Civilization and Beyond: Learning from HistoryNearing, Scott
History
Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History
Nearing, Scott
Civilization -- History
Integrating such economies proved to be a difficult, arduous task, well
beyond the powers of the average political, military or hereditary
leader. In a very real sense, the problems of management were extremely
personal and correspondingly concentrated in the hands of skillful
acquisitors. Nowhere was the impact of the 1750-1970 revolution more far
reaching than in the area of management.
Economic activities, in the course of the great revolution, had less and
less connection with the homestead, and except for a tiny minority of
the personnel, had no connection with the family of the owner-operator.
The seat of the family--the home--continued to exist, but on a far more
restricted basis. Arts and crafts moved from the household into the
workshop, where they expanded both in extent and in complexity. Domestic
tasks were associated with hand labor and simple tools. The great
revolution filled the workshop with the ancestors of present day
machinery, but with a prodigious difference. In the early step from home
workshop to factory, hand tools in plenty were being used in the
workshops. As "modernization" progressed, hand tools were replaced by
specialized machines.
The implements of specialization--the machine building tools and the
machine tools themselves--were housed in forests of associated
workshops. The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and
square miles of factory floor space. Nowhere were the results of the
great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between
the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the
forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of
floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their
personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and
equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.
Two centuries of the great revolution have given present-day industrial
society a capital plant the like of which has never existed on the
planet in any historical period. After two hundred years of meteoric
development, it exists today on a planet-wide scale and at a level of
all-pervasive dominance undreamed of even up to the middle of the last
century.
Modern industry "plants"--steel plants, cement plants, open pit mines,
textile plants, machine tool plants, auto plants, rubber factories, oil
refineries--not only occupy extensive acreage per plant, but the same
interests and corporate managements operate dozens of plants in widely
separated geographical areas and produce a great variety of goods and
services. An experienced observer feels entirely at home in any
industrial center, on any continent. In Detroit, in Dusseldorf, in
Osaka, in Shanghai, in Bombay, the architecture of the plants is
essentially the same, the machines in the widely separated plants bear
a striking resemblance to one another, and the problems of management
are similar.
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