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Michelle Jackson
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Michelle Jackson
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Narrator/Announcer
welcome to the New Books Network
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Interviewer/Host
welcome to the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Michelle Jackson about the division of rationalized labor. So welcome to the podcast.
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Michelle Jackson
Thank you. It's very nice to be here.
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Interviewer/Host
This is a fantastic book. It's a really kind of serious bit of contemporary and historical sociology. Makes quite, I think, a major theoretical contribution to I guess, kind of sociology of occupations, professionals fashion sociology at work. But it also kind of gives us a sort of guide almost to explain the world we live in and how we kind of experience that world. And the kind of grand themes, I guess are grounded in two things. One is a big idea that's drawn from maybe kind of classical economic theory or classical sociological theory, which is this thing, the division of labor. And then the other thing is how we kind of think about rationality and the kind of rationalization of that labor. And to kick off with, I guess I've got two questions really. The first thing is what is the division of labor? What does that mean? Can you sort of explain that idea for maybe non specialists? And then what gave you the inspiration to write about it as well?
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Michelle Jackson
Wow. So the division of labor is an interesting term because I mean, certainly if you tell another social scientist that you're working on the division of labor, they don't immediately Know what that means? Because it means actually several different things in contemporary social science. So you can think about the division of labor with respect to paid work, and you can think of that in kind of two different ways. You can think of it in terms of what individual workers are up to, that is, the degree to which they're specializing in a given set of tasks. But you can also think about it as the whole occupational structure. How many specialized occupations do we have? Have? And so the division of labor is used in both of those terms. And of course, that's kind of a classic distinction in the literature. And then on the other hand, people might think that you're talking about the family. You know, do you have division of labor within the family? Who does the housework, who does childcare, you know, etc. Etc. So the book is about the first two. It's about paid work. It's thinking about the degree of task specialization of workers and the degree to which we have these kind of occupational boundaries that form around these different sets of tasks. You know, what it is that people do in their work. And of course, the classical theories of the division of labor. And I'm thinking here about people like Adam Smith or Durkheim or Marx, a whole set of theorists, really, who have these very straightforward predictions about what's going to happen to the division of labor over time. So we definitely would expect to see more specialization over time. So you expect, I mean, if you think about Adam Smith's pin factory, the idea was that it's going to be much more efficient insofar as you have a set of workers who each work on an individual task rather than an individual worker who's working on the whole range of tasks. And, I mean, there are several reasons for that, but I think the two most important are that first of all, if you do a task repeatedly, then you get really good at it. And so insofar as you can specialize in a given task, then you're going to be much more efficient in doing that task. A second reason is that you don't need to waste time on task switching. So insofar as you're producing all of the bits of the pin, you need to move from machine to machine, you need to worry about when one part is completed and what's next. And does that take time then to cool down, for example, or for paint to dry or whatever it may be. So insofar as you specialize, then you don't have to worry about that time that you spend switching tasks. So there are all sorts of reasons in the background as to why we would expect that sort of specialization to arise. And so that's all at the kind of task specialization level. But then if we kind of layer the sociology on top of it, we expect that occupational boundaries are going to form around people who are doing similar sorts of tasks and similar groups of tasks in order to produce some sort of given output. So there's a long sociological history, again on this. So, I mean, Durkheim is probably the most prominent example of a person who talks about these occupational boundaries forming. But Andrew Abbott's work is pretty fundamental, I would say, over the past 40 years in shaping how we think about tasks and occupations. And the idea is we have these pretty strong cultural boundaries around the idea of what it is reasonable for people to do within a given occupation. And those boundaries are then important in kind of fighting off other occupations who might be interested in taking over some of those tasks. So that's the kind of backdrop, I guess, in the sociology or the social science of the division of labor, this general idea that there's this kind of push towards efficiency, productivity that is associated with specialization, and then all of these kind of social processes layered on top of it that then form the occupational structure that we see today. And I think you asked me next why I was working on that. You're going to have to remind me.
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Interviewer/Host
Yeah, I mean, there's so much in there that immediately is obvious as that's really interesting. You could probably write a book about that. You know, there's probably like six or seven books in that, Both kind of sociological, professional, occupational and economic setting.
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Michelle Jackson
But.
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Interviewer/Host
Yeah. What was your kind of inspiration to start interrogating the division of labour?
