One of the main methodologies of industrial capitalism. By breaking down the mode of production into smaller units of work, which are easier to monitor and mechanize, the creation of complex material goods can be accomplished by the most de-skilled (and therefore unthreatening) worker possible. The process is particularly insidious when combined with the management streamlining of Taylorism, who took the assembly line ideas of Ford and added time-motion studies.

(...how many times can you turn that bolt in a minute? an hour? a day? Corporate consultants eat, breathe & snort Taylorism)

This break-up of work was initially applied to craft industries during the Industrial Revolution, then heavy & light industry through the late 19th & early 20th centuries, then many white-collar financial sectors beginning in the 1960s. These same processes are now being applied to the 'knowledge-based' industries by breaking coding down into tiny individual tasks, while also removing 'gatekeepers' of information (disintermediation).

Old example: The division of fry -cookers, drive-thru servers & burger flippers in every franchised fast food kitchen on the planet. Extra points to Burger King for actually taking the numbers & words off their cash registers so that they needn't even have people who can read.

New example: Major database vendors shipping HTML coding off to Singapore or the Philippines (because data entry people don't need to be able to read what they key-punch).

Further reading:

  1. Exploitation (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press International, 1997)
  2. Geographies of global change : remapping the world in the late twentieth century (Oxford : Blackwell, 1995)
  3. Commodity chains and global capitalism (Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1994)