The Division of Labor
"...Social harmony comes essentially from the division of labor. It is characterized by a cooperation which is automatically produced through the pursuit by each individual of his own interests. It suffices that each individual consecrate himself to a special function in order, by the force of events, to make himself solidary with others."
(Durkheim, 1933, p.200)
The division of labor is simply the separation and specialization of work among people. As industry and technology proliferate, and population increases, society must be become more specialized if it is to survive. In modern society, this is especialy evident. Labor has never before been as specialized as it is now, and the current trend is toward even further increased specialization.
Durkheim was not merely concerned with what the division of labor was, but how it changed the way people interreacted with one another. He was concerned with the social implications of increased specialization. As specialization increases, Durkheim argued, people are increasingly separated, values and interests become different, norms are varied, and subcultures (both work-related and social-related) are formed. People, because they are increasingly performing different tasks than one another, come to value different things than one another. Durkheim didn't see the division of labor as the downfall of social order, however. He recognized that, in reality, the division of labor gave rise to a distinct type of social order, or solidarity: organic solidarity. Organic solidarity is social order built on the interdependence of people in society. Because people are forced to perform distinct, separate, and specialized tasks, they come to rely on others for their very survivial. While shoemakers and carpenters may be functioning fine, if farmers stop working, everyone starves. If the carpenters quit, no one has any shelter. If the garbage haulers don't show up, the streets become dumps and diseases spread. Durkheim saw that without one another in a highly specialized society, no one can survive. This interdependence is why the division of labor does not destroy social order.
The division of labor is not without problems of course, and an industrial utopia does not form simply out of interdependence, for specialization has been seen to set people not only apart, but against each other. Interests often collide and conflict exists. Karl Marx spent a great deal of effort identifying the problems that arise due to the division of labor. Durkheim did not fool himself into believing that the changes happening around him as a result of industrialization would bring about total harmony, but he did recognize that though specialization sets us apart, it does, in certain ways, bind us together.
One theme seems to be identical among all of the most important social theorists---Marx, Comte, Spencer, C. Wright Mills, and especially Durkheim---the division of labor is almost always the most important concept in understanding societies. It is the foundation upon which most sociological thought is built.
"As the progress of the division of labor demands a very great concentration of the social mass, there is between the different parts of the same tissue, of the same organ, or the same system, a more intimate contact which makes happenings much more contagious. A movement in one part rapidly communicates itself to others."
(1933, p.224)
"If work becomes progressively divided as societies become more voluminous and dense, it is not because external circumstances are more varied, but because struggle for existence is more acute."
(Giddens, 1972, p.153 [excerpt from The Division of Labor in Society])
"...It is easy to understand that any condensation of the social mass, especially if it is accompanied by an increase in population, necessarily stimulates an advance in the division of labor."
(1972, p. 154 [excerpt from The Division of Labor in Society])
"But if the division of labor produces solidarity, it is not only because it makes each indivdual an exchangist, as the economists say; it is because it creates among men an entire system of rights and duties which link them together in a durable way."
(1933, p. 406)
"In one case as in the other, the structure derives from the divison of labor and its solidarity. Each part of the animal, having become an organ, has its proper sphere of action where it moves independently without imposing itself upon others. But, from another point of view, they depend more on one another than in a colony, since they cannot separate without perishing."
(1933, p. 192)
The following is what I consider the most important passage of Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society.
"But not only does the division of labor present the character by which we have defined morality; it more and more tends to become the essential condition of social solidarity. As we advance in the evolutinary scale, the ties which bind the individual to his family, to his native soil, to traditions which the past has given to him, to collective group usages, become loose. More mobile, he changes his environment more easily, leaves his people to go elsewhere to live a more autonomous existence, to a greater extent forms his own ideas and sentiments. Of course, the whole common conscience does not, on this account, pass out of existence. At least there will always remain this cult of personality, of individual dignity of which we have just been speaking, and which, today, is the rallying-point of so many people. But how little a thing it is when one contemplates the ever increaisng extent of social life, and, consequently, of individual consciences! For, as they become more voluminous, as intelligence becomes richer, activity more varied, in order for morallity to remain constant, that is to say, in order for the individual to remain atached to the group with a force equal to that of yesterday, the ties which bind him to it must become stronger and more numerous. If, then, he formed no others than those which come from resemblances, the effacement of the segmental type would be accompanied by a systematic debasement of morality. Man would no longer be sufficiently obligated; he would no longer feel about and above him this salutary pressure of society which moderates his egoism and makes him a normal being. This is what gives moral value to the division of labor. Through it, the individual becomes cognizant of his dependence upon society; from it come the forces which keep him in check and restrain him. In short, since the division of labor becomes the chief source of social solidarity, it becomes, at the same time, the foundation of the moral order."
(1933, p. 400-401)
Sources:
Durkheim, Emile. 1933. The Division of Labor in Society Translated by George Simpson. New York: The Free Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1972. Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings. London: Cambridge University Press.