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Michelle Jackson
Well, so one of the interesting things about the division of labor is that although it is fundamental in a way that I think everyone would acknowledge, it's actually not one of those topics that we very frequently take on in and of itself. So we often look at little bits of it, or we look at consequences of the division of labor, or we look at, you know, the emergence of specialization in some setting or, you know, whatever it may be. But we don't generally say, okay, well, let's try and think about the division of labor as a whole. And I thought, well, you know, maybe it'd be interesting to write a book about that. And I thought in particular, it would be interesting to try and track how quickly the division of labor happens. Does it happen more quickly at some points in time than others? Does it differ across countries? For example, is it something that's more prominent in some areas of the occupational structure than in others. It just kind of struck me as interesting that despite the fact that this thing was absolutely fundamental to economies and societies, that we didn't. We didn't really kind of look at it directly as it were, and we didn't measure it directly or kind of. Yeah. Or try to track it in a very structured way. So that was where I started off. And really I thought I was going to write a book just. Just on that and thinking about, okay, well, look, it happens more quickly here than it does in other places, or it happens more quickly at this point in time than at other times. And actually it does turned out that when I started working on it, something different was happening than I thought. And in particular, I had really been absolutely convinced that I was going to find increasing specialization over time. But as I started working on these historical case studies, it seemed like something different was happening. And it seemed like actually people were taking on more tasks rather than fewer. And I was like, okay, well, this is a bit strange. And I kept on down that path. And eventually I actually really remember the point at which I kind of said to myself, okay, something different is going on here. I'm just wrong. And it really forced me to really think about, well, what was happening here and why was it that we didn't seem to be getting this increasing task specialization over time. And eventually I came to this idea that actually what was happening with task specialization and what was happening to occupational specialization, they were two things that you had to think about really quite differently, rather than just assuming they're both part of the same process. And that made me think about these more general changes over time. I mean, the book goes back over the past 150 years or so, and obviously we've had huge and fundamental changes to society, to science. And those things are pretty important in understanding actually what has happened to the division of labor. And so, yeah, that pushed me in the direction of doing something quite different from what I'd started with. But I think actually I kind of ended up in a place I was happy with.
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Interviewer/Host
So let's say that I guess that kind of almost sort of eureka moment is crystallized into really kind of central ideas. And you've sort of like, kind of foreshadowed them a little bit. On the one hand, we've got this thing that you called the paradox specialization, and then you've also got the kind of increasing rationalization within and of occupations. And these two things kind of go together, and they're probably the kind of two key theoretical like strands that run through the book. And I wonder if you could kind of unpack them a little bit partially because as you've alluded to already, there's a kind of counterintuitive thing going on with specialization. And certainly the idea of we've not seen the simplification we might have expected in some of the more classical theories, but at the same time that other elements of I guess the kind of the importance of not just social science actually, but as we'll come to in some of the case studies, the sciences and research more generally having an impact on professional boundaries. So yeah, that's a long way of saying what is the paradox of specialisation and what are rationalised occupations?
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Michelle Jackson
So I guess I'll start with the second one first. So sociologists of course are very interested in this process of rationalization. This is a process that we, I mean, generally associate with Weber. And he lays out how it is that societies increasingly become rationalized. That is they build institutions that increasingly reflect these sort of rationalized ideas. And you can think about it in very basic terms as you know, a focus on means, ends, calculations. That is, I have a certain end in mind. What are the best means to get there? You can think about it as building in kind of bureaucratic structures. You could think about it as linking what it is that we do with kind of rationalized processes. And one such rationalized process would be science. So in the case of occupations, you might think science becomes ever more important in explaining what it is that workers should be up to. So when I talk about the rationalized occupation, I am talking about an occupation that develops over the hundred past 150 years and it develops to get ever closer to science. So workers within the occupation, occupational actors by which I'm thinking, you know, trade unions, employers, professional organizations and so on, they get increasingly enthusiastic about the idea of building in scientific principles, knowledge, science based practices to the occupation itself. So rationalized occupation is one that says, okay, this is what I'm trying to do. How does the science tell me I can best reach that goal? And one of the interesting things about occupations as sociologists conceive of them, is that we're well aware that we're living in this highly rationalized society and getting ever more rationalized. It's of course a process, it's not just a single point in time, but we have always focused on tasks