The space of schemes for dividing labour

Across the many forms of organization that distinguish our social species – surgical teams, firms, markets, bureaucracies, professions, caste orders – labour is divided, and the divided activities are integrated coherently by distinctive schemes that fall across a range of possibilities. We require a principled account of the dimensions along which such schemes vary. This paper supplies one organized around two axes. The primary axis distinguishes task, role, and station differentiation, according to the unit on which the differentiated labour assignment lands. The secondary axis is governed by the placement of coordinative labour itself (the labour by which first-order labour is organized): non-mediated, intermediated (through a coordinator or organization), or diffuse (across signals, practices, and inherited arrangements). Across these three categories, the paper develops six (non-exhaustive) mechanisms of integration: mutual adjustment or negotiated coordination; direction or administered rule; and signal-mediated coupling or sedimented normative coordination. The paper distinguishes civic self-government by the placement not only of ongoing coordination but of vigilance and the labour of revising the scheme. The resulting taxonomy, available to all social science, distinguishes the terrain of division-cum-coordination from the economic forces that produce movement across it, including specialization gains, coordination and communication costs, technological change, and entrepreneurial judgement.