Specialization Quotes

“Division of labor”

“Vocational education”

“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”

“Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”

“Specialization in this world is rudimentary and self-sufficiency characterizes most individual households”

“Academic specialization”

“Lack of knowledge concerning all the factors and the failure to include them in our integral imposes false conclusions.”

“This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits.”

“If a man is trained, purely and simply, to be expert and contented in a particular task he will not innovate; Freud would have remained an anatomist, Marx a philosopher, Darwin a field-naturalist.”

“... I think the right strategy for the mass of humanity is to specialize. Nobody wants to go a doctor who is half proctologist and half dentist. ... The ordinary way to succeed is to narrowly specialize.”

“The former distrust of specialization has been supplanted by its opposite, a distrust of generalization. Not only has man become a specialist in practice, he is being taught that special facts represent the highest form of knowledge.”

“The underlying principle of specialization is division of labor; but the term division of labor has become associated with the individual worker, whereas specialization is, in general, far reaching in its effects, and influences industrial enterprises of all kinds.”

“International specialization and division of labor requires institutions and organizations to safeguard property rights across international boundaries so that capital markets as well as other kinds of exchange can take place with credible commitment on the part of the players.”

“It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.”

“Just as it is inconceivable that human society would have evolved to its present state without language, it is inconceivable that we would have gotten to this point without specialization and trade. Moreover, in order for society to progress further, patterns of specialization and trade must continue to evolve.”

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

“Previously men could be divided into the learned and the unlearned, … But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these categories … We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned.”

“A second, related assumption of modern progress-philosophy is that intellectual production functions in essentially the same way as economic production: the progress of both results from “teamwork,” from the practice of the division of labor or specialization within a group. And just as the essential precondition of the economic division of labor is exchange, so the precondition of intellectual specialization is the efficient exchange of knowledge—through publication.”

“The idea of expertise in any one area of the humanities, with its subsequent phenomenon of faculty recruitment by time framed "slots," was always mistaken. It was inspired, in this masculine pioneer country that has never taken the arts seriously, by nervous emulation of the sciences, where one can indeed deeply and profitably specialize in moths, ferns, or igneous rocks. But there is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities.”

“The inevitable counterpart of specialization is organization. This is what brings the work of specialists to a coherent result. If there are many specialists, this coordination will be a major task. So complex, indeed, will be the job of organizing specialists that there will be specialists on organization and organizations of specialists on organization. More perhaps than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestation of advanced technology.”