Social division of labor theory

Author: Emi Gan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-04-01
Features: The Division of Labor in Society is the doctoral dissertation of the French sociologist émile Durkheim in 1893, and it is his seminal work. From the outset, he demonstrated his opposition to a singular utilitarian mindset, pointing out that society is pluralistic, composed of various conflicting parts, and must adapt to mutually conflicting needs, requiring a certain limitation and balance. The topic he chose is an object of economics, but he sought to extract the non-economic core from it. The central idea of this book is that labor division is not a purely economic phenomenon. In this work, Durkheim not only proposed concepts such as "social solidarity," "collective consciousness," "function," "social capacity," "moral density," and "social differentiation and integration," which have been widely adopted, revised, and debated in the field of sociology, but also explored the fundamental laws of historical evolution through the vertical binary division of "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity," "segmented society" and "differentiated society," as well as "repressive sanctions" and "restorative sanctions." In summary, the fundamental stance of Durkheim's sociology is evident in this book: the root of all existence and phenomena is "social."