The contrast between the normative functions of political parties in representative democracies and their empirical working is stark and rapidly increasing. This article starts from a sober, realist account of the empirical state of affairs and from structural problems of democracy and participations – in terms of limits of time, information, qualification and relevant expertise – that have to be acknowledged by any realist–utopian proposal of alternatives beyond the exclusive alternative of ‘thin, realist democracy’ or emphatic ‘strong, participatory, direct, (...) or mass democracy’. We can do better. My search for institutional alternatives looks not for the replacement of political parties but for their relief. Many, not all, of their normative tasks can be shared with other functional networks, associations and organizations. In exploring such a new division of political labour I draw on older debates and designs of associative democracy and on recent discussions to democratize expertise and to expertise democracy in order to address urgent societal problems of high-risk decisions under conditions of extreme complexity, contingency, unpredictability and uncertainty and deep contestedness of our knowledge, problems that turn out to be unmanagable by party politics and representative democracy. (shrink)

I use the theory of the division of labor as a case-study in the logic of social explanation and to test the explanatory power of a new Aristotelian model for social theory. The classical political economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx argue that the divisions of labor is both efficient and natural. I claim that this explanation suffers from a two-fold reductionism: the moral dimension of the division of labor is reduced to technical efficiency; and the (...) customary and stipulated dimensions of the division of labor are reduced to nature. This reductionism collapses two important Aristotelian distinctions: that between moral reason and technical reason ; and that between nature , custom , and deliberate stipulation . I revise these concepts in the light of modern natural, social and philosophical sciences into a framework for social theory: I show that, in human conduct, technical reason always presupposes moral reason; and I show that every social institution is the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation: just as custom presupposes nature, so stipulation presupposes custom. I then use this framework to criticize Aristotle as well as classical political economy. By transcending the positivist dichotomy of ends and means, I restore moral reason to supremacy over technique. By transcending the Sophistic dichotomy between nature and convention, I restore custom to its rightful place at the center of social theory. (shrink)

The Abbé Sieyès is usually portrayed as a thoroughly modern thinker and a critic of the nostalgic Classical Republicanism of some of his contemporaries, in favour of a “modern republicanism”, founded upon the division of labour and commercial sociability in a nation composed of equal labourers and producers. But Sieyès’s unpublished manuscripts suggest he, in fact, regarded modern labourers as unskilled “Machines du Travail”, dulled by work and incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship, a critique grounded in (...) a critical account of commercial society as compared to the ideal republican polity. Where most scholars regard this as either a simple contradiction or a passing juvenile nostalgia, this paper argues that, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sieyès consistently sought to counteract the degrading effects of the inequalities generated by commercial society and the division of labour. It was on this basis that Sieyès sought to construct a new political system which would reconcile participatory politics with representative government, enabling all citizens to enjoy a life of Active Citizenship. Based on these insights, this paper reinterprets Sieyès’s political project as an attempt to reconcile the classical conception of citizenship with the demands of a commercial society. (shrink)

