Abstract
Although the division of labour is not of recent origin, it was only at the end of the last century that societies began to become aware of this law, to which up to then they had submitted almost unwittingly. Undoubtedly even from antiquity several thinkers had perceived its importance.1 Yet Adam Smith was the first to attempt to elaborate the theory of it. Moreover, it was he who first coined the term, which social science later lent to biology. Nowadays the phenomenon has become so widespread that it catches everyone's attention. It involves increasingly powerful mechanisms, large-scale groupings of power and capital, and consequently an extreme division of labour. Inside factories, not only are jobs demarcated, becoming extremely specialised, but each product is itself a speciality entailing the existence of others.
Keywords
Division (mathematics)Division of labourLabour economicsSociologyPolitical scienceEconomicsLawArithmeticMathematics
Related Publications
National Institutional Structures, Transaction Cost Economizing and Competitive Advantage: The Case of Japan
Japan’s economic success since World War II has been striking. Modern Japan was the first major industrial economy to emerge from outside the Western tradition. Economically dev...
Fixing Weight Decay Regularization in Adam
We note that common implementations of adaptive gradient algorithms, such as Adam, limit the potential benefit of weight decay regularization, because the weights do not decay m...
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
"Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions...
Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, written between 1929 and 1935, are the work of one of the most original thinkers in twentieth century Europe. Gramsci has had a profound infl...
Social categorization and similarity in intergroup behaviour
Abstract The present study is one of a series exploring the role of social categorization in intergroup behaviour. It has been found in our previous studies that in ‚minimal' si...
Publication Info
- Year
- 2023
- Type
- book-chapter
- Pages
- 15-34
- Citations
- 1247
- Access
- Closed
External Links
Social Impact
Altmetric
PlumX Metrics
Social media, news, blog, policy document mentions
Citation Metrics
1247
OpenAlex
Cite This
Émile Durkheim
(2023).
The Division of Labour in Society.
, 15-34.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003320609-4
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003320609-4