behavior to achieve it.
Two Traditions of Analysis
The concept is used both by structural functionalists, following Émile Durkheim, and by conflict theorists, following Karl Marx — but with different meanings. For Durkheim it denotes the occupational structure and, with it, a new form of social solidarity: the organic solidarity that integrates members of industrial societies, in contrast to the mechanical solidarity of traditional ones. He regarded this newer solidarity as weaker and more precarious, still developing in the early twentieth century. For Marx the term denotes a double division: the technical division of labor within the enterprise and industry, which breaks production into a sequence of tasks, and the social division of labor among enterprises, industries, and classes, mediated through commodity exchange in the market. While the labor of the enterprise was rationally organized, Marx found contradiction, exploitation, and domination in the social division of labor.
Despite the chronic warfare of agrarian societies, their social structures remained relatively stable for hundreds or thousands of years, with change occurring mostly at the top through changes of regime. The transition to industrial society, by contrast, brought dislocations, conflicts, social movements, and continuous technological revolutions that disrupted everyday life — giving the new discipline of sociology both its problems and its reason for being. Durkheim and Marx share obscured intellectual roots: both were materialists influenced by German critical philosophy, especially Ludwig Feuerbach. The conventional portrait of Durkheim as a conservative preoccupied with order and Marx as a radical preoccupied with change is, as Anthony Giddens notes, simplistic — Durkheim was as concerned with social change as Marx, and though he dismissed communists as hopeless utopians he was himself a socialist, albeit one who saw no prospect of the state “withering away.” Both, influenced by the age of Darwin, sought to explain how one form of society transforms into another; Marx even wrote to Darwin asking permission to dedicate the first volume of Capital to him — an honor Darwin declined.
Durkheim: Anomie and the Forced Division of Labor
Durkheim saw the social order of industrial societies as problematic in two respects. First is the tendency to anomie, or normlessness. Traditional societies rested on deep consensus over norms, values, and expectations, because their members shared a common religion, performed similar work, and met most needs within their immediate communities, occasionally trading surplus craft goods and food with neighboring tribes — commonalities that grounded mechanical solidarity. Industrialization dissolved this consensus: urbanization and immigration threw together people of different values, religions, and subcultures, while industrial work forced specialization into new occupations and professions. Specialization made members of the new society dependent on one another for all their needs, which were no longer met locally. The resulting organic solidarity was weaker and more fragile than what it replaced — hence the structural tendency to anomie. Durkheim’s remedy was a new corporate order of professional and occupational organizations, guild-like bodies mediating between the state and the level of employers and workers, which would generate norms and ethics — a new moral order.
Second is the “forced” division of labor: inherited wealth gives the children of the capitalist class a decisive advantage in claiming the most remunerative positions, often regardless of natural talent, by buying access to the best universities and to family businesses and social connections. Durkheim thought the abolition of inherited wealth would open the opportunity structure to demonstrable talent — a meritocracy — reducing the resentment of the talented who face class barriers and revitalizing the ranks of professionals, managers, and entrepreneurs with new talent and ideas.
Marx: Alienated Labor and Exploitation
Marx rooted the problems of industrial society in alienated labor and the exploitation of living labor by “dead labor” — capital and class relations. One dimension is the contradiction between mental and manual labor. The craft laborer of pre-industrial society united both: conceiving a work in response to a specific client’s demand, planning the process of production, and executing it without taking orders, while guilds set fair prices and regulated relations among apprentices, journeymen, and masters. Under industrial capitalism, when the working class sells its labor power — its only commodity — it alienates control of the labor process to the entrepreneur. Mental labor becomes the prerogative of capital and management, who think and plan; the wage laborer is reduced to manual labor under direction, doing what they are told, work shrinking to indifferent money-making. Industrial workers rarely meet consumers, prices are set by competitive markets, and relations between capital and labor were at first regulated only through class conflict.
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management pressed this logic to its end: on Taylor’s premise that any thinking by the worker harms productivity, time-and-motion studies reduced work to bit parts requiring almost no thought, deskilling the worker. Yet this same organization of work opens the possibility of automation — the “end of work” through robots and computers — and automation in turn requires thinking workers to program the smart machines and restore systems after crashes, partially re-establishing the unity of mental and manual labor. Workers who can use computers potentially can work in any industry, breaking the tendency toward one-sided development and deskilling. This aspect of alienation resembles Durkheim’s forced division of labor.
Alienation extends further: workers are separated from the products and wealth they create — production is socialized while profits are privately appropriated; capital confronts the workforce as an alien, dominating force; workers competing for jobs are alienated from one another; and wage labor estranges humans from their “species being” as producers of their material world. Exploitation is the related problem: the capitalist class takes advantage of the propertylessness of workers, who must exchange labor power for a wage sufficient to reproduce themselves and their dependents, and of the fact that in the labor process workers create more value than the wage returns to them — the use value of labor power yields surplus value beyond its exchange value and the value of materials and machinery consumed. Unlike the transparent exploitation of slavery, caste, or serfdom, this transformation of value is opaque to the working class: labor power is sold for wages, raw materials are transformed into products, and the enterprise sells them for more than production cost — the origin of profits, capital formation, and the luxury consumption of the capitalist class.
Transformation and Legacy
Marx looked to class conflict and a social revolution led by a class-conscious proletariat as the agent of societal transformation, holding that the proletariat’s interests were identical with those of society as a whole — just as the capitalist class’s interests had been in its earlier struggle against the feudal order. Under socialism the working class would regain control of the labor process and the distribution of wealth through some form of self-management; under communism it would abolish itself as a class, ending the various forms of alienated labor. The technical division of labor and the occupational structure, modified by automated technologies, would nonetheless remain the capitalist class’s lasting contribution to a post-capitalist society. Work would no longer define the human “species being,” and society might see a return of Homo ludens — urban life organized around leisure and play.