I. The Drudgery Report
An underlying issue that makes several appearances throughout Marty's post, but is never the center of attention, is that of economic specialization, or what is often called in more technical terms the division of labor. It is certainly the case that the entire economic sphere in any advanced industrialized nation such as ours is marked by increasing specialization of skills and tasks. A graphic designer of long ago may have done a little bit of everything, from planning to drawing to execution to printing, whereas today an employee of a graphic design firm may only work on one specific software program to optimize one specific website widget for one specific corporate client. Or, to continue with the academic thread begun by Marty, a typical scholar of old -- particularly in the humanities and social sciences -- was a true polymath, entwining history, philosophy, and a dash of political economy or sociology into a compelling magnum opus. By contrast, today an academic can rapidly climb through graduate school and go on to achieve tenure without ever venturing outside the bounds of a single theoretical line (say, substantivist economic sociology) and a single methodological technique (for example, network analysis). Indeed, as Marty points out, the substantivist network analyst is all but compelled to stay within those narrow bounds simply to be able to wrack up the list of publications and conference presentations that counts for success in an increasingly fractionalized academy.
Now, the opinion one has about specialization depends largely on one's general worldview. To stick with the academic examples: economists by and large think it is the greatest gift that capitalism has bestowed on the human race, while sociologists tend to see specialization as the forerunner of increased outsourcing, class conflict, and inequality. From my own observations of cultural discourse, it seems that the general opinion among the public is closer to the economist's view than the sociologist's, if only because specialization is the handmaiden of economic "progress," and few dare criticize the progress that allows them hot showers, iTunes, and a wide selection of breakfast cereals.
There are, of course, more critical views of economic specialization. The most fundamental and damning is the one brought up by Marty: that the returns from specialization in the form of a general advancement of societal wellbeing have become increasingly marginal. When we went from people sewing their own clothes to textile workers making clothes for everyone else, few can deny that this level of specialization increased the greater good. When we have gone from a general level of autonomy and know-how in our daily lives to having "experts" manage our finances, our diets, our schedules, our children, and our marriages, then the trend has gone too far. The benefits to society are no longer worth the costs.
But I actually wish to focus here on a different critique of specialization, and it is one that is not often broached -- the only reason I can surmise being that it simply makes people uncomfortable to look the truth in the eye. My concern is not the rising level of helplessness that accompanies specialization, not the the loss of autonomy, not the proliferation of so-called experts, but the sheer drudgery of the workplace. When you're only good at a few things, then those few things tend to be all that you do. And when you only do a few things all day, every day, and increasingly come to be relied on by those above or below you to do exactly those few things, you have the recipe for anomie, boredom, and dissatisfaction.
The ranks of the generalists, the jacks of all trades, the polymaths, have thinned. The world is too complex for them to be effective anymore. Markets have expanded, rules and regulations have proliferated, the sheer amount of stuff grows unceasingly, and the quantity of information at our disposal has exploded. What the whole universe of work -- corporations, non-profit organizations, government agencies -- needs more than ever are 100 different variations of data managers, often entering and sorting and displaying data that is two or three levels removed from any real-world application, or at least any that truly matters.
It is bad enough to be little more than a cog in the giant industrial-capitalist complex -- but then again most of us are. But how much worse when your function as a cog is just a series of rote activities with minimal creativity and only the faintest connection to any form of social progress that seems significant or worthwhile. Think of the utilities technician, checking the same valves or filters or machines each day and marking their status on the same photocopied forms. Think of the tens of thousands of administrative assistants in college offices of development or medical clinics or public relations firms, inputting data into spreadsheets or assembling newsletters. Think of the accounting clerks, the legal aides, the web programmers, the lab assistants. Or for that matter the accountants themselves, the lawyers, the web designers, the scientists. More to the point, think of the number of people you hear about or know who tire of the rat race, who are harried and overtaxed, who derive no satisfaction from work but continue working because they can't see any other way to conduct a life.
And what satisfaction is there to derive? What is the most common refrain we hear from those individuals who do love their jobs? That it is varied, that they are never bored, that each day is different. But what about the rest? What about those whose work responsibilities compel them to do the same thing, if not each day then each week? The same reports to create, the same accounts to reconcile, the same training session to give, the same database to maintain. The human mind grows dull and atrophies with such repetition. Discontent grows as our specialized training pushes us further and further from creativity and spontaneity and a sense of ownership over the tasks we perform.
Let me insert here a couple of caveats. There are two things I'm not saying. First, I'm not saying that everyone in the modern working world hates their job. There are plenty of people at all levels of the labor hierarchy who love their work and are even driven by the competition and the deadlines and the stress of it all (though many of them simply haven't reached burnout stage yet). Anytime you offer up a radical critique of a societal norm you open yourself to the counter that "Surely some people are happy with the status quo." And some people surely are -- but exceptions do not a rule break. Second, I'm not arguing that in some golden past we all lived lives of endless diversity and diversion. Work and life were full of drudgery back then, too -- particularly for housewives, peasants, and slaves. What is unique about the present state of affairs relative to several centuries ago, I think, is how this drudgery, this sameness, this refinement of skills and narrowing of freedom in the workplace has now permeated all levels of the economic pyramid. Specialization may raise the narrowly-measured "standard of living," but I would simply ask: At what cost to our selves?
