Division of labor is an economic concept involving the specialization of the functions and roles of production. To social theorists, such as Karl Marx, Adam Smith and Max Weber, the division of labor is more than economics; it is rooted in their own individual philosophy of life and society. This paper will compare and contrast Marx, Smith and Weber with respect to their analysis of "the division of labor."
All three men agree that the division of labor is tied to the standardization of production. To Adam Smith, the division of labor is the underlying principle of free trade, a concept he strongly advocated. To Marx, the division of labor is the underlying cause of the ills of society because it creates class differences, planting dissension among the individual workers. To Weber, the division of labor is the means by which one group in a society achieves unequal control over another.
In Adam Smith's conception, economic growth, necessary to the increase in a country's wealth, is based on increasing division of labor and labor specialization, the discovery of new kinds of technology, and an increase in the amount of raw materials available to producers. Cooperative production increased productivity (as he showed in his example of the production of pins) as did the division of labor into separate trades-bootmakers, carpenters, wheelwrights. To Smith, this was an improvement over the less efficient older system in which each person produced many of these goods for his/her own use, or at most, for the use of a very few others.
In 1776, Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that "the greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour, and the greatest part of the skill, dexterity, and judgement with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour" (7). He went on to explain that despite the many economic advantages gained from the division of labor, it was not in itself...