As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informational systems, this demands new skills, competencies and commitments. Informed by the findings of an online survey, this article explores how, who and to what extent those in the profession of architecture are investing in technology knowledge and skills, and under what material conditions this occurs. Survey data collected from five large-scale architecture practices in Sydney, Australia finds that while technology-related skills are highly valued in the profession, (...) more men than women are engaging with computationally intensive software and technology skills building remains a largely unstructured and often self-directed enterprise. Drawing on feminist technology studies and digital labour perspectives, it is argued that the drive to computationalise the profession of architecture rests heavily on discretionary, aspirational and invisible labour practices that disadvantage employees with lesser reserves of economic and social capital, and particularly women. This further contributes to revealing neo-liberalism’s influence on the concrete practices of the architecture workplace and highlights how the diminished structural role of employers breeds uneven opportunities and inequitable working conditions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Clear Division of Labor Within Environmental Philosophy?William M. Throop (bio)In discussions about the future of environmental philosophy, I have found myself supporting two positions that are in tension with one another. The first, which has been well explored in the last decade, is that environmental philosophy should have a more dramatic impact outside of academic circles. It should affect policy and guide the behavior of non-philosophers, which (...) usually requires that it deeply engage the empirical details of problems it addresses. The second is that environmental philosophy needs to improve its status within the larger philosophical community, which requires its practitioners to use methods that dominate mainstream philosophy and to be conversant with contemporary work in ethical theory, epistemology, metaphysics, and continental philosophy. Some have argued that this tension places a double burden on those training to be environmental philosophers; they must demonstrate both theoretical and practical excellence. I fear that such a standard will limit [End Page 147] the growth of environmental philosophy. It will be daunting to new environmental philosophers and achieved by only a few.With respect to this tension, I suggest that environmental philosophy should support a robust division of labor. Many new environmental philosophers should be recruited from cohorts trained primarily in core areas of philosophy. Most of these thinkers will probably focus on highly theoretical issues—issues that anyone in the field would recognize as philosophical.Their knowledge of environmental problems may be superficial and their audience likely will consist primarily of other philosophers. Their impact beyond philosophy may be quite limited (except for their students). I come from this tradition, and I am still delighted by the purely intellectual puzzles that our field generates. Work of this sort should be honored, but our field will be sterile if it is dominated by this kind of thought.I hope that many other new environmental philosophers will be trained in interdisciplinary environmental graduate programs or "applied" philosophy Ph.D. programs where they will acquire the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to address practical problems and to effectively engage non-philosophical audiences. This group of "practical" environmental philosophers should also include a host of practitioners in other fields who contribute to philosophical dialogue. I suspect that much work in this area will be case-based, empirically sophisticated and, where it addresses non-philosophical audiences, more reliant on compelling metaphors than on tight arguments. I doubt that it is fruitful to view this group as applying the work of the former group. The aims, the sources of insight and the standards of quality for the two groups are categorically different. For practical philosophers, the political feasibility of a proposal matters, and the arguments must have the capacity to move relevant stakeholders. The results of this work may appear to be philosophy-lite to those in the first group, but only if judged by standards that are inappropriate if we accept a division of labor in the field.This division of labor cannot be an apartheid. Many promising innovations in environmental philosophy will come from the interface between these groups. And unfortunately, a good bit of questionable work done in each group may result from a failure to understand progress that has been made by the other group. For example, philosophers focused only on theory may draw implications for action that fail to accord with current empirical information. Practical philosophers may [End Page 148] critique simplified metaethical positions that have long been abandoned in favor of more sophisticated versions. A healthy dialogue and a mutual respect should diminish these dangers. Such a division of labor has significant implications for graduate education, hiring and evaluation of faculty, and allocation of prestige within the field. The health and growth of environmental philosophy will depend on part on how we address these implications.William M. Throop Bill Throop is provost and professor of philosophy at Green Mountain College, an environmental liberal arts college in Poultney, VT. His background is in epistemology and philosophy of science, but in the last decade his work has focused on conceptual and ethical issues in ecological restoration and wilderness preservation. E-mail: [email protected] © 2007 Indiana University Press... (shrink)

Explains how Nietzsche's late-period elitism emerges out of the cultural division of labor envisioned in _Human, All-too-Human_ between a scientifically-trained (but essentially philosophical) avant-garde whose work opens up new paths for cultural development, thus avoiding cultural stagnancy.

ABSTRACT:Within corporate social responsibility (CSR), the exploration of the political role of firms (political CSR) has recently experienced a revival. We review three key periods of political CSR literature—classic, instrumental, and new political CSR—and use the Rawlsian conceptualization of division of moral labor within political systems to describe each period’s background political theories. The three main arguments of the paper are as follows. First, classic CSR literature was more pluralistic in terms of background (...) political theories than many later texts. Second, instrumental CSR adopted classical liberalism and libertarian laissez-faire as its structural logic. Third, new political CSR, based on a strong globalist transition of responsibilities and tasks from governments to companies, lacks a conceptualization of division of moral labor that is needed to fully depart from a classical liberalist position. We end by providing a set of recommendations to develop pluralism in political CSR. (shrink)

In the last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance new conceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, (...) mass media, and gallery networks while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. (shrink)

