The industrial revolution was built on a model that emphasized both the division of labor and a tightly vertical "chain of command". In the ideal assembly line, each worker performed a specific task that was seemingly independent of that performed by coworkers. Likewise, each supervisor's had specific duties that reported through the chain of command to supervisors with successively broader responsibilities.

In recent years, this has been replaced by team-oriented workplaces that flatten -- if not erase -- the differences between management and labor and emphasize shared responsibility for corporate success. Higher education is slowly paralleling this workplace transformation as students increasingly work as collaborative teams to master course content.

A humorous view of collaboration