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commentary


(798) Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of the state capitals
(792) Jazz Protest Music: The Freedom Now Suite
(782) Making Mothers of Fake Babies
(780) Debunking the "Eat Local" Myth
(773) The discourse of engineering needs to be expanded
(766) Facebook Viral Campaign
(764) Tracking the trackers: Unmasking wiki
(762) Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
(761) The videogame based on the McDonald's production chain
(760) Plastic Bottles: Five minutes worth of consumption in North America
(751) Humanities: meaning, value, and significance
(744) The mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence
(735) Yes Prime Minister: entertaining parody of the Australian Prime Minister
(733) Chernobyl Legacy: photographic essay with audio commentary
(731) Kingdom of Piracy: online, open work space to explore the free sharing of digital content
(724) A devout Christian is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else
(722) Regionalisation: Educational Reform in New Zealand
(718) Rip, Mix, Burn, Autolink
(698) Bodymouse: the potential of biomedical science?
(695) Jihad videos posted on YouTube website
(680) Bright: undermining the heterosexual love triangle in the heterosexual narrative
(677) Parody Through Recurring Motifs of Suspense and Clichés of Plot
(672) Symbolic Control Through Appropriation of Local Stories
(663) Citizen Reporting of the London Bombings
(613) New Zealand is not naive to the great cost of waging war
(602) art and design students look at surveillance
(596) Database of Virtual Art: a richly interlinked online repository
(588) Boal: the intervention of the art of tragedy
(574) (un)Smart-Mobs: Text-Messages Used to Incite Racial Violence at NSW's Cronulla beach
(567) Terra Nova: collaborative weblog about virtual worlds
(559) Diagnosing Iranian history in terms of European past
(546) Regulation Through Discourses/Practices
(529) the War on Terror and other conservative catchphrases
(520) historical materialism: offering critical resources for the de-reification of capitalism
(519) ethics question satirising Australian Prime Minister


(518) industrialisation: pin making and the the division of labour

http://folksonomy.org.uk/?s=518
Simon Perkins (09-09-2005)
Utterance:
To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upward of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of proper division and combination of their different operations.
- ©Adam Smith (1776)
Smith's theory of specialisation has come to dominate Western economic theory in the 200 years since it was first published.
Image: , (1892). Mule-Jenny Spinning Machine. , : Appleton's Cyclopaedia of Applied Mechanics []
Motivation:
Book: Smith, Adam. 1994 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), , USA: Modern Library. 0679424733


(506) Culture Jamming: Australian International University
(505) Culture Jamming the Forbes Global CEO Conference
(496) Enemy Image: where is the human tragedy?
(494) NICHT loschbares Feuer / Inextinguishable Fire
(490) Christian forces humiliating Muslims in their own heartland
(400) Heartfield: political commentary through photomontage
(350) Seven Up! series: glimpses of Britain's future
(331) Freire: answers to exploitation in photographs
(319) Escape from Woomera: videogame social commentary
(207) Social Inclusion and Exclusion
(199) Faces of the Fallen: photomosaic
(201) eugenics: forced sterilization
(73) urban theory: world systems
(2) Futurist manifesto: War is beautiful


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