as the thing that should define an occupation. But in a rationalized society it doesn't really make sense to focus on the means rather than the ends, when you're trying to define what an occupation is. Because actually, insofar as workers are trying to decide how best to do their jobs, what they're normally doing is saying, this is my output. How do I best achieve that output? And in talking about the rationalized occupation, what I'm trying to do is to encourage sociologists to really focus on what it is that workers are trying to do. Because when they engage in those means, ends, calculations, that's what they're trying to search for. And I think we've seen this huge shift over the past, certainly century in which workers are increasingly, you know, going to science in order to decide what it is that they best need to do in order to achieve their goals. So, I mean, even if you think about academics and so on, think about when we're trying to support student learning. I mean, even that word, support student learning is something quite different from maybe how we would have thought about it in the past when the idea is, you know, we would have stood up and lectured. But now the idea is, well, okay, you know, students are, you know, bundles of complicated stuff, and in order to help them learn, we've got to do all sorts of other things that we. We might worry about. And how do we know what those things are that we worry about? Well, we've got science telling us that these are the ways in which students learn. And so we better kind of pay attention to those if we want to do well in producing our outputs. But that sort of shift, you know, that sort of shift to thinking about how we best achieve our ends through what science tells us about the means, I think that that's occurred across the occupational structure. Now, once you have these kind of rationalized occupations in place now, you have a kind of funnel for science to get in. And if we think about what's happened to science, that's another big shift over the past 100, 150 years. First of all, we have an awful lot more science than we had in the past. I mean, you know, the classic thing about scientific growth is it looks basically exponential. You know, the number of science, the number of scientists, the number of journals, the number of scientific publications, all of these go up dramatically. So each new generation feels this massive increase in scientific output. So first of all, there's just more scientific output than we had in the past. But science has also changed, actually, in quite frankly, fundamental ways. And in general, philosophers of science often think about this as being a probabilistic revolution. That is, we move from a type of science in which we think we've got pretty simple relationship between cause and effect, you know, single cause, single effect, to a more probabilistic understanding of how science should work. And that's of course encouraged through the growth of statistical models and you know, those sorts of multi causal mechanisms. And so now we tend to think about a cause of an effect as being, okay, it can be part of a huge complex of causes, it doesn't have to work in and of itself. And so that kind of multi causal approach opens up the idea that actually there's all sorts of different types of scientific work that might be relevant to a given outcome output. So again, if we think about education, well, maybe in the past we just thought psychology was important in understanding how children learn. But over time we come to understand that actually social context is really important. Maybe biology is really important, maybe geography is really important, whatever it may be. But that type of scientific growth just in terms of the breadth, so if you think about that growth in the breadth as well as just the growth and the raw amount, and you now have an occupation that is open to accepting science, you can see that there's just a massive amount of new stuff that people now need to attend to. So once you have this rationalized occupation in place, once you have that science growing alongside it, now you have this route in to having an increasing number of job tasks. Because as a person within one of these occupations, I'm saying to myself, okay, if I need to produce my output, well, I've got to take account of all of these things. And those things just keep growing and growing and growing over time. And that's what I call the paradox of specialization. It's by virtue of specializing in a given output that all of this stuff then becomes more important to me and I have to take it into account. So in other words, the job tasks follow precisely because I'm specializing in an output. And that output is something that science has a lot to to say about.
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Michelle Jackson
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Michelle Jackson
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Interviewer/Host
It plays out. And the book really brings this to life in the context of four, I guess, kind of like case study occupations which are also kind of like histories of the industries or the professions. And so you've got doctors of medicine, police and law enforcement, teachers and education, and then actually a kind of broader scoped chapter on manufacturing. And we'll probably dip into them in turn if we get time. Medicine comes first. And I think is the one where, and you sort of correct me if I'm wrong, but is the one that's got the most kind of clear cut version of the story you've just been telling, that sense of both the kind of proliferation of particular occupational tasks, but at the same time a really kind of close interrelationship with science expanding both for really kind of good and positive reasons, the scope of what medicine can do and the kind of things medicine could kind of act on and cure, but also bringing us into realms of things like public health prevention rather than kind of that narrow cure and intervention. And I wonder if you could kind of maybe tell that story, really the kind of expansion of both medical science and medical theory, but also the story of how this changed what a doctor kind of, you know, maybe does every day.