Some scholars claim that Critical Realism promises well for the unification of the social sciences, e.g., "Unifying social science: A critical realist approach" in this volume. I will first show briefly how Critical Realism might unify social science. Secondly, I focus on the relation between the ontology and methodology of Critical Realism, and unveil the politics of metaphysics. Subsequently, it is argued that the division of labour between social scientific disciplines should not be metaphysics-driven, but rather question-driven. In (...) conclusion, I will therefore defend a question-driven pluralism as a guide for interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to present a legal theory of agency selection. The theory posits why certain legal forms of agency are chosen when agencies are created by the executive branch of government. At the core of the theory is the idea that the executive branch chooses agency forms that strike a politically optimal balance between maximising its control while minimising its legal and political accountability for agency activities. This optimal balance is determined on an issue by (...) issue basis. As such, the rise of the regulatory state has provided a means by which the executive branch of government has been able to strategically choose to divest itself of and minimise its legal accountability for the administration of government while, at the same time, maintaining effective political control of the administrative arm of government. (shrink)

Clayton and Stevens argue that political liberals should engage with the religiously unreasonable by offering religious responses and showing that their religious views are mistaken, instead of refusing to engage with them. Yet they recognize that political liberals will face a dilemma due to such religious responses: either their responses will alienate certain reasonable citizens, or their engagements will appear disingenuous. Thus, there should be a division of justificatory labour. The duty of engagement should be delegated (...) to religious citizens. In this comment, I will argue that the division of justificatory labour is indefensible. This dilemma can be avoided if politicians and political philosophers correctly use conjecture, a form of discourse that involves non-public reason. As a conditional response, conjecture avoids alienating any reasonable citizens. Also, if conjecture is given in a sincere and open-minded manner, then the problem of disingenuousness can be overcome. My comment concludes that while the engagement of politicians and political philosophers does not necessarily jeopardize overlapping consensus, they should be permitted, or perhaps even required, to engage with the religiously unreasonable due to the natural duty of justice. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” (...) and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

The dominant framing of the political corporate social responsibility discussion challenges the traditional economic conception of the firm and aims to produce a paradigm shift in CSR studies wherein the traditional, apolitical view of corporations’ roles in society is replaced by the political conception of CSR. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion calls for a redirection to take international hard legal and moral regulations, as well as the need for (...) the boundaries between business and politics into account. (shrink)

The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice. Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning the (...) humanitarian restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It locates the genealogy of restitution in Émile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour, individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss. (shrink)

The UK-based deliberations that led up to the legalisation of two new ‘mitochondrial donation’ techniques in 2015, and which continued after that time as regulatory details were determined, featured a division of advisory labour that is common when decisions are made about new technologies. An expert panel was convened by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, charged with assessing the scientific and technical aspects of these techniques. Meanwhile, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics addressed the ethical issues. While this (...) division of labour was undertaken in the name of thoroughness, I argue here that it can have the unintended consequence that hybrid questions that simultaneously involve ethical and technical aspects—especially questions about where to set evidential thresholds for the acceptance of new technology—do not receive enough attention. (shrink)

Perhaps the most basic network in modern life is the division of labor. It certainly rates alongside family, school, and town. That inexorably leads to a discussion of how resources are allocated within this division, who exercizes power, and what happens when the network meets a seemingly natural or unnatural end. For networks that may appear extremely stable can come to abrupt or scheduled conclusions, when a company goes bankrupt or a school cohort breaks up. This article briefly (...) examines the history of the division of labor, with particular reference to culture and to its internationalization, concluding with a brief discussion of how short-term networks can lead to the exploitation of workers and have a devastating ecological impact. (shrink)

