Division of labour is the system under which both economic production and other, especially administrative or policy-making, tasks are handled in all modern societies. It is a system contrasted to craftsmanship or to generalized political and social leadership, and it involves the splitting up and distribution of different parts of any job among several people. In a modern manufacturing enterprise, for example, not only the manufacture of a car, but even of a simple object like a pen, may be subdivided into hundreds of very minor tasks, done repetitively by many people, over and over again, with none of them actually being responsible for creating the whole unit. Many social theorists, but especially Durkheim and Marx, the latter notably in his theory of alienation, have attached great importance to the division of labour as a causal factor in social development.
Although the division of labour is the corner-stone of modern economic productivity, it is held to have a seriously deleterious impact on human self-confidence and inter-personal relations by such theorists. (Though in fact Durkheim also thought it to be crucial for social solidarity.) In other theories, however, it is seen as a necessary aspect of development and modernization, and in its political coverage is almost a definitional element of theories of political development and political modernization. In fact the division of productive tasks seems to have been integral to all known societies, though in primitive societies the distribution of tasks was often on a gender basis. The very earliest of Western political theory assumed automatically that anything larger than a tiny subsistence economy would require specific tasks to be carried out full time by particular individuals, and the theories of both Plato and Aristotle rest much on this form of organization.
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