ABSTRACT
The social and technical division of labor, long an integral part of economic choices and industrial strategies, has always gone together with inegalitarian distribution of risk, due to its very founding principle, i.e., the division between idea and prescription on the one hand, realization on the other. This general approach to the division of industrial labor was continuously maintained, though modified by the development of the production system, labor relations, and the social welfare system. The labor relations that structure work organization lead us to distinguish several ways of dividing labor: socio-cultural, hierarchical, and technical. To these G. Mendel adds what he calls the “institutional division of labor,” which designates differentiation of activities and jobs within an “institution” (a company or any establishment structured by a particular type of work organization). What characterizes the institutional division of labor is that “jobs are not understood to be practiced by separate individuals in the society, nor is each job performed for itself. They can only take on full meaning . . . in relation to . . . the institutional act as a whole” (Mendel, 1997).