II. From Diverse to Perverse: The Trajectory of Modern Farming
My second commentary flows directly from the first but hones in on one specific sector of the workforce: farming. Few economic actors display the consequences and the tragedy of hyperspecialization like that of the modern-day commercial farmer.
The trajectory of American agriculture since World War II, and particularly since the 1970s, is marked by two intertwining phenomena: the vast expansion of the scale of most farms coupled with the contraction of their scope. The typical conventional farmer of today plants crops on far more acreage or raises far more heads of livestock than did his grandfather, but produces far fewer kinds of products. Row crop farmers grow one or two grains and have no livestock; dairy farmers raise one or two breeds and feed them grains grown by the row crop farmers; chicken, hog, and apple farmers do nothing but raise chickens, hogs, and apples. By contrast, a typical Midwestern farm prior to WWII might raise cattle, a few hogs, a small flock of chickens, grain for the animals,vegetables for self-consumption, and a handful of apple trees as an afterthought (for some fascinating indirect evidence, see page 25 of this report). Not only the tasks performed by the farmer but the actual crop or animal at the receiving end of those tasks would change week to week, if not day to day. The farmer's labor cycle was marked by diversity rather than sameness. Was it a land of milk and honey in which farmers were the most blissful souls in the country? Not by a long shot -- but that has more to do with political economy, commodity prices, and the urban-rural divide than the so-called drudgery often attributed to earlier eras of farming. The small diversified farmer almost by definition has a more varied work week because she is not tied in to a single crop, and the effects of that variety on the human psyche are subtle but powerful. By contrast, modern commercial industrial farming epitomizes the specialization that has crept into nearly every sector of the economy. I am compelled here to pull a quote from Leopold Kohr directly from Marty's blog entry. This passage would have been equally appropriate as part of the first commentary above, but I find it particularly apropos when discussing the beleaguered farmer:
"Our life's experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts.... Instead of experiencing many different things within surveyable limits, as did our enviable ancestors, we experience only one thing on a colossal plane."
From a stark economic perspective, this phenomenon is entirely positive. Industrialized, specialized farming has allowed fewer individuals to provide more food on less total farmland than once thought possible. There is no doubting this basic fact of production -- but are there not a number of more insidious consequences?
First, related to the point made in my first commentary, this level of specialization takes a lot of the joy out of farming. Your average city-dwelling nonfarmer may find it hard to believe, but farming has traditionally been an occupation that its practitioners found so deeply fulfilling that they would claim it was "in their blood." As the classic literature on agrarianism will tell you, despite the exacting physical labor, farming has long been experienced as a deeply fulfilling activity. But ah, times have changed. Some of my own research among farmers in Wisconsin reveals how the satisfaction of farming a small piece of land has turned into the repetitiveness and stress of farming massive acreage with industrial machines. Farmers told me that their occupation was no longer a lifestyle but "just a business." One identified himself not as a farmer, but as a "risk manager." And another told me quite plainly, "It's just not as fun as it used to be."
A second consequence is ecological, for the handmaiden of specialization is monocropping. It is not just that corn and bean farmers only grow corn and beans -- it is that they grow them in vast fields of a single variety, laying out an agronomic grid that runs completely counter to how natural forces operate and keeping those forces at bay with liberal doses of biocides. When you shed the cows and the chickens and the small grains, you only need a few machines to accomplish your farming system; and when you only have machines for planting and harvesting corn and soybeans, guess what you grow? One extreme version of this monocrop specialization is potato farming, which dispenses with any crop rotation at all and simply grows potatoes this year, next year, and every year until the system buckles. What is the ecological response to this form of agronomic specialization? Massive disease buildup in the soil, which explains the fact that potatoes are among the most pesticide-intensive crops grown today.
A final consequence I want to touch on is the loss of biodiversity. Vast fields of a few varieties of corn, soybeans, wheat, canola, etc., completely destroy the floral diversity that once graced our farms. Farmers choose their seeds from an ever-narrowing genetic base, a situation that some term "genetic erosion." Specialized apple farming -- or more properly, the cessation of apple cultivation on individual farmsteads nationwide -- has helped reduce the total count of named apple varieties in the US from 8000 at the turn of the last century to about 700 today3, and of these 700 we see only a small handful with any regularity in the marketplace. Or how about this statistic? 99 percent of all the turkeys in the US are the same breed -- and it is a breed that cannot even sexually reproduce on its own because it has been bred to be so meaty!4
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You cannot really come down and say that specialization is "good" or "bad" -- it is a matter of degree. The division of labor was a great thing at a certain, early point of human economic development. It was a great thing, for example, at the time when Adam Smith was writing. It is a fine thing when it frees us from certain tasks (mending our own shoes; building our own vehicles) and creates more time for leisure, for social interactions, for pursuing meaningful hobbies. But the kind of specialization which marks our work lives only seems to have caused us more stress, less leisure, and less quality time with family and friends. The academic narrowing that Marty references is part of this larger societal trend, and as in all other sectors it is questionable whether more and more specialization continues to yield positive outcomes for humanity. Historically specialization tended towards more noble purposes, but the declining returns being won from an overspecialized economy are a signal that things have swung too far in the opposite direction. My intent in this response essay was to discuss a few of the ways that specialization affects us where it counts the most: at the personal, human level, at the level of our lived experiences and our very happiness. It's time to become specialists at being generalists.
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