Explain how the Industrial Revolution led to both an increase in job specialization and an increase in managerial and professional occupations

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The Industrial Revolution—the rise of large-scale production of goods and products for mass markets—centered on the emergence of the factory as an increasingly central place where economic activity occurred. The first factories used relatively simple technology, and much of the work had to be done by skilled craftspeople who were capable of producing a finished product more or less by themselves. As technology advanced, so did more sophisticated forms of management and supervision. Jobs were subdivided into different specialties. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America and Europe, factories increasingly became dominated by assembly-line production, in which each worker would perform one or a small number of tasks. Alongside the increasing specialization inside factories was rapid growth of both new and old professional and managerial occupations. The increasing wealth that the Industrial Revolution created both required and supported the creation of a large set of occupations that provided services and support to the manufacturing sector. Colleges and universities, once primarily reserved for the very wealthy or for religious instruction, underwent a mammoth expansion from the late nineteenth century onward. Occupations like physician, lawyer, accountant, business manager, professor and teacher, and many others expanded very rapidly, and became linked to educational credentials that provided a ticket to entry into the field.