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Michelle Jackson
Sure. So yeah, so the book has these four different case studies. And the idea of the case studies was that they would represent, you know, different, different kind of poles of rationalization and scientific development. So like a two by two table, basically, medicine is a case where you see obviously a high degree of rationalization. Even at the beginning of this period, you know, there was this strong belief that what doctors should do was going to be related to science. I mean, it wasn't that doctors should only take care, take account of science. But you know, they were clearly much more invested in having a scientific foundation than many other occupations were. So they, I saw them as being kind of extreme on that and also, you know, reasonably extreme on the scientific development side of things. You know, there was a lot of science even at the start of the period I consider, which, you know, starts around 1880, somewhere like that. So even at that period in time, you know, people, people knew an awful lot about how the human body worked and obviously discovered more over time, but they knew a lot at that point in time as well. So they are kind of already on the extreme. And so, yeah, you're absolutely right that this is a place where you might expect to see a more extreme takeoff. And in fact, I think that is what we see so in medicine if we think first of all about what happened in science. So at the beginning of the period you have this idea that ill health is very much rooted in kind of abnormal physiology basically and this kind of monocausal approach, I mean, just to put it in very basic terms. So you know, there was a single cause and that was going to produce some bad effect. And then over time that science develops and I mean, you see this kind of pattern across actually lots of different occupations. But you know, there's a period of time in which psychology becomes much more important. So you know, towards the beginning of the 20th century, 1920s, that that type of zone psychology becomes really important and, and people start thinking, you know, very carefully about the, the effects of psychology and abnormal psychology on ill health. But where you see a big shift actually in scientific work in medicine is where you get the social science entering in. And that's partly public health. So public health becomes really important and thinking about the effects of communities and living situation and nutrition and all the rest of it, that becomes very important for public health. And you know, there's this slight kind of interesting period where you have a lot of public health work going on and that public health work is usually oriented towards children and trying to improve children's health and so on. But it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that actually a lot of these public health interventions are doing things by helping the individual children, and that maybe the doctors might want to be involved in that process too. And so you kind of end up in this slightly odd battle between family doctors, physicians, and the public health people. And of course, all of them are understanding that this is improving health in general. But the family doctors are just starting to say, well, wait a minute, actually, if all of these things are important for health, well, maybe we should be doing this stuff. And then, of course, you see that gradually develop over the course of the century. So the social basis of health stuff becomes very, very important within medicine over the course of the 20th century. I mean, you might say, particularly in the 1960s, 70s and so on, it probably really takes off then. But I mean, you already know if you go to the doctor today, you are going to be asked questions that relate to your kind of social situation, to your diet, to smoking, pat, and so on. All of these things are kind of driven by this social science of health and medicine and the public health of science and medicine that kind of pushed medics to think in this much broader way about the causes of disease. The other really important shift that you see in medicine, and this is strongly related to changes in science, is the move from curing disease to preventing disease. And one of the important things about probabilism, and we tend to just take this for granted now, but insofar as you can build strong causal models that allows you to have a reasonable route to preventing bad outcomes, and we see this move over time that is increasingly away from curing disease towards the idea of preventing disease. And this is a change again, that you see across a whole range of occupations. So if you think again about something like education, education or even policing, there's a move away from saying, okay, well, we need to deal with the bad stuff when it happens, towards saying, actually, we need to stop that bad stuff from happening. If the stuff that we can do to intervene well before then, it's going to make much more sense for us to intervene at that point. And again, you can think about this in terms of rationalization. It just is much more efficient to intervene before bad things happen than to wait for the bad thing to happen and then deal with it at that point. So one of the big shifts that you're seeing in medicine is exactly that. It's the move away from curing bad things once they've happened, to having doctors who are largely oriented towards preventing those bad things happening. And that change you see particularly in something like pediatrics. So there's this big shift over time that you can see in terms of, say, well, child visits. So they're called, well, child visits here. I can't even remember what they're called like in called in the uk.
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Interviewer/Host
Maybe you can remind me as a man without children. I have no idea. But yeah, there'll be in fact, actually one of the things that we've been talking us examples, one of the things that's great about the book is this is not an American phenomenon. And so, you know, this expansion of cure to prevention is the kind of thing that you'll see in like basically kind of every health system now. So I'm sure every health system has got some version of like these kind of yet pediatric wellness interventions.
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Michelle Jackson
Yes, those types of interventions anyway. Yeah, those types of, well, child visits, visits that are largely designed to prevent bad things from happening. They really take off over time. And so you, you see this big of the amount of time that doctors are spending on that type of work as a proportion of their whole workday. Of course, I think one thing that people often think about with respect to medicine, and this is particularly the case, of course, for the United States, is the growth of medication. And I think it's really important when you think about prescribing and medication that, that we understand what's happened there too. So in a sense, you might think, okay, if you give people a tablet or you know, prescribe them some medicine, that's like a classic example of a cure. But there's actually been this big shift over time in prescribing as well. So that actually, if you look at the top 10, 20 prescribed drugs in this country, they are largely to stop bad things happening. They're not to cure a disease. They are to do things like lower your cholesterol, because if you lower your cholesterol, then you're less likely to get heart disease, you know, in 30, 40 years time, whatever it may be. And so this shift from, you know, disease treatment to disease prevention is something that you see even in a place that you might think is kind of classic curing rather than prevention. But it's happening on the medication side too. Do so we're seeing this kind of big shift in medicine on the prevention side. And that prevention is really entirely due to the shift that we have seen in science that allows us to build these more complicated causal models in which we can have a reasonable expectation that if we can stop this cause, then we're going to be able to prevent a disease from happening. And so the medicine chapter is largely about that prevention shift and also about this shift to bringing in all of these different sciences. And, of course, medicine's also an interesting place to see how different sciences might come in, because if you think about what medics are thinking, if you were to say to a medic, okay, you're not allowed any biology, they would look at you like there was something wrong with you. It would clearly be a very bad idea for medics to just ignore biology. But insofar as you have these more complex causal models, they don't have to get rid of biology in order to think. Actually, is there a psychology effect going on here, too? Is there a social effect going on here, too? And so that allows them to take into account a much broader range of sciences and causes of disease and of course, to become much better at being doctors as a result. Now, the disadvantage of that is that there's a load of new tasks associated with all of that different scientific work, because instead of just focusing on the biology of the person in front of you, you've got to think about all of these different aspects as well, insofar as you're treating them. So this is why you end up with all of these different things added into a doctor's appointment, all of these questions about your personal. Your smoking habits, your alcohol habits, you know, whatever it may be. But yeah, that. That kind of lays the groundwork for this big increase in these. These different tasks that they might want to. To take into account as part of their daily job.
