DIVISION OF LABOUR

Do markets and the division of labour encourage or discourage social cohesion?

Do markets and the division of labour encourage or discourage social cohesion?

Introduction

The division of labor refers to the specialty in distinct phases of work that happens inside firms, amidst firms, and amidst districts and countries. Though it is not exclusive to capitalism, the division of labor is most spoke under product output and earnings maximization. Rudimentary divisions of labor based on gender emerge in hunter-gatherer societies. Similarly, household divisions of labor typically are founded on gender, but these alter broadly amidst societies; feminists often issue to gender-based partitions of labor in the context of patriarchy (Hirschman, 1977, 44).

The discovery/ creation of agriculture directed to a division of labor based on class, that is, slavery. Under feudalism, an uneven differentiation between country localities and villages started to appear, as evidenced by the increase of the guild system. Nevertheless, it is under capitalism that the division of labor reaches its most unambiguous level.

Discussion and analysis

Capitalist development has always occurred unevenly—spatially, sect orally, and temporally—producing differential degrees of industrialization and varying modes and levels of integration into the world economy. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a widespread recognition that a fundamental transformation (now commonly understood as globalization) is taking place in the conditions of capitalist accumulation and expansion of capital on a world-historical scale (Hirschman, 1977, 36).

The term new international division of labor (NIDL) was coined by theorists seeking to explain the spatial shift of manufacturing industries from advanced capitalist countries to developing countries—an ongoing geographic reorganization of production, which finds its origins in the formation of the “world market for labor” and “world market for industrial sites” famously analyzed by the German political economists Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye. Under the “old” international division of labor, underdeveloped areas were incorporated into the world economy principally as suppliers of minerals and agricultural commodities. A growing emphasis on factors such as the internationalization of production, the greater sway of transnational corporations (TNCs), and the enhanced mobility of capital facilitated by modern communications technology and liberalization has generated a transition toward an NIDL in which low-wage developing countries increasingly provide sites for labor-intensive industries that manufacture goods for sale in the world economy (Muller, 2003, 6).

Theories of the NIDL assign a major role to TNCs as the orchestrator of a global reallocation of manufacturing away from advanced countries toward the developing countries. Varying in emphasis from a “neo-Smithian” focus on changes in the world market to a “neo-Ricardian” one on capital exports, theories of the NIDL have sought to explain a dual pattern of “industrialization” in the developing countries and “deindustrialization” in the advanced countries. In seeking to explain this pattern, the concept of an NIDL focuses on the determining roles played by (a) the development of a worldwide reservoir of potential labor power; (b) the development of the labor process in manufacturing, which has led to the decomposition of production processes into elementary units ...