Ken rightly took me to task for a too-vague use of the word "specialization." Since my focus on this topic is still pretty lose, I'll add to my vagueness.
 
First a bit of translation for those lost by references to dead economists:
 
David Ricardo looked at the economic benefits of trade and specialization. He was looking at British cloth production and Portuguese port wine production and trade between countries but the principle can be applied more generally. If you are better at x than you are at y and I am better at y than I am at x, we will both be better off if you do x and I do y even if you are better at y than I am. Your cost in lost opportunity to do more of x is a higher value than your gain from doing y.
 
Ronald Coase (pronounced to rhyme with doze) was famous for a couple of things. The one Terry brought up was his early work on transaction costs. If we look back at David Ricardo's assumptions, you'd assume that you should just trade with me to get your required amount of y. But the phrase "trade with me" covers over complexity. You have to find me. You have to make a deal with me. You have to trust me. You have to take the risk that I'll go out of business in the middle of the deal, leaving you high, dry, and sans y. We both have to pay our banks for transferring money. . . These are some of the transaction costs.
 
If the transaction costs are, as Ricardo seemed to imply, zero then you will do more and more x as your capacity grows and you'll keep getting your y from me. This would be described as horizontal expansion. If, however, transaction costs are high, you will discover that there is some point where it makes sense to do x and y both because the transaction costs make that cheaper than trading with me to get y. This would be vertical expansion.
 
You may have noticed some linguistic slipperiness with my use of "you." Did I mean you (singular) or you (plural)? If "you" plural is several people who can do x well, you have the start of the firm--the subject of Coase's paper. (You also, interestingly, have the opportunity for super specialization where someone does x1, someone else x2, etc. until it all adds up to x.)
 
Of course, as Terry indicated with his talk of computer systems and such, there are internal transaction costs. Your x department still has to communicate with your y department, you've added more people in your warehouse, your accounting is more complex, etc. So until you know about both internal and external transaction costs, the total actual cost may not be obvious.
 
The question of differences in Terry’s/MIS’s use of "transaction cost" and Coase's indicates that what is transaction cost and what is just plain vanilla cost can depend to an extent on one's perspective. If you're selling something and hiring me as a graphic designer to promote the sale, what looks like cost to me looks like transaction cost to you. Terry and I went back and forth on that several month ago.
 
But Terry's dragging Coase into the answer to my sort-of question is very interesting because [Ken--here comes vague usage as promised] vertical expansion is a sort of specialization and horizontal expansion is a sort of generalization. In some sense, vertical expansion parallels disciplinary focus and horizontal expansion parallels interdisciplinary approaches. Since transaction costs shape not just the existence of the firm but, as the paper title put it, the nature of the firm, the question of intellectual transaction costs may reveal something.
 
I'm still not sure what's there (and whether it extends at all to the high modernist/post modernist shift in notions of the importance of medium in art) but I think there's something. (I assume that dragging ol' Clement into the fray requires a shift of attitude that most economists--especially the Chicago School guys--would disapprove of.)

I'll put it on simmer and let you know if it cooks down into something worth consuming.
 
Thanks again to both of you for your insights.
 
By the way, Terry--I've long thought that the place where computer learning could have a great impact is in the realm where most of us in the "Art and" end of design think we're safe from domination by robot overlords; that's "taste." I'm not talking Komar and Melamid stuff.

In the late '80s, I used to bug everyone I knew who was involved in parallel processing stuff to make typography their focus. Most of typography (at least on the text type level) is based on rules. Not rules in the prescriptions sense but in the sense of interlocking factors that affect judgment. This sounds dismal to a lot of people but it's not--my attitude is that typography is all about what I hate less. I hate hyphenation but in some particular case, I hate a nasty rag or bad word spacing (depending on whether I'm talking flush left of justified) more so I go with the hyphenation. And so on down a longish chain of choices.
 
It seems like a computer doing some general amount of typesetting automatically then asking me for my choices would be efficient use of my time. Alternatively, the computer could just watch me and infer my answers, thus later being able to anticipate my preferences.
 
General rules (in the prescriptions sense) have been incorporated. InDesign now requires less attention to adjustments on my part than QuarkXPress did in the '90s. More of an AI/computer learning approach could extend that and in the process it could capture much of an individual's judgement that we label "taste." It may be more plausible that you could say "Siri--Set this just like Robert Bringhurst would" than "Siri--Set this just like David Carson would" but both are plausible.


Gunnar

Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program

http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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