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Interviewer/Host
The idea of prevention seems like a really great thing that's happened with medicine, you know, kind of keeping us fit, healthy, helping us live for longer, both on an individual and, you know, kind of a social level. And yet there is a really. And it, you know, is in the next chapter that follows actually, you know, potentially negative version of prevention, which is in, or at least in relation to police and law enforcement. And one of the things you. You open with is, I guess, the kind of. I'm trying to think how to describe it, like, you know, kind of current controversy, but also, you know, quite reasonable call for a way of rethinking the police, both in terms of, I guess, the kind of. What do you call it? The kind of clarion cries of defund the police as a political moment, political movement associated with Black Lives Matter, but also, I think, the kind of. Of questioning of the kind of overreach that has maybe happened in a way that, I guess medicine hasn't been questioned from that kind of shift from cure to prevention. So what's the kind of contrast with police and law enforcement? How is that same kind of process that you've identified open to, I suppose, a more critical view in the context of police and law enforcement?
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Michelle Jackson
Yeah, so when I started working on the book Defund the Police was. I mean, it's. It's of course, been a movement for a long time, But I had started working on this book in about 2019, and of course, the Black Lives Matter protests, the very large ones, happened in 2020. And so this was kind of in, you know, a backdrop to me. To me thinking about this project. And this was actually the first chapter, the first case study that I wrote. And what struck me as very interesting about Defund the Police was, first of all, this is a social movement that is focused on the division of labor. And I think sociologists have. I mean, of course, there's all sorts of really important stuff in Defund the Police on race and policing. And it's absolutely right that that should be the priority when people talk about this topic. But it did strike me that sociologists were not properly kind of taking into account that this was a division of labor movement as well. Like, this is a social movement built on the idea that the police are doing too much. They're doing tasks that don't belong in that occupation, and lots of these tasks should belong to more highly specialized occupations. So to take on your kind of question of like, well, what's happening here relative to medicine. Yeah, you're absolutely right that this is in many ways the same process. So the police, if we think about what it is that they're trying to do and what they think they're trying to do, more importantly, they think that their job is to prevent crime. Now, at the beginning of the period I look at, they thought that in order to prevent crime, what you had to do was to take criminals off the streets. Because the idea was that criminals were abnormal in some fashion. You know, there was something wrong with their psychology or their physiology. And if you were to just remove them from society, then you were going to be able to prevent crime because you just take the criminals away. And you can see that that kind of mirrors what happens in medicine. You know, the idea of this abnormal physiology, psychology. And actually, if you can kind of deal with that, then that's the best way you have at dealing with disease. But of course, the thing about crime, as you start to have this understanding of crime, that becomes much more social over time. And, you know, crime does Go through this period where they focus a lot on psychology and then they move to think about the importance of the social basis of crime and so on. But as that social basis of crime becomes more and more, you know, the primary way in which people understand how crime should be presented, prevented, as that happens, there's more and more argument that you need interventions in communities. And so you move away from this idea of targeting individual criminals to the idea that, well, police need to be really involved in communities. And then we think about, well, okay, we've got children, maybe we can socialize children into a life that is going to be law abiding and so on. So then you get police officers engaged in schools and youth organizations. And I do have a case study of the LAPD that's in the chapter on policing. And you see, I mean, they, they saw themselves as being a very kind of enterprising, free thinking police agency. They're very much interested in following the science of crime. And so they start to develop these interventions. So they have like a summer camp for disadvantaged children in which they send up these disadvantaged children to a park with police officers and they spend a few days together and they have this idea that police officers should go into schools and talk to students and try and socialize them into this life of being law abiding. But the obvious problem, of course, as soon as you start engaging in communities is that you then first of all have police officers in communities all of the time. And, and police officers are of course, an occupation that carries guns with them, that they are not some of the best trained. They have relatively low skill requirements actually, relative to what it is that they're required to do in the occupation. And so as you start loading more and more and more tasks on police officers, the job becomes ever more complex. They're in communities and, and obviously that's a recipe for some very bad things to happen. One of the interesting things about policing is that they have been very good at guarding the boundaries of the occupation. And so you don't see what you might expect, that certain more specialized occupations would come along and that they would kind of develop over time. So that process, of course, and I haven't really spoken much about this, but that process of occupational specialization can happen at the same time as you see increases in tasks elsewhere. So if we think back to medicine, of course it's the case that we had occupational specialization. Over time you move from having just a general