Critiques of the Division of Labor?

In recent days I have been reading some critiques of the division of labor, as presented by Austrians, by folks such as Kevin Carson and thought I would get some others opinions on the matter. I have taken a few bits from the above link and injected a few quick off the cuff thoughts into the matter here. I mean this in no way as a long well thought out critique only a small quibble to get a ball rolling:

In the process of writing his book, Dillow manages to attack many of the platitudes of establishment economists and neoliberal chatterers like Tom Friedman. For example, he points out that the natural tendency of technical change is to reduce the international division of labor. The increasing speed with which technology crosses national borders means that particular nations maintain comparative advantage for shorter and shorter periods. "that tends to limit the international division of labour and, with it, world trade growth." [p. 45] And as I recall someone else suggesting, a great deal of "comparative advantage" is the artificial result of "intellectual property" [sic] laws.

This is true of the international macro-sort of level of the division of labor perhaps, assuming the presence of truly free trade. But I do not see how it could be the same on the individual scale. None of this seems to addresses specialization of labor and its benefits. However I can see greater technological advancement is increasingly making the business of being in business easier and how production methods are coming down to an individual level, especially with the advent of  micro-manufacturing technology. The internet has opened the means, and eased the ability, to achieve the knowledge and skills to go into business or create many a thing on ones own, astronomically. So perhaps there is some truth to the reduction in the division of labor with increasing technological advancement. But this seems to only be the result of a division of labor no longer being needed in an area, not the failure or lunacy of divisions of labor.

It seems that the "division of labor" Paul Edwards wrote about, between workers and those with superior gifts in "entrepreneurship," is largely a figment of the imagination. It's hard to imagine any "speculative aspect of the entrepreneur" that workers could possibly do worse than the people currently at the top.

I fail to see how ones ability to judge and weigh costs and make managerial decisions is in anyway different from ones ability to create an artistic masterpiece or ones ability to kick box and most any other activity. That I am better than most anyone on this board at drawing (probably) or drag racing is no surprise. It is how I have delegated my time in, labor and leisure, and how I have specialized myself. Further, I reject any argument that everyone can do anything, this would be to simply deny that men are all different.

Even if I could do something as good as another there is no reason to believe that I can do it any better on that fact alone. Carson seems hung up on being close to the labor:

Certainly in terms of technological innovation, a subcategory of "entrepreneurship" that Paul Edwards mentioned in the quote above, production workers are the best judges of what would cut costs and increase efficiency (see "On the Superior Efficiency of Small-Scale Organization").

I am a web developer/designer by trade. I can see many areas where management is screwing *** up. I can see where a lot of costs can be cut and where money spent is being wasted or at least not seeing the returns management thinks it is. So I can see where he is coming from. But Management is shielded from my input in many ways, one of which is the amount of power they have over me to fire me, which makes me less likely to say anything about these things which is state created/influenced. Another of which includes barriers or limitation to entry on the market which make it harder for me to take to creating my own business and competing with the business I currently work for. And they are shielded from the consequences of their decisions or lack of inputs by being protected in a broad sense from failure and from competition on a whole. Making bad decisions because the state has set up a system in which it doesn't matter as much if I DO make bad decisions is not a damning of the position of decision maker but a damning of the state.

As a developer here, I have absolutely no knowledge of sales, the graphic arts department, contract negotiations, project time management and the like. So my view is also rather limited in the course of things and perhaps I am shielded from a host of inputs through my specialization.

Even in terms of the entrepreneurial functions of shifting money around to its most productive use, we find senior management hampered by another of Jackall's findings: their incredible short-sightedness. Despite Posner's rose-colored view of things, about the only group with a shorter "time horizon" than corporate CEOs, or the managers of divisions and plants, would be fruit flies.

Whether the manager's jurisdiction is a plant, a division, or the entire company, his remuneration and chances for promotion are determined mainly by the short-term balance sheet and the price of stock. Anything he does to improve long-term productivity is unlikely to show its effects until he has left his current job, so that someone else will take credit for it. So the overwhelming incentive is to do whatever is necessary to inflate the quarterly figures--defer maintenance, draw down inventories, and neglect capital improvements that are necessary for long-term competitiveness. The trick is for the manager to time it just right, so that he runs his domain into the ground and milks all the credit for short-term profits, and then moves on leaves a successor to take the blame for the disaster that follows. The mark of a manager on the fast track is that he outruns his messes, leaving one gutted plant after another to experience catastrophe after he has been promoted. The mindset of the corporate manager, under these circumstances, is that of an Ottoman tax farmer: milk your jurisdiction for all you can get, even to the point of destroying its economy, because you won't be around long enough to benefit for making it more productive. The typical resume carpetbagger has often run one plant after another into the ground, and never gotten anything but praise for the profits under his immediate tenure. The guy who ran a plant into the ground often winds up at corporate headquarters, giving orders to the guy who inherited his mess.

This short time-horizon means that, despite all the lip-service to "reengineering" and Deming knockoffs like Six Sigma and ISO-9000, any corporate cost-cutting drive aimed ostensibly at increasing efficiency will really be aimed instead at milking the maximum possible short-term returns out of the firm at the expense of its long-term viability, before the CEO moves on to greener pastures.

So much of this seems more or less an attack on faulty business practices and inflated size brought about by government protection of corporations which Carson himself is so apt to point out. The corporate organizational structure, in my opinion, is largely a product of state, not of naturally occuring business strategy or construct. A corporation in itself was born of government privilege and so we cannot expect its workings to be completely efficient or 100% illustrative of free market forces. Is Carson attempting to illustrate that the division of labor is bogus because state created inefficencies have distorted how labor is divided or created? Seems this way to me. This seems like saying that governments have created conditions which have given unfair favortism to growing/eating apples, distorting how we eat our fruit, so eating fruit is bad. ?