Glamor Economics

Chapter 16

Chapter 3 Section 3 The Efficiency Revolution Brought by Cooperation——Division of Labor and Specialization

Markets emerge with the continuous development of specialization and division of labor.Before the market appeared, most economies were in a state of self-sufficiency, self-production and self-marketing.Why is this self-sufficiency broken?What are the advantages and advances of specialization and division of labor over self-sufficient production?Let's take a look at the advantages of division of labor and specialization from two small cases.

Mr. Zhou is the owner of a lighter manufacturing factory in Wenzhou. He believes that division of labor and cooperation is the secret to his company's success in competition.He said that for the same small electronic ignition part, the cost of a Japanese company to produce one is 1 yuan, and his purchase price is [-] yuan.The production cost of the family business that plays a role in his business is only [-] yuan.However, there are hundreds of small workshop-style factories that are similar to cooperative supporting, and there may be several or dozens of companies that produce the same parts. These hundreds of supporting companies do not have a unified management and internal transfer relationship. , but rather self-managing and market-trading relationships.In this way, downstream enterprises can choose the best among the upstream enterprises, choose the lowest price, best quality, and most timely supply for cooperation.In this way, Wenzhou's metal lighters defeated Japanese manufacturers and occupied more than [-]% of the global market share.

The division of labor and specialized production have greatly improved production efficiency, which is the secret to the success of enterprise management.Similarly, in scientific research, division of labor and collaboration also play a huge role.

In 1942, the United States spent 50 billion dollars to develop the "Manhattan Project" of the atomic bomb. Dr. Oppenheimer, the chief engineer of its engineering technology, summed up his successful experience and pointed out: "It is scientific organization and management that makes science and technology fully exert their power. From 1961 to 1969, the United States organized and implemented the grand and complicated "Apollo Moon Landing Program". The rocket "Saturn-5" developed and launched by it consisted of 560 million parts, and a total of 400 million researchers participated in it. , there were 42 people at the most. 120 universities and 200 companies cooperated with each other, costing a total of more than 8 billion US dollars in 300 years, and finally succeeded in 1969.Dr. Weber, who was in charge of the "Apollo Moon Landing Project", also said with deep emotion: "We did not use a technology that others did not have. Our technology is a scientific organization." Scientific organizational management is based on a highly specialized division of labor. In the process of planning, organizing, directing and coordinating, if there is no professional division of labor, there will be no need for mutual coordination, and only individuals can manage individuals, so there will be no organizational management behavior and exist.

Through the above two examples, we can see the great role of division of labor and collaboration in modern organizational management.

For example, there are various functional departments in the company, the finance department is in charge of finance, the sales department is in charge of sales, and the administration department is in charge of daily company affairs...Under such a division of labor, each department completes its work efficiently.The division of labor makes the work more efficient. If you want a person to do N things at the same time, he will be unable to do what he wants, but let him only do one thing, and he can concentrate on doing it well.At the same time, the specialized division of labor makes the scale of production continuously expand, so that enterprises can reduce the average cost and realize economies of scale.

In today's society, the degree of division of labor is getting higher and higher.The division of labor is not limited to individuals, but has extended to the whole world.For example, 747 million parts and components of the Boeing 450 jetliner are produced by 8 large enterprises and 100 small enterprises in 15000 countries in the world.Under the guidance of comparative advantage and division of labor exchange, multinational corporations are constantly striving to reduce transaction costs and factor costs, and let the division of labor spread to every corner of the world.

[links to related words]

Specialization refers to a group of people engaged in a profession that requires specialized skills, which requires special intelligence to be cultivated and completed, and its purpose is to provide specialized social services.Whitehead, a modern western philosopher, believes that: "A profession is a kind of industry, its activities have a theoretical basis, scientific research, can be verified, and knowledge can be accumulated from theoretical analysis and scientific verification to promote the activities of this industry."

Division of labor Each person is only responsible for a part of the production activities, instead of participating in all activities to complete the production of the product.The division of labor makes people's respective products become commodities and equivalents of each other, and makes people become markets for each other.

(End of this chapter)