doctor to having, say, a pediatrician, but at the same time, the pediatrician is also taking on Huge numbers of. Of more tasks as time goes on. So you can have both of those trends happening at the same time. In policing, you're basically not seeing a huge amount of occupational specialization and you're seeing a big increase in tasks over time. So you're getting both of those kind of slightly odd things happening. So policing by the end of the 20th century and in the present day, you can see that they are actually one of the most complex occupations within the occupational structure. So in other words, like what Defunder Police is identifying here is absolutely on the mark. It is a very, very specialized, sorry, very, very unspecialized occupation with respect to the number of tasks that people are doing. One of the most extreme that we see in our occupational structure. So people are right when they have this feeling that something kind of slightly odd is going on here. And police officers also feel that, by the way, police officers are constantly saying things like, we have to do this immense range of tasks and it's just too much. And that type of situation is absolutely the worst type of situation for accidents that, I mean, of the type that we frequently see in policing. And, you know, accidents slash, you know, losing temper, you know, whatever it might be. But it's a very, very stressful situation and it's one that is likely to produce bad results.
- [42:00]
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- [42:30]
Interviewer/Host
You've touched already on some of the examples from education, but I was really struck by the final case study of manufacturing. How I mean, you've given the example of policing in la, but the manufacturing discussion had maybe a bit of a paradox of its own. Like some of the material you'd used was, you know, these kind of general approaches to understanding how manufacturing functions. But you'd also really try to ground it in places maybe in a way that kind of speaks to a more general discourse about things like deindustrialization, but also was maybe a little bit of contrast to the other three chapters. And I suppose as a way of kind of setting up a question about the manufacturing case study. What is, I guess, kind of different about manufacturing? Why maybe did you kind of include it as A distinctive case study in its own right.
- [43:30]
Michelle Jackson
So I thought it was really important to include manufacturing because when people think about the division of labor, and this partly comes back to our classical roots, we think about it in terms of the manufacturing industry. You know, you've got Marx talking about people becoming appendages to machines and how this is just miserable and that's where alienation comes from and so on. So I think for anyone who's interested in the division of labor, like, you really have to think carefully about what's happening in the manufacturing industry. Just in terms of my kind of two by two table, as it were. Manufacturing is an interesting case study because it's a place where there wasn't a lot of science or actually some, but not huge amount. And it wasn't necessarily seen as highly rationalized at the beginning of this period. It wasn't like workers were necessarily saying, well, science was. Science has a lot to tell me about my job. And so it was an interesting one for that reason. The thing that I think is super interesting about manufacturing is that you can actually split apart the forces of rationalization and the forces of science in a way that is more difficult to do in some of the other chapters. So just to explain what that means, everybody who has done a kind of basic course in labor or work or so on has thought about Taylor and the idea of, you know, scientific type of manufacturing. The idea that we can really strongly rationalize manufacturing processes in a way that is going to maximize output. So Taylor and his scientific management system, that kind of kicks in, well, let's say the beginning of the 20th century, that type of period. And there is an idea that instead of relying on, on rules of thumb in manufacturing, we should be encouraging workers, via the foreman, via the managers of the factory to engage in a more kind of rationalized production process. And that was going to improve output significantly. And so everyone gets very, very excited about that. But this is an interesting example of a place where you have a high degree of kind of rationalization, a big process of rationalization within factories. But actually the science doesn't grow. Huge amount counts in the background. There's a little bit of growth. You know, there's, there's various interesting pieces of work on fatigue, so fatigue, the, it's, it's not just about being tired. It's about this idea that, like a Marxian idea basically that if you are working on a single machine in repeated production, then that's very draining and actually productivity is harmed as a result of it. So there was quite a Bit of science that was aimed at solving that, that fatigue problem. The other place that you see a kind of growth in science is actually on the accident prevention side. And this is again part of this kind of shift towards prevention. You see that in manufacturing too. And it's about preventing accidents within factories. Because as you increasingly bring machines into the factories, you do end up in this situation where actually accident rates were just absolutely horrific. And, and that's very bad for production, it turns out, because if someone loses an arm, then production has to shut down for the day and people are not happy about it and all the rest of it. So it's not good for productivity. So that kind of accident prevention science also happens. But in manufacturing, you see this rationalization process without a corresponding growth in science. And what happens is that the number of tasks do decline. So if you look at what's happening to the tasks of, let's say, machine operatives and those types of people, they do actually decline over the first part of the 20th century. But then what you see is actually that the scientific research starts to kick in. In particular, you see the type of research that was done in the Hawthorne studies. You know, think about Roethlisberger