In Class...

On friday (October 1) in our business class, we talked about the terms "specialization", "efficiency", "productivity" and "quality". So far, it was our most beneficial business class, since our business teacher Mr.Sen was back to school after 2 weeks, and we got a chance to discuss our previous assignments face to face and understand our mistakes.

First of all, Mr.Sen made cl

ear what "specialization" really meant. I used to think that specialization could only be about a product, but I learnt that it could also be a process.

For instance, we discussed the specialization in school; there are specific teachers for specific fields (Math, English, Bio, Turkish etc) who are giving "services", which makes specialization a process.

Then, we talked about efficiency and learned that it is equal to output/input.

For instance, a car company's output is the number of cars produced and the input is the man-hour put into the work. So to be more efficient, this company should increase the amount of cars while also decreasing the man-hour. We figured out that efficiency can also be called "productivity".

Then, we began discussing whether specialization was an advantage or a liability. It was certainly increasing the efficiency, but what if someone was good in multiple fields, d

id he/she have to choose one of those fields to specialize at? If a teacher was as good in math as in literature, couldn't he/she become a literature and a math teacher?

Wasn't it boring to specialize in the sa

me field and do the same work over and over again everyday?

Of course having employes that are focusing on specific fields will help the development and the increase in profit of a company, but what about the employees? What if they get sick and tired of what they do and want to do other things and get out of control? Specializati

on could decrease the quality; the bored workers would need power and would start making waves.

So many questions such as these raised in our heads and we decided that even though specialization had it benefits, it also had disadvantages.

Then we started discussing what made a company, school, product "qualified", how could

"quality" be measured and who decided what "quality" meant. Since quality was a subjective notion, it couldn't have a certain criteria and be measured by applying surveys, questionnaires etc. Mr.Sen again gave the example of school. He said that if the school's reputation was high, if the students were learning interesting things, if the employee was happy and working hard, would

it mean that the school has a good quality?

Then we decided that, when it comes to quality, criteria violence the differences. That's why, every company, organization, school etc had to have a certain unique criteria to determine whether it has a high quality. But then again, since it was impossible, we figured out that measuring the quality of a non-business organization is almost impossible.

At the end of the lesson, my perspectives about specialization absolutely changed.