Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for EducatorsMarot, Helen
Science
Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators
Marot, Helen
Business and education -- United States; Technical education -- United States; Working class -- Education -- United States
Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive,
is of assistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the
worker is reached. Nothing better illustrates the limitations of
promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where
the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers
decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of
service. That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories
where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker. In the factory
where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that
promotion is a negligible factor. Where the turnover is high there is
greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to
promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number
of what they call "functionalized foremen" and teachers in proportion
to the working force.
It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions
in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in
finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their
direction has produced.
Before scientific management was discovered, business management and
machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the
real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker
of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content. All
that was left for scientific management to gather together for its
direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own
experimental efforts at how best to handle tools. Their efforts it
is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise
progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was
still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort
inspired by an interest in the work.
When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of
scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage:
educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are
fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them.
They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own
initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all
things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it. The
responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a
better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific
management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from
the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of
learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the
opportunity is provided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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