and Dixon and Elton Mayo. That type of work starts to speak to the worker as being part of a social group. And that actually, if we want to maximize productivity, we've really got to think about the science of workers. So manufacturing, although you might think that the output, the product is relatively straightforward because it's often just, I don't know, some sort of durable good that is going to be sold into the world, the complexity in that manufacturing process is actually coming from the workers. And so the science of workers, as that develops, that then becomes the route to which you see this paradox of specialization develop within the manufacturing sector. So you see job tasks added to manufacturing, workers that are designed to help them work in teams that are designed to help them be more productive as workers, because, you know, somebody's paying attention to them or somebody is focusing on how productivity can be increased by making people feel better. And then of course, over the last part of the 20th century, you see this kind of growth in the bureaucratization of work and the state and so on. This is part of the more general rationalization of society. So there's sort of work on health and safety legislation, economic equal opportunities legislation. All of those types of interventions are also then increasing the number of job tasks. So that period towards the end of the 20th century, you get to see actually the increase in tasks starting to take place so manufacturing shows you what can happen if you do indeed get kind of machinery that can increase productivity without increasing work tasks. You do see this decline in work tasks. But then as you see the science develop and now you have this rationalized occupation that science can feed in, and now the number of job tasks increases over time. Sorry, I realized you asked me about places and I just completely ignored you.
- [49:50]
Interviewer/Host
No, I was going to say one of the things that kind of brings the book, I suppose, to a really kind of, like, obvious sort of relevance. And I mentioned right at the start about the kind of. Of the sense of given, you know, how people kind of like, experience and live their lives. Is that kind of story about places?
- [50:12]
Michelle Jackson
Yeah, absolutely. So in the manufacturing case study, I use examples. Well, I use data that are drawn from a particular town in Pennsylvania. And when I was doing the research for this book, I. I went to the archives of Elton Mayo, Roethlisberger Taylor, and various other people. And in those archives, I discovered a study that had never been published. And in fact, it was sealed until I went to the archive. And in the archive, it was a set of interviews with manufacturing workers from a town in Pennsylvania. And it was a kind of fascinating group of interviews with people, people who had been basically unemployed when the industry left the town and the industry left the town. I mean, basically a mix of the Great Depression and machine. Machine development, but basically a lack of investment in this particular town. They had decided not to install the machines in this town. So then the manufacturing went elsewhere. And it was these manufacturing workers talking about their lives, but also talking about, you know, what their lives in the factory had been like. And I thought that this was super interesting because most of the time, when we think about manufacturing work in the early 20th century, we're not actually hearing workers voices. We're hearing. Well, you know, you can look at task analyses and those sorts of things, but a lot of those are highly formalized, and they're by scientists and so on. And I felt like it was good to have the voice of the workers at that point. This is actually something that I'm continuing to work on now and thinking about how place comes into this, because I do think that there's something very important about groups of workers who are together experiencing this. And in the case of this particular town in Pennsylvania, everything becomes very real in the sense that the company, in some sense, is seen to be punishing them. The machines take on this kind of almost human quality, that these are choices that were made that are not about kind of general social Forces, they're about things that punish these workers and this place in particular. And in fact, I'm writing about this as we speak. I think that this is a really important dimension and it feeds into kind of ideas of monopolies as well. It was the idea that it was one specific company. And so in the background here, I haven't really talked about what firms have done over the past 150 years, but you see the same kind of increase in tasks as it were, over time. So if you think about workers taking on all of these different tasks because, you know, the science tells us that we're more productive, firms have also been doing the same thing. So, you know, as we think that it's more important to support workers, we develop human resources departments. And you know, you see in the early part of the 20th century, a lot of these factories would do things like, well, we now need a canteen, we now need a kind of social group that's going to help workers socialize with one another. We're going to have sports leagues, we're going to do this, that and the other. So, so those firms took on that kind of welfare capitalism role, as people like Hacker would talk about it. So that welfare capitalism develops this idea that actually firms have this almost familial responsibility for people who are working for them. And so then when you have these towns that are built around these firms, when that firm goes away, it's like, you know, the familial character has gone away and is punishing them. And in fact they're thinking, I mean, this is shortly before the Second World War and the main topic of conversation is like, ah, that they may come back. They're going to come back, things are going to be okay, they're going to come and rescue us. And it's an incredibly, I mean, it's a different form of alienation, you might say. I mean, we focus a lot on the alienation produced by work, but this type of, the kind of loss of self to this kind of imaginary company that can then rescue you. There's something incredibly sad and moving about it.
