The DOI matches its Crossref record.
The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge
Abstract
This paper considers specialization and the division of labor. A more extensive division of labor raises productivity because returns to the time spent on tasks are usually greater to workers who concentrate on a narrower range of skills. The traditional discussion of the division of labor emphasizes the limitations to specialization imposed by the extent of the market. We claim that the degree of specialization is more often determined by other considerations. Especially emphasized are various costs of "coordinating" specialized workers who perform complementary tasks, and the amount of general knowledge available.
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Citations
Cited by
Structural Holes and Good Ideas
Burt, R. S. (2004) · American Journal of Sociology · doi:10.1086/421787 · Cited by 5,642
The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge
Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1136099 · Cited by 3,615
The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market*
Deming, D. J. (2017) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjx022 · Cited by 1,727
Kittur, A., Nickerson, J. V., Bernstein, M., Gerber, E., Shaw, A., Zimmerman, J., Lease, M., & Horton, J. (2013) · Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work · doi:10.1145/2441776.2441923 · Cited by 1,034
The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances
Gulati, R., Wohlgezogen, F., & Zhelyazkov, P. (2012) · Academy of Management Annals · doi:10.5465/19416520.2012.691646 · Cited by 768
Metadata
- Authors
- Becker, G. S., & Murphy, K. M.
- Venue
- The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 1992-11-01
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1137-1160
- ISSN
- 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-4650
- OpenAlex
- W2023235317
- Cited by
- 1,191
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 20.92
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2118383
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- Becker, G. S., & Murphy, K. M. (1992). The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.2307/2118383
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
