Еңбек бөлінісі және оның экономикалық маңызы

Separation of tasks in any system so that participants may specialise

The division of labour is the separation of the tasks in any economic system or organization so that participants may specialize (specialisation). Individuals, organizations, and nations are endowed with or acquire specialized capabilities, and either form combinations or trade to take advantage of the capabilities of others in addition to their own. Specialized capabilities may include equipment or natural resources as well as skills. Training and combinations of equipment and other assets acting together are often important. For example, an individual may specialize by acquiring tools and the skills to use them effectively just as an organization may specialize by acquiring specialized equipment and hiring or training skilled operators. The division of labour is the motive for trade and the source of economic interdependence. An increasing division of labour is associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and the increasing complexity of industrialised processes. The concept and implementation of division of labour has been observed in ancient Sumerian (Mesopotamian) culture, where assignment of jobs in some cities coincided with an increase in trade and economic interdependence. Division of labour generally also increases both producer and individual worker productivity. After the Neolithic Revolution, pastoralism and agriculture led to more reliable and abundant food supplies, which increased the population and led to specialization of labour, including new classes of artisans, warriors, and the development of elites. This specialization was furthered by the process of industrialisation, and Industrial Revolution era factories. Accordingly, many classical economists as well as some mechanical engineers, such as Charles Babbage, were proponents of division of labour. Also, having workers perform single or limited tasks eliminated the long training period required to train craftsmen, who were replaced with less paid but more productive unskilled workers.

Xenophon, in the 4th century BC, makes a passing reference to division of labour in his Cyropaedia (a. k. a. Education of Cyrus). Just as the various trades are most highly developed in large cities, in the same way, food at the palace is prepared in a far superior manner. In small towns, the same man makes couches, doors, ploughs and tables, and often he even builds houses, and still, he is thankful if only he can find enough work to support himself. And it is impossible for a man of many trades to do all of them well. In large cities, however, because many make demands on each trade, one alone is enough to support a man, and often less than one: for instance one man makes shoes for men, another for women, there are places even where one man earns a living just by mending shoes, another by cutting them out, another just by sewing the uppers together, while there is another who performs none of these operations but assembles the parts. Of necessity, he who pursues a very specialised task will do it best.|sign=|source=

A simile used by Augustine of Hippo shows that the division of labour was practised and understood in late Imperial Rome. In a brief passage of his The City of God, Augustine seems to be aware of the role of different social layers in the production of goods, like household (familiae), corporations (collegia) and the state. like workmen in the street of the silversmiths, where one vessel, in order that it may go out perfect, passes through the hands of many, when it might have been finished by one perfect workman. But the only reason why the combined skill of many workmen was thought necessary, was, that it is better that each part of an art should be learned by a special workman, which can be done speedily and easily, than that they should all be compelled to be perfect in one art throughout all its parts, which they could only attain slowly and with difficulty.|title=The City of God (tr. Marcus Dods)|source=VII.4

The division of labour was discussed by multiple medieval Persian scholars. They considered the division of labour between members of a household, between members of society and between nations. For Nasir al Din al Tusi and al Ghazali the division of labour was necessary and useful. The similarity of the examples provided by these scholars with those provided by Adam Smith (such as al Ghazali's needle factory and Tusi's claim that exchange, and by extension the division of labour, are the consequences of the human reasoning capability and that no animals have been observed to exchange one bone for another) led some scholars to conjecture that Smith was influenced by the medieval Persian scholarship.

Sir William Petty was the first modern writer to take note of the division of labour, showing its has worth in existence and usefulness in Dutch shipyards. Classically, the workers in a shipyard would build ships as units, finishing one before starting another. But the Dutch had it organised with several teams each doing the same tasks for successive ships. People with a particular task to do must have discovered new methods that were only later observed and justified by writers on political economy. Petty also applied the principle to his survey of Ireland. His breakthrough was to divide up the work so that large parts of it could be done by people with no extensive training.

Bernard de Mandeville discussed the matter in the second volume of The Fable of the Bees (1714). This elaborates many matters raised by the original poem about a 'Grumbling Hive'. He says:
But if one will wholly apply himself to the making of Bows and Arrows, whilst another provides Food, a third builds Huts, a fourth makes Garments, and a fifth Utensils, they not only become useful to one another, but the Callings and Employments themselves will in the same Number of Years receive much greater Improvements, than if all had been promiscuously followed by every one of the Five.