- [54:50]
Interviewer/Host
You mentioned you're kind of working on that place element. It's I guess one of the things that comes as a next step from the book. And I mean, I should have said, you know, there's so much more we kind of could have talked about in the book. And you know, I sort of urge people to, to buy it and read it, to, to know more, particularly actually the education case study that we've only touched on. But are you Thinking about a kind of future book about this place element. I mean, that, you know, kind of narrative around alienation and places is a really sort of rich kind of area for work. But at the same time, academic kind of books take a long time to produce. And there is an element of people kind of wrap a book up and think, maybe I'd like to do something a bit kind of distinctive or slightly different. So, yeah, what are you working on now and next?
- [55:51]
Michelle Jackson
Yeah, so it's a really interesting time, of course, to be thinking about work. And I'm sure most of us are thinking about what the effects of artificial intelligence are likely to be. And I think that that's obviously something in the background if you care about the division of labor, thinking about what artificial intelligence is likely to do. I have been. One thing I didn't really write much about in the book, but have thought about more recently is the extent to which humans are just kind of really bad with complexity. And a lot of what we're seeing around in the world at the moment is really about things just seeming too complicated. So I have done some recent work thinking about, first of all, okay, are we in this kind of crisis moment for the division of labor? And I actually think that we might be. And part of it is due to this kind of task accumulation that I talk about in this book. Part of it is due to just this incredibly complex work we have of these very complex organizations, complex governmental structures. I mean, if we think about some of the problems that are facing governments at this point in time is that it's just actually really difficult to do the stuff that people want you to do now. And I think Keir Starmer is facing this in the UK at the moment, that just trying to deal with this incredibly complicated machine is something that's very, very difficult. And with we're all in this mode where we're feeling a bit uncomfortable. We've all got too much to do, Everything's too complex. So I think we're actually in kind of the special moment at this point in time, a slight crisis moment. And I do think that actually AI might be helpful in dealing with some of that. So I think that there is potential for AI to help us deal with some of that complexity. And I'm in no way sanguine about AI and its likely effects. I mean, I think that the most likely effect for individual workers is that we all then have to now deal with all of the other stuff that comes with AI. And if you think about, you know, the job of a professor like, that's now more complicated because we have to deal with student assessment and retooling and, you know, all of the other stuff that AI is bringing along. But I do think where it has potential is helping us maybe navigate some, some of the complexity of the modern world. And particularly, I mean, think about a university as incredibly complex organization. I never know who I'm supposed to talk to about a given topic. So if we could potentially have these sorts of. Think about a chatbot that's trained in a particular university system, that could be helpful actually in cutting through the masses of information and helping us kind of find an answer very quickly. So I'm kind of interested in that side of things, what AI is likely to do. But I'm also interested in just this kind of general process of rationalization and capitalism and all the rest of it. How do these forces kind of come together in ways that might cause us problems in the future? And I always like sociologists, and I kind of always say this to students of like, well, like, look around you in the world to try and understand what might be interesting to write about. And I think that we kind of get very focused on within disciplinary arguments often. But like, there's something happening in the world, people are not happy, there's discomfort, there's. There's stuff going wrong.
- [59:35]
Interviewer/Host
Wrong.
- [59:37]
Michelle Jackson
I do actually touch on this in the last chapter of the book, but you see on both the right and the left wing, this feeling that there's too much complexity. So I think on the right wing side you've got the Doge type approach to things. On the left wing you've got the kind of abundance approach to things. But I think both of those are speaking to this more general discontinuity, comfort that something is going wrong here. And I don't know that what's going wrong is what they say is going wrong. But I do think that it's important to notice that people feel that something is going wrong. And so I'm kind of interested in those types of things. What's happening in societies. People seem uncomfortable. What's going on? What's that about? So anyway, that's a very kind of long and rambling way of saying, I don't know exactly what I'm going to work on next, but I'm kind of up for ideas.