Kirjahaku

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.

A searing critique of our contemporary policy agenda, and a call to implement radical change. Although it is well known that the United States has an inequality problem, the social science community has failed to mobilize in response. Social scientists have instead adopted a strikingly insipid approach to policy reform, an ostensibly science-based approach that offers incremental, narrow-gauge, and evidence-informed "interventions." This approach assumes that the best that we can do is to contain the problem. It is largely taken for granted that we will never solve it. In Manifesto for a Dream, Michelle Jackson asserts that we will never make strides toward equality if we do not start to think radically. It is the structure of social institutions that generates and maintains social inequality, and it is only by attacking that structure that progress can be made. Jackson makes a scientific case for large-scale institutional reform, drawing on examples from other countries to demonstrate that reforms that have been unthinkable in the United States are considered to be quite unproblematic in other contexts. She persuasively argues that an emboldened social science has an obligation to develop and test the radical policies that would be necessary for equality to be assured for all.

A searing critique of our contemporary policy agenda, and a call to implement radical change. Although it is well known that the United States has an inequality problem, the social science community has failed to mobilize in response. Social scientists have instead adopted a strikingly insipid approach to policy reform, an ostensibly science-based approach that offers incremental, narrow-gauge, and evidence-informed "interventions." This approach assumes that the best that we can do is to contain the problem. It is largely taken for granted that we will never solve it. In Manifesto for a Dream, Michelle Jackson asserts that we will never make strides toward equality if we do not start to think radically. It is the structure of social institutions that generates and maintains social inequality, and it is only by attacking that structure that progress can be made. Jackson makes a scientific case for large-scale institutional reform, drawing on examples from other countries to demonstrate that reforms that have been unthinkable in the United States are considered to be quite unproblematic in other contexts. She persuasively argues that an emboldened social science has an obligation to develop and test the radical policies that would be necessary for equality to be assured for all.