With the technical advances of the last few hundred years, production of goods and services has taken place on a much bigger scale. The concentration of large numbers of workers within very large production units allowed the process of production to be broken down into a series of tasks. this called the division of labour. For example, Adam Smith, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, showed how the production of pins would benefit from the application of the division of labour in a factory. He suggested that pin-making could be divided into 18 distinct operations and that, if each employee undertook only one of the operation, production would rise to 5,000 pins per employee per day. This was compared to his estimate that each employee would be able to produce only a few dozen each day if they produced pins individually.
Although the division of labour raised output, it often created dissatisfaction in the work force, who became bored with the monotonous nature of their task. The process was taken a stage further in the 1920s when conveyor belt production was introduced in the United State car industry by Henry Ford. Ford's method of car production provided the model for much of manufacturing production in the twentieth century. In more recent times the de-humanising impact of production techniques, such as those using a conveyor belt, have been recognized and alternatives methods of production have been introduced.
Resource: As Level and A Level Economics, Colin Bamford, Keith Brunskill, Gordon Cain, Sue Grant, Stephen Munday, Stephen Walton, University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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