production

Examples of production in the following topics:

• Marx's View of Class Differentiation

  • In the Marxist perspective, social stratification is created by unequal property relations, or unequal access to the means of production.
  • In Marx's view, social stratification is created by people's differing relationship to the means of production: either they own productive property or they labor for others.
  • In Marxist theory, the capitalist mode of production consists of two main economic parts: the substructure and the Superstructure.
  • The means of production would be shared by all members of society, and social stratification would be abolished.
  • " Marxism is associated with a view of stratification that pits the owners of means of production against the laborers.

• Socialism

  • Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are socially owned and used to meet human needs, not to create profits.
  • Social ownership of the means of production can take many forms.
  • Social ownership contrasts with capitalist ownership, in which the means of production are used to create a profit.
  • In a planned economy, the means of production are publicly owned and the government is in charge of coordinating and distributing production.
  • That is, market socialism uses the market and monetary prices to allocate and account for the means of production and the products they create.

• Class Conflict and Marx

  • In each stage, an ownership class controls the means of production while a lower class provides labor for production.
  • In feudal times, feudal lords owned the land and tools used for production.
  • Today, large corporations own many of the means of production.
  • Different stages have different relations of production, or different forms of social relatinoships that people must enter into as they acquire and use the means of production.
  • Together, the means of production and the relations of production compose a particular period's mode of production.

• Using computers

  • A social scientist might be interested in whether the "structures" of trade in mineral products are more similar to one another than, the structure of trade in mineral products are to vegetable products.

• Ominous Trends in the U.S.

  • Recently, industry has become more information-intensive, which has led to higher productivity but also higher unemployment and inequality.
  • As technology increases productivity, it tends to reduce the demand for labor, eliminating jobs and creating unemployment.
  • New machinery, new varieties of crops, and new chemicals made farmers more productive than ever.
  • As a result, automation and computerization have led to both higher productivity and a net job loss.
  • During the same time period, the value of production from manufacturing increased 270%.

• Work and Technology

  • The Information Age has impacted the workforce through automation and computerization, resulting in higher productivity and fewer jobs.
  • There is another way in which the Information Age has impacted the workforce: automation and computerization have resulted in higher productivity coupled with net job loss.
  • Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services .
  • The service sector consists of the "soft" parts of the economy—activities where people offer their knowledge and time to improve productivity, performance, potential, and sustainability.
  • The basic characteristic of this sector is the production of services instead of end products.

• Work and Alienation

  • Alienation occurs when the worker can only express individuality through a production system that is not collectively, but privately owned.
  • Alienation in capitalist societies occurs because the worker can only express this fundamentally social aspect of individuality through a production system that is not collectively owned, but privately owned.
  • The first is the alienation of the worker from the work he produced, or from the product of his labor.
  • The product's design and the manner in which it is produced are determined not by its actual producers, nor even by those who consume products, but rather by the capitalist class.
  • The fourth is the alienation of the worker from other workers, in which the capitalist system reduces the act of work to a simple economic practice, rather than recognizing the social elements of the act of production.

• Importance of Division of Labor

  • When the worker monitoring the caramel no longer sees how his work contributes to the larger product, he is said to be alienated from his labor.
  • In a division of labor, the production process is broken down into a sequence of stages, and workers are assigned to particular stages.
  • A complex division of labor appears to be strongly correlated with the rise of capitalism, as well as the rise of complex industrial production.
  • While it can have benefits for productivity, the specialization of labor can lead to workers with low overall skills and low enthusiasm.
  • In his view, workers become more and more specialized, and their work becomes more and more repetitive, until eventually they are completely alienated from the production process.

• Industrial Work

  • But this type of production required a new type of labor, industrial labor.
  • New technology made workers much more efficient and productive, but these developments were expensive.
  • To be able to afford these investments, production had to take place on a larger scale.
  • Before the Industrial Revolution, most production took place in homes or in small workshops.
  • This being said, industrial labor also includes service jobs that rose up alongside, and as a result of, industrial production.

• Lenski's Sociological Evolution Approach

  • The relationship between population and production is central to Lenski's thought.
  • Thus, Lenski concludes, human populations are limited by their capability of food production.
  • It is the relationships among population, production, and environment that drive sociocultural evolution.