Justice makes demands upon us. But these demands, important though they may be, are not the only moral demands that we face. Our lives ought to be responsive to other values too. However, some philosophers have identified an apparent tension between those values and norms, such as justice, that seem to transcend the arena of small-scale interpersonal relations and those that are most at home in precisely that arena. How, then, are we to engage with all of the values and (...) norms that we take to apply to us? In this article, I discuss one way that we might hope to resolve the tension and its relation to John Rawls's `basic structure restriction'. The prospect of resolution is offered by the idea of a `division of moral labour', according to which the pursuit of certain values is assigned to institutions and not to individuals. According to Rawls's basic structure restriction, principles of justice are applicable only to the institutions of the basic structure of society. The possibility of a connection between the division of moral labour and the basic structure restriction readily suggests itself. Taking G.A. Cohen's well-known `incentives' critique of the basic structure restriction as a starting point, I consider five ways in which that restriction might be defended by appeal to the division of moral labour. I conclude that none of these defences succeeds, for none convinces that the conditions in which it makes sense to apply the division of moral labour idea obtain for Rawls's conception of distributive justice. Although the division of moral labour is an attractive proposal, it can do no work in a Rawlsian context. Key Words: Cohen • distributive justice • egalitarian ethos • equality • Rawls. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits by Rocco PezzimentiAdam CarringtonPEZZIMENTI, Rocco. The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits. Herefordshire, U.K.: Gracewing, 2021. 207 pp. Paper, $22.00Rocco Pezzimenti's The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits is an ambitious book. A professor at LUMSA, Rome, he seeks to (...) consider anew the nature, structure, and purposes of democracy as well as the society in which this form of government best operates. He sees this task as needed because, he argues, contemporary democracies face new challenges that threaten their legitimacy and their capacity to fulfill their just and needed purposes. He notes that democracies are not "infallible," either morally or in their ability to maintain themselves, and thus need conscious understanding and prudent maintenance.The subtitle establishes the three main themes by which he diagnoses and addresses democracy's trials. Pezzimenti orders his argument most through the lens of limits. While present in all spheres and regimes, popular government in particular partakes of limitation, since "mutual limitation... is the basis of our democracies." Limits for Pezzimenti stem from distinct elements of a society competing for finite power ordered toward action. Many of our political and social problems, both past and present, stem from denying limitations or misordering their interactions. The presentism that tempts democracy must be tempered by the limits the past places on it. Institutions are one helpful means for this interaction, which helps guard against a "utopianism which wants to solve everything immediately, deceiving itself that it can perform miracles." Law itself involves limits, placing boundaries on the action of private persons and public entities. So does pluralism and "polyarchy," whereby we recognize the limits particular persons and communities place on politics' universalism as well as how politics restrains these other elements from descending into intolerant, selfish particularity. Important to this point is Pezzimenti's discussion of sovereignty, which must not be reduced to a mere question of who rules and where but to the question of rightly pursuing a common good respectful of individual rights. True freedom inheres in the proper cohering of these elements.Pezzimenti turns to the distribution of powers within a community as part of the discussion of limits. He argues that "the traditional tripartition, theorized by Polybius and on to Montesquieu, today appears certainly insufficient." To define all political power as legislative, executive, and judicial, then to distribute them among competing institutions, does not fully account for the contemporary political landscape. Moreover, those [End Page 361] "classic" powers themselves need to be rethought to meet today's concerns. Legislative power must account for claims that its representative systems either are oligarchic in practice or lead to crass populism, and that they fail to account for group identities as opposed to class ones. The executive must evolve in pursuit of a better "efficiency and efficacy"—including speed of response to problems—that requires a better relationship with the modern bureaucracy, which he describes as "the other face of the executive." The judicial power must focus on a renewed impartiality, especially in relation to the additional powers Pezzimenti thinks need to be named and then tamed. The new powers that he says we must recognize include the press, mass media, technology, and more. Here, Pezzimenti categorizes as powers the functions of government (making, enforcing, and adjudication of the law) alongside avenues or means for exercising political influence, if not outright control. These other forces have distorted democracy's needed limits partly because law and custom have not adequately accounted for their evolving role in power.These issues lead to the last challenge, that of representation. The problem of representation threatens democracy's legitimacy, since this form of government is grounded more than any other in the idea that "power must be the expression of the community." Yet even here the issue of limits orders the discussion. The unaccounted-for new powers described above remove too many limitations either on crass populism or encroaching rule of elites. The former can abuse individual rights, which he says "are not negotiable," based on oppressive whims... (shrink)

