Abstract

As a functional separation in the performance of tasks and activities, division of labor is a basis of the economic and social structuring of the population and also a driving force of global social change. Originally, it was probably a gender-specific form. Later, the result of ongoing functional specialization trades workers with self-contained work complexes. Predominantly, artisanal forms of division of labor have been fundamentally updated in the course of industrialization through technical innovations as well as by advances in economic organization. An adverse effect has been the anonymous dependence of workers within repetitive routine jobs in mass production. Increasingly, the embedding of work processes into socially acceptable structures has become a basic challenge. The global turn has fundamentally changed the structure and mode of division of labor by transnational integration of work processes and work units, particularly in the form of network developments. The regional structures of the division of labor and its shifts are almost fateful for the location-based population. Socially decisive is the reconciling of new forms of division of labor with the interests of stakeholders.