![]() ![]() ![]() Hyperspecialization also creates new social challenges, such as the possibility of exploitation as work quickly finds the cheapest takers, and the opportunity for deception when workers can’t see the larger purposes to which they are contributing. Firms will learn to rely on a new breed of intermediaries-from small assignment brokers like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to complex problem posers like InnoCentive. This will force managers to master a new set of skills: dividing work into assignable micro tasks attracting specialized workers to perform them ensuring acceptable quality and integrating many pieces into whole solutions. The hyperspecialization of workers may be inevitable given the quality, speed, and cost advantages it offers employers-and the power it gives individuals to devote flexible hours to tasks of their choice. All these, the authors believe, could be ameliorated by global rules and practices and a new form of “guilds” to provide workers with a sense of community and support for professional development.Īs labor becomes more knowledge based and communications technology advances, the division of labor accelerates. Meanwhile, companies and governments must be aware of the potential perils of this new age: “digital sweatshops” and other forms of worker exploitation nefarious schemes hidden behind task atomization work that becomes dull and meaningless increased electronic surveillance of workers. Managers who want to capitalize on hyperspecialization’s possibilities need to learn how best to divide knowledge work into discrete tasks, recruit specialized workers, ensure the quality of the work, and integrate the pieces into a final whole. The nonprofit organization Samasource sends data-entry work to marginalized individuals in the developing world, where tiny jobs lasting just minutes and paying just pennies give workers an economic boost while creating substantial savings for clients. A company called CastingWords produces transcripts of audio files by farming out segments to remote workers for simultaneous transcription: Many hands make (extremely) fast work. The developers aspire to be ranked among the company’s top coders, virtually guaranteeing quality in the winning end products. Now, however, as knowledge work expands and technology advances, we’ve entered an era of hyperspecialization: Work previously done by one person is divided into more-specialized pieces done by multiple people, achieving improvements in quality, speed, and cost.įor example, the start-up software firm TopCoder chops its clients’ IT projects into bite-size chunks and offers them to its worldwide community of developers in the form of competitive challenges. ![]() Since 1776, when Adam Smith described how the division of labor could spur economic progress, work has increasingly been broken into ever smaller tasks performed by ever more specialized workers. ![]()
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