Current theories of the division of cognitive labor are confined to the “context of justification,” assuming exogenous theories. But new theories are made from the same labor that is used for developing existing theories, and if none of this labor is ever allocated to create new alternatives, then scientific progress is impossible. A unified model is proposed in which theories are no longer given but a function of the division of labor in the model itself. The interactions of (...) individuals balancing the exploitation of existing theories and the exploration of new theories results in a robust cyclical pattern. (shrink)

This paper analyzes classical concepts of division of labour and offers some contemporary theoretical model which includes causes and effects of it. For Smith, the main cause is a tendency of human nature to exchange and the main effect is a progress of the country. For Marx, the fundamental cause is historical development of productive forces and effects are accumulation of capital on the one side but also an alienation of working class on the other. Spencer considers as (...) the main cause specialization of functions in generally, which consequence is integration of society. For Durkheim, causes are social density and volume, and its effect or function is new interconnection in society known as term organic solidarity. Weber derives division of labour from his theory of rational economic actions, and its most important effect is development of occupational structure. (shrink)

Over the last decade, successive New Zealand governments have instituted social, political and economic changes that have fundamentally challenged nurses’ sense of themselves and their position in society. Major upheavals in the health service have occurred as a result of reforms promoting competition and contestability. This paper deals with the impact of one aspect of the reforms, that of the deregulation of the labour market through the Employment Contracts Act 1991. More specifically, the way in which discussions and (...) decisions regarding the withdrawal of nursing labour are shaped by the language available to those involved are considered. The intersection of ethics and union discourses may exacerbate feelings of ambiguity and confusion in nurses facing strike action. The result can be unnecessary and unproductive division and conflict: among nurses, between employers and employees, between unions, between nurses and the public, and between nursing organizations and the Government. An examination of some of the discourses of strike action may serve as a tool to elucidate the way nurses see themselves and their clients in the context of social change and social action. (shrink)

Modern society is characterised by the constant production, commodification, and distribution of risks, which has also become an increasingly important political issue. Given the commodification and the resulting distributability of risks, risks have become an issue of distributive justice instead of mere reason for precautionary concerns. This is particularly pronounced in the case of financial risks. In this article, we analyze how choices related to distributive justice inform the systems of risk distribution. Our main aim is to apply the (...) Rawlsian notion of “division of moral labor” in the context of financial risks. By an analysis of the scope of financial risks, we will show that the libertarian choice of division of moral labour rests on an unnecessarily narrow idea of the scope of the distribution of risks. (shrink)

This book provides a novel framework for understanding and revising labor markets and education policies in an era of machine learning. It posits that while learning and knowing both require thinking, learning is fundamentally different than knowing because it results in cognitive processes that change over time. Learning, in contrast to knowing, requires time and agency. Therefore, “learning algorithms”—that enable machines to modify their actions based on real-world experiences—are a fundamentally new form of artificial intelligence that have potential to be (...) even more disruptive to labor markets than prior introductions of digital technology. To explore the difference between knowing and learning, Turing’s “Imitation Game,”—that he proposed as a test for machine thinking—is expanded to include time dependence. The arguments presented in the book introduce three novel concepts: (1) Comparative learning advantage: This is a concept analogous to comparative labor advantage but arises from the disparate times required to learn new knowledge bases/skillsets. It is argued that in the future, comparative learning advantages between humans and machines will determine their division of labor. (2) Two dimensions of job performance—expertise and interpersonal: Job tasks can be sorted into two broad categories. Tasks that require expertise have stable endpoints, which makes these tasks inherently repetitive and subject to automation. Tasks that are interpersonal are highly context-dependent and lack stable endpoints, which makes these tasks inherently non-routine. Humans compared to machines have a comparative learning advantage along the interpersonal dimension, which is increasing in value economically. (3) The Learning Game is a time-dependent version of Turing’s “Imitation Game.” It is more than a thought experiment. The “Learning Game” provides a mathematical framework with quantitative criteria for training and assessing comparative learning advantages. The book is highly interdisciplinary—presenting philosophical arguments in economics, artificial intelligence, and education. It also provides data, mathematical analysis, and testable criteria that researchers in these fields will find of practical use. The book calls for a rethinking of how labor markets operate and how the education system should prepare students for future jobs. It concludes with a list of counterintuitive recommendations for future education and labor policies that all stakeholders—employers, employees, educators, students, and political leaders—should heed. (shrink)

