The Division of Rationalized Labor

Specialization should make workers perform an ever-narrower range of tasks. Yet evidence shows that many specialized occupations have grown more complex. Michelle Jackson untangles this paradox, arguing that scientific investigation of social and industrial problems has changed the nature of work and burdened workers with new responsibilities.

A pathbreaking study of why, paradoxically, workforce specialization and job responsibilities have increased hand in hand.

In the United States and other late-industrial countries, the division of labor has changed radically over the last 150 years. This comes as no surprise: the nature of work has been transformed by new technologies, new discoveries, and new challenges. While the fact of change was predictable, the type of change is not at all as theorists envisioned.

For all their differences, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber each presumed that specialized workers would perform a narrower range of tasks. The early history of the industrial age supported this view. As the assembly line overtook the workshop, the artisan who constructed every part of a useful object was replaced with workers who handled a single piece of the work process. The Division of Rationalized Labor demonstrates that—although early industrialization may have operated as Smith, Marx, and their colleagues surmised—in late industrialization we are witnessing something quite different: specialization in many occupations has actually led to workers taking on an increasingly wide range of responsibilities.

Marshaling rich historical and statistical data, Michelle Jackson shows how this paradox of specialization emerges today in education, law enforcement, medicine, and manufacturing. Jackson argues that the development of probabilistic science provided the foundation for growing job complexity. As researchers learned which levers to pull in order to maximize productivity in a given industry, they created new tasks for the workers who specialized in producing industry outputs. As researchers developed the capacity to predict bad outcomes—criminality, low test scores, poor health—they left police, teachers, doctors, and nurses responsible for increasingly complicated preventive work. Analogous situations arise throughout the labor force, ensuring that workers across the occupational structure are overworked and overwhelmed.

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