Specialization, the Division of Labor, and Explorations in Property Distribution

Specialization is a process where individuals, groups, or organizations focus on one task or area of knowledge. It drives economic development, organizational growth, and increases in social complexity, capacity, and heterogeneity. Discussions of specialization in the social sciences contain an undocumented but significant ambiguity. The term specialization is used to refer to both the division of labor, in which tasks are divided into complementary processes or components, and differentiation, in which units choose tasks that are different from each other. Despite a long history in which the two types of coordination are used interchangeably under the term ‘specialization,’ we demonstrate that the division of labor and differentiation thrive in opposite social conditions. Using computational models, we found that variation in basic social conditions had opposite effects for the two different coordination processes: increasing social density encouraged the division of labor and inhibited differentiation and increasing the number of specializations encouraged differentiation and inhibited the division of labor. Since specialization is central to economic development, there is value in understanding the conditions that foster it. We show that encouraging specialization requires disambiguating the two distinct types of coordination.