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women's colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the (...) material infrastructures of the modern university-the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans-reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the sense that (...) the answer to them is self-evident. But to the extent that political problems are complex, expertise is required to answer them—although if such expertise exists, we are unlikely to know who has it. This conundrum is illustrated by the financial crisis. The consensus views of financial regulators prior to the crisis appear to have been mistaken, in that the regulators not only failed to anticipate a crisis of the type that occurred, but adopted regulations that may have encouraged the concentration of mortgage risk in financial institutions. Similarly, once the crisis broke, academic financial experts, financial regulators, and journalists—who communicate information from one branch of the division of epistemic labor to another—converged on a narrative of the crisis that, once again, may plausibly be described as inaccurate, but that nonetheless has come to shape the understanding of the crisis shared by the rest of the polity. (shrink)

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such “big data” have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of (...) the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories—nouns and verbs sound differently from each other—affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including “big data” analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox. (shrink)

“In modern political economy the division of labor is a main aspect.”.

This article challenges the long-standing belief that Plato is an early proponent of the division of labor on account of the political proposals advanced in the Republic. In contrast, I contend that the Republic offers a radical critique—rather than any endorsement—of job specialization and its accompanying psychological orientation toward acquisitiveness. The article begins with a methodological section that attempts to explain the origin of the common misreading of Plato's works and forwards an interpretive framework for situating arguments raised (...) in the Platonic dialogues in their dramatic and dialogic contexts. Having established these hermeneutic principles, the article proceeds to analyze the shifting significance of job specialization within the imaginary cities that are considered in the Republic and concludes that the dialogue ultimately critiques job specialization insofar as it prevents individuals from harmonizing their souls and hinders their ability to philosophize. (shrink)

Discussion of the cognitive division of labor has usually made very little contact with relevant materials from other disciplines, including theoretical biology, management science, and design theory. This article draws on these materials to consider some unavoidable conundrums faced by any attempt to present a particular way of dividing tasks among a labor team as the uniquely rational way of doing this, given the interdependence of the underlying evaluative standards by which the products of a system of division (...) of labor will be judged. Divisions of labor will typically cut across these interdependencies in ways which leave the outcomes of a process of labor hostage to path dependencies and suboptimalities. Some attempts to avoid these results are shown to be unsuccessful. All these difficulties are compounded by the fact that, in many cases, the division of labor has to be constructed over a ground of values that is itself being constructed simultaneously with the products which they are invoked to assess. Key Words: risk spreading • interdependency • NK fitness landscapes • complexity • epistasis • Kuhn • modularity • path dependency. (shrink)

This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: middle-class women in receiving nations, migrant domestic workers, and Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor suggests that reproduction activities, as they have been increasingly commodified, have to be situated in the (...) context of the global market economy. This division of labor is a structural process that determines the migration of Filipina domestic workers. As such, this article also uses in-depth interviews to examine and enumerate the contradictions that migrant Filipina domestic workers experience in their family and work lives as a result of “being in the middle” of this division of labor. (shrink)

The new and vibrant field of the epistemology of democracy, or the inquiry about the epistemic justification of democracy as a social system of procedures, institutions, and practices, as a cross-disciplinary endeavour, necessarily encounters both epistemologists and political philosophers. Despite possible complaints that this kind of discussion is either insufficiently epistemological or insufficiently political, my approach explicitly aims to harmonize the political and epistemic justification of democracy. In this article, I tackle some fundamental issues concerning the nature (...) of the epistemic justification of democracy and the best theoretical framework for harmonizing political and epistemic values. I also inquire whether the proposed division of epistemic labour and the inclusion of experts can indeed improve the epistemic quality of decision-making without jeopardizing political justification. More specifically, I argue in favour of three theses. First, not only democratic procedures but also the outcomes of democracy, as a social system, need to be epistemically virtuous. Second, democracy’s epistemic virtues are more than just a tool for achieving political goals. Third, an appropriate division of epistemic labour has to overcome the limitations of both individual and collective intelligence. (shrink)

