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Human Work

Chapter 22: XI: SPECIALISATION Summary
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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Sociology

About This Book

A systematic examination of social and economic life that treats familiar facts as outcomes of underlying processes, arguing that widespread suffering, ignorance, and inefficient institutions persist despite material advances. The work analyzes social evolution, concepts and conduct, and exposes false assumptions while mapping the social soul and body. It traces economic processes — labor, specialization, production, distribution, and consumption — and contends that many hardships are socially produced and therefore preventable. The author advocates a scientific social physiology to diagnose social pathologies and recommends reorganization and enlightened policy as remedies.

XI: SPECIALISATION
Summary

Organisation means specialisation. Military organisation, trades-unions, and trusts. Guerilla bands in industrial organisation. Unspecialised primitive life, the higher the life-form the more specialisation. The “all-around” savage. Injury of our present specialisation under false conditions. Waste of energy. Man of thirty who died of old age. Canoe and steamer. Effect of errors. Normal conditions of specialisation: shorter hours, variety of work, wide education. Ownership in collective production. Specialisation should increase product and decrease effort; it does, but the advantage is misplaced. Hours of labour in proportion to interest. Especial cruelty in our conditions of specialisation. Specialisation proves collectivity. Absurdity of “self-support” idea. Our progress due to such social distribution as we have, not to “self-support.” Society feeding on itself. The Social sacrifice. “Unskilled labour” a product of high social development. Our mistaken attitude toward it. The real nature of it. Serf and noble. Savage’s exciting monologue. Unskilled labour does not require inferior men. Line of social growth. Highly specialised work involves extremely simple details. Our misuse of above fact owing to false concepts. Unskilled labour is high social service. We punish instead of paying, or promoting. Height of ingratitude.