Jane Jacobs famously took on Adam Smith’s notion that specialization leads to growth. She countered basically that specialization can and does lead to doing the same thing better, but that it does not lead to creating new things and the new industries and work that go with it. For that, a social collectivity called the city was required. Over at the NYT Economix, Catherine Rampell points to a new paper which finds that
ants that specialize are no more productive than ants that don’t. The author, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona named Anna Dornhaus, studied how efficiently rock ants completed their tasks of brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for protein and nest-building. An ant was considered more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one particular task. She found that the ants that specialized in these tasks did not perform them more efficiently than ants that remained “generalists,” and in some cases performed their tasks less efficiently. Her conclusions: “My results indicate that at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.”
November 24th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Fordist ant colonies, I love it.
Also compare this with the studies showing that the seemingly random actions of individual termites result in complex structures. For example
http://ai-depot.com/Essay/SocialInsects.html
November 24th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
What works for ants or termites probably does not apply to humans. …Jacobs and Smith are both right, sometimes specializtion creates growth, sometimes much is accomplished by generalists, on an individual level…. This question reminds me of an article that I read in “Backwoodsman ” magazine on the ferry back to Vancouver Island last week. The article was entitled “November Hunting? Take Your Fishing Pole”, in the piece the author described the opportunities that a hunter can enjoy if he is,in a sense, a generalist who also is prepared to fish if unsuccessful while hunting. This backwoodsman writer, who has a series of special skills, is not much different from creative class people today who need a basket of several well developed skills in order to make progress in the collective world of business/work.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Specialization necessary when the details matter. But it’s microscopic focus can be detrimental to interdisciplinary thinking. The interdisciplinary mind can seem shallow, when it skims a variety of fields and does not take the time to acquire a specialist’s knowledge in any of them. Also, the interdisciplinary mind sees connections between all manner of disparate things. Most of the connections are spurious. Some are true, but their truth must be proved over time. Often, it is the specialists who establish the proof. So I think it is productive to combine the interdisciplinary mind into a network of sympathetic specialists (ie open-minded enough to seriously consider a discipline-crossing idea). You need everybody to contribute what they are good at, in an atmosphere of welcome.