Several stages can be identified in Darwin's effort to formulate natural selection. The first stage corresponded, roughly speaking, to the period up to 1844. It was characterized by Darwin's attempt to base his model of geographic speciation on an individualistic dynamics, with species understood as reproductively isolated populations. Toward the end of this period, Darwin's ignorance of the laws of variations and heredity led him to adopt varieties and species as the units of variations. This had the extremely important effect (...) of stimulating him to consider the process of speciation as involving populations. At the end of this period, Darwin also began to regard adaptation as being exclusively toward places in the economy of nature. Thus he faced the problem of integrating the process of natural selection with the process of speciation. Individual variants were the units that fueled the first process, whereas varieties produced new speices. There was no link between adaptation and speciation, except whatever could be supplied by a quasi-historical, developmental idea of optimizing the amount of life.In the second stage, I contend, Darwin's reading of Milne-Edwards crystallized his previous insights into a coherent whole. Milne-Edwards' comments on the advantage of functional specialization could readily be understood in terms of the advantage accruing to the individual, relative to other members of its species, from occupying a different niche. Milne-Edwards' discussion of the division of labor suggested that organisms which moved into unoccupied niches would enjoy reduced competition, and hence a differential advantage in survival and reproduction; thus they would induce the species to do likewise. Rather than base his explanation on an analogy with the artificial economy, Darwin chose the principle of the optimalization of the amount of life per unit area as the overall explanatory principle. The difficulties connected with integrating different levels of description were therefore circumvented, insofar as the problem of diversity and speciation was concerned. Although natural selection considered individuals as the units of selection, and the units of variations were varieties and species, the dynamics of the process understood in terms of natural selection, competition, division of labor and niches could give a plausible account of how individual advantage could be transferred to the species, and how diversity resulted from this mechanism. The problem of the different levels of descriptions was confined to how the properties of variations in individuals (in particular, the frequency of variations and their transmission) were responsible for the assumed variability characteristic of varieties and species. This problem Darwin never solved.A third stage occurred in 1858 with the amalgamation of the tree-of-life vizualization of the process of speciation. Speciation, geographic distribution, and systematics were all then embedded in a conceptual matrix with vast explanatory powers. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The dominant understanding of political corporate social responsibility suggests new, broader political roles for businesses in the globalized economy, challenging the classical liberal social order. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion not only challenges the classical liberal social order but also goes against the more general political economic perspective of the regulated market economy. We argue that this latter tendency of the political CSR discussion is its main (...) weakness. We introduce a Rawlsian reframing of political CSR that is in line with the idea of a global-regulated market economy and compatible with some of the basic global ethical aims of the political CSR movement. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new gendered division of labour. More men than women occupy ‘greedy jobs’ that offer high wages and swift career progress in return for long work hours and unforeseeable schedules. As a result, women earn less income and occupy fewer positions of power than men. This division of labour is the result of patriarchal norms that make it costlier for women than for men to occupy greedy jobs. This article (...) analyses the morality of greedy employment. It offers a novel explanation of why norms that give rise to the new gendered division of labour are morally objectionable. The main claim is that it is morally objectionable to adopt the new gendered division of labour because this perpetuates patriarchal norms that impose unjustifiable costs on others. (shrink)

