Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau criticized the division of labour in Walden (published in 1854), on the basis that it removes people from a sense of connectedness with society and with the world at large, including nature. He claimed that the average man in a civilized society is less wealthy, in practice, than one in a "savage" society. The answer he gave was that self-sufficiency was enough to cover one's basic needs.

Thoreau's friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, criticized the division of labour in "The American Scholar"; a widely-informed, holistic citizenry is vital for the spiritual and physical health of the country.

Émile Durkheim

In his seminal work, The Division of Labor in Society, Émile Durkheim observes that the division of labor appears in all societies and positively correlates with societal advancement because it increases as a society progresses. Durkheim arrived at the same conclusion regarding the positive effects of the division of labor as his theoretical predecessor, Adam Smith. In The Wealth of the Nations, Smith observes the division of labor results in "a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labor." While they shared this belief, Durkheim believed the division of labor applied to all "biological organisms generally" while Smith believed this law applied "only to human societies." This difference may result from the influence of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on Durkheim’s writings. For example, Durkheim observed an apparent relationship between "the functional specialization of the parts of an organism" and "the extent of that organism's evolutionary development," which he believed "extended the scope of the division of labor so as to make its origins contemporaneous with the origins of life itself…implying that its conditions must be found in the essential properties of all organized matter." 

Since Durkheim’s division of labour applied to all organisms, he considered it a "natural law" and worked to determine whether it should be embraced or resisted by first analyzing its functions. Durkheim hypothesized that the division of labor fosters social solidarity, yielding "a wholly moral phenomenon" that ensures "mutual relationships" among individuals.

As social solidarity cannot be directly quantified, Durkheim indirectly studies solidarity by "classify[ing] the different types of law to find...the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it."  Durkheim categorizes: criminal laws and their respective punishments as promoting mechanical solidarity, a sense of unity resulting from individuals engaging in similar work who hold shared backgrounds, traditions, and values; and civil laws as promoting organic solidarity, a society in which individuals engage in different kinds of work that benefit society and other individuals. Durkheim believes that organic solidarity prevails in more advanced societies, while mechanical solidarity typifies less developed societies. He explains that, in societies with more mechanical solidarity, the diversity and division of labor is much less, so individuals have a similar worldview. Similarly, Durkheim opines that in societies with more organic solidary, the diversity of occupations is greater, and individuals depend on each other more, resulting in greater benefits to society as a whole.

Durkheim’s work enabled social science to progress more efficiently "in … the understanding of human social behavior." 

Friedrich A. Hayek

In The Use of Knowledge in Society, Friedrich A. Hayek states:

The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a 'division of labor' but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type.

Cooperation (sometimes written co-operation or coöperation) is the process of working or acting together. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a nation. It is the opposite of working separately in competition. Cooperation can also be accomplished by computers, which can handle shared resources simultaneously, while sharing processor time.

Roots of human cooperation may be found in empathy. For example, when several infants are in a room, and one of them starts crying, others start crying too.

Language allows humans to cooperate on a very large scale. Certain studies have shown that fairness affects human cooperation; individuals are willing to punish at their own cost (altruistic punishment) if they believe that they are being treated unfairly. Sanfey, et al. conducted an experiment where 19 individuals were scanned using MRI while playing an Ultimatum Game in the role of the responder. They were receiving offers from other human partners and from a computer partner. Remarkably, responders refused unfair offers from human partners at a significantly higher rate than those by a computer partner. The experiment also showed that altruistic punishment is associated with negative emotions that are being generated in unfair situations by theanterior insula of the brain.

It has been observed that image scoring promotes cooperative behavior in situations where direct reciprocity is unlikely. In situations where reputation and status are involved, humans tend to cooperate more.