When every individual person labors apart, and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employed in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences. By the conjunction of forces, our power is augmented: By the partition of employment, our ability increases: And by mutual succour we are less exposed to fortune and accidents. 'Tis by this additional force, ability, and security, that society becomes advantageous. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

In his introduction to The Art of the Pin Maker (Art de l'Épinglier, 1761), Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau writes about the "division of this work": The contradiction has led to some debate over Smith's opinion of the division of labour. Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with Smith: "Nothing tends to materialize man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labor." Adam Ferguson shared similar views to Smith, though was generally more negative. The specialization and concentration of the workers on their single subtasks often leads to greater skill and greater productivity on their particular subtasks than would be achieved by the same number of workers each carrying out the original broad task, in part due to increased quality of production, but more importantly because of increased efficiency of production, leading to a higher nominal output of units produced per time unit. Smith uses the example of a production capability of an individual pin maker compared to a manufacturing business that employed 10 men:One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day. Smith saw the importance of matching skills with equipment—usually in the context of an organisation. For example, pin makers were organised with one making the head, another the body, each using different equipment. Similarly, he emphasised a large number of skills, used in cooperation and with suitable equipment, were required to build a ship. In the modern economic discussion, the term human capital would be used. Smith's insight suggests that the huge increases in productivity obtainable from technology or technological progress are possible because human and physical capital are matched, usually in an organisation. See also a short discussion of Adam Smith's theory in the context of business processes. Babbage wrote a seminal work "On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures" analysing perhaps for the first time the division of labour in factories.

In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant notes the value of the division of labour:All crafts, trades and arts have profited from the division of labour; for when each worker sticks to one particular kind of work that needs to be handled differently from all the others, he can do it better and more easily than when one person does everything. Where work is not thus differentiated and divided, where everyone is a jack of all trades, the crafts remain at an utterly primitive level.

Marx argued that increasing the specialisation 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 specialised 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." Additionally, Marx argued that the division of labour creates less skilled workers. As the work becomes more specialised, less training is needed for each specific job, and the workforce, overall, is less skilled than if one worker did one job entirely. Among Marx's theoretical contributions is his sharp distinction between the economic and the social division of labour. 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.

Henry David Thoreau criticised the division of labour in Walden (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 civilised society is less wealthy, in practice than one in "savage" society. The answer he gave was that self sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.

Marx's theories, including his negative claims regarding the division of labour, have been criticised by the Austrian economists, notably Ludwig von Mises. The primary argument is that the economic gains accruing from the division of labour far outweigh the costs, thus developing on the thesis that division of labor leads to cost efficiencies. It is argued that it is fully possible to achieve balanced human development within capitalism and alienation is downplayed as mere romantic fiction. According to Mises, the idea has led to the concept of mechanization in which a specific task is performed by a mechanical device, instead of an individual labourer. This method of production is significantly more effective in both yield and cost effectiveness, and utilises the division of labour to the fullest extent possible. Mises saw the very idea of a task being performed by a specialised mechanical device as being the greatest achievement of division of labour.

In "The Use of Knowledge in Society", Friedrich A. Hayek states:

The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it, not only a division of labour but also a coordinated utilisation of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilisation. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labour on which our civilisation is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilisation, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type.|title=|source=

The clearest exposition of the principles of sexual division of labour across the full range of human societies can be summarised by a large number of logically complementary implicational constraints of the following form: if women of childbearing ages in a given community tend to do X (e. g., preparing soil for planting) they will also do Y (e. g., the planting); while for men the logical reversal in this example would be that if men plant, they will prepare the soil. White, Brudner, and Burton's (1977) "Entailment Theory and Method: A Cross Cultural Analysis of the Sexual Division of Labor", using statistical entailment analysis, shows that tasks more frequently chosen by women in these order relations are those more convenient in relation to child rearing. This type of finding has been replicated in a variety of studies, including those on modern industrial economies. These entailments do not restrict how much work for any given task could be done by men (e. g., in cooking) or by women (e. g., in clearing forests), but are only least effort or role consistent tendencies. To the extent that women clear forests for agriculture, for example, they tend to do the entire agricultural sequence of tasks on those clearings. In theory, these types of constraints could be removed by provisions of child care, but ethnographic examples are lacking.

Job satisfaction has been shown to improve as an employee is given the task of a specific job. Students who have received PhDs in a chosen field later report increased satisfaction compared to their previous jobs. This can be attributed to their high levels of specialisation. The higher the training needed for the specialised job position, the higher is the level of job satisfaction as well, although many highly specialised jobs can be monotonous and produce high rates of burnout periodically.

In contrast to the division of labour, a division of work refers to the division of a large task, contract, or project into smaller tasks—each with a separate schedule within the overall project schedule. Division of labour, instead, refers to the allocation of tasks to individuals or organisations according to the skills and/or equipment those people or organisations possess. Often division of labour and division of work are both part of the economic activity within an industrial nation or organisation.

A job divided into elemental parts is sometimes called "disaggregated work". Workers specialising in particular parts of the job are called professionals. The workers doing a portion of a non recurring work may be called contractors, freelancers, or temporary workers. Modern communication technologies, particularly the Internet, gave rise to the sharing economy, which is orchestrated by online marketplaces for various kinds of disaggregated work.