Received Accepted Social insects display task-related division of labour. In some species, division of labour is related to differences in body size, and worker caste members display morphological adaptations suited for particular tasks. Bumble-bee workers (Bombus spp.) can vary in mass by eightto tenfold within a single colony, which previous work has linked to division of labour. However, lit...

Ants and other social insects forming large societies are generally characterized by marked reproductive division of labour. Queens largely monopolize reproduction whereas workers have little reproductive potential. In addition, some social insect species show tremendous lifespan differences between the queen and worker caste. Remarkably, queens and workers are usually genotypically identical, ...

Labour productivity affects food security, but quantifying this relationship has been scarce with respect to empirical literature. The Central Madagascar dataset explores the influence of labour productivity and related variables on the food security status of cassava farmers. Drawing on both theory and empirical evidence, this paper argues that fundamental effects of links between labour produ...

This paper builds upon on-going research into the organisational implications of ‘modularity’. Advocates of modularity argue that the Invisible Hand of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the Visible Hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits to the extent of division of labour: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set...

This paper builds upon on-going research into the organisational implications of ‘modularity’. Advocates of modularity argue that the Invisible Hand of markets is reaching activities previously controlled through the Visible Hand of hierarchies. This paper argues that there are cognitive limits to the extent of division of labour: what kinds of problems firms solve, and how they solve them, set...

It seems entirely fitting to discuss the Chinese economy on this occasion of the opening of the Renmin-Monash Advanced Centre of Economic Studies (ACES). One of the most striking features of that economy is the remarkable pace at which it has grown in the past one or two decades. A real challenge for economists is to account for this extraordinary success story. I think that a potentially signi...

In some of the most complex animal societies, individuals exhibit a cooperative division of labour to form castes. The most pronounced types of caste formation involve reproductive and non-reproductive forms that are morphologically distinct. In colonies comprising separate or mobile individuals, this type of caste formation has been recognized only among the arthropods, sea anemones and mole-r...

0003-3472/$38.00 The Association for the Study of A doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.11.019 Individuals in many types of animal groups show both reproductive and task-related division of labour. In some social insect species, such division of labour may be related to the spatial organization of workers inside the nest. We examined colonies of bumblebees and found that (1) 11–13% of workers maintained...

Deeply conserved molecular mechanisms regulate food-searching behaviour in response to nutritional cues in a wide variety of vertebrates and invertebrates. Studies of the highly eusocial honey bee have shown that nutritional physiology and some conserved nutrient signalling pathways, especially the insulin pathway, also regulate the division of labour between foraging and non-foraging individua...

Division of labour, or specialization, is common in many types of insect colonies. It emerges in some of these societies as a result of age polyethism, whereby the division of labour is tied to the age of the individuals. One known method that explains this is social inhibition. Individuals release pheromones when they interact with other agents. The strength of their pheromones is tied to thei...