While Susan Moller Okin found much to celebrate in Rawls's earlier articulation of his theory of justice, she worried that his later turn to political liberalism evacuated his theory of its feminist potential. Here, I argue that we need not be so pessimistic: some of the strongest arguments for pursuing certain feminist projects can and should be made from within a politically liberal framework. In advancing this claim, I develop Rawls's idea of primary goods—namely those goods that all citizens (...) need qua citizens—as a key conceptual resource for arguing for the elimination of the gendered division of labor using public reason. Drawing on recent empirical literature, I point out that the gendered division of labor continues to distribute to women an unfair allocation of primary goods. I then advocate for a specific public policy, which I call Gender Egalitarian Daddy Quota—a parental leave policy that sets aside time specifically for fathers to encourage men and women to engage in childcare related leave-taking to similar extents—on the grounds that this policy would help secure a fairer distribution of primary goods, and thus is required as a matter of justice. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the main issue of this book by affording a side look at a discipline other than economics, namely political theory. It is argued that the contemporary debate in political theory hinges on the question of 'realism'. Through a discussion of Raymond Geuss's work, the paper seeks to show that political theory remains caught between the conflicting requirements of deep contextual analysis and radically critical engagement with the world 'as it is'. Finally, the (...) idea of a 'division of labour' between contextualist and critical approaches to political theory is introduced. (shrink)

The increasing corporatization of education has served to expose the university as a business—and one with a highly stratified division of labor. In _Chalk Lines_ editor Randy Martin presents twelve essays that confront current challenges facing the academic workforce in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrate how, like chalk lines, divisions between employees may be creatively redrawn. While tracing the socioeconomic conditions that have led to the present labor situation on campuses, the contributors consider such topics as the (...) class='Hi'>political implications of managerialism and the conceptual status of academic labor. They examine the trend toward restructuring and downsizing, the particular plight of the adjunct professor, the growing emphasis on vocational training in the classroom, and union organizing among university faculty, staff, and graduate students. Placing such issues within the context of the history of labor movements as well as governmental initiatives to train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy, _Chalk Lines_ explores how universities have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the corporate sector. Originally published as an issue of _Social Text_, this expanded volume, which includes four new essays, offers a broad view of academic labor in the United States. With its important, timely contribution to debates concerning the future of higher education, _Chalk Lines_ will interest a wide array of academics, administrators, policymakers, and others invested in the state—and fate—of academia. _ Contributors._ Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt. (shrink)

Women continue to be in charge of most childrearing; men continue to be responsible for most breadwinning. There is no consensus on whether this state of affairs, and the informal norms that encourage it, are matters of justice to be tackled by state action. Feminists have criticized political liberalism for its alleged inability to embrace a full feminist agenda, inability explained by political liberals’ commitment to the ideal of state neutrality. The debate continues on whether neutral states can (...) accommodate two feminist demands: to enact policies aimed at dismantling the feminization of caregiving, especially childrearing, and to compensate women for some of the disadvantages they incur by being primary care-givers. I contribute to this debate with three arguments in support of policies meant to de-gender care-giving and compensate care-givers. The first appeals to equality of opportunity to positions of advantage and justifies policies that prevent or mitigate statistical discrimination and implicit biases. The second draws attention to a possible causal relationship between the specialization of women in early childcare and misogyny; since the latter is incompatible with political liberal justice, it yields the conclusion that political liberals ought to further investigate the causal hypothesis with the aim of establishing or refuting it. The third argument concludes that legitimate childrearing prohibits adults from socializing children or, at least girls, into gender norms; it justifies duties of justice on the side of parents, educators, and economic agents, and state policies meant to offset foreseeable breaches of some of these duties. (shrink)

Silvia Castellazzi shows how companies can implement their corporate responsibility and support employability and access to training in an incentive-compatible manner. The study provides insights into unrealized cooperation and disincentives which prevent companies from investing in a shared pool of employable and skilled people. The research draws on the theoretical framework of the economic ethics and on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in two European countries. Findings show that incentives for investments in training are selective and might reinforce path-dependencies and (...) exclusion, while not supporting cooperation and productive competition. The study also shows the value of conceptualizing employability as a social rather than a psychological contract to facilitate investments and the implementation of corporate responsibility. Contents Trends and Conflicts in Employability and Provision of Training Incentives Structures and Stakeholders' Strategies A Social Contract for Employability Target Groups Researchers in business ethics, employee relations, further education and training HR and training managers; CSR managers The Author Silvia Castellazzi works as account manager in the corporate education division of MIP Graduate School of Business (Politecnico di Milano). Her research interests and activities are focused on professional and executive education, corporate responsibility and decision-making, the future of work and new forms of work organization. (shrink)