The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial artsVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts
Veblen, Thorstein
Industrial arts -- History; Industries -- History; Technology -- History; Workmanship -- History
With the advent of the machine industry this pecuniary rating of
efficiency gained a new impetus and brought new consequences for
technology as well as for business enterprise. Typically, the machine
industry runs on a large scale, as contrasted with handicraft, and it
involves a relatively wide and exacting division of labour between
workmanship and salesmanship. Under the conditions of large ownership
implied in this modern industrial system the workmen no longer
have, or can have, the responsibility of the pecuniary management
of the industrial concern; on the other hand the same conditions
of large ownership and extensive business connections require the
businessmen in charge to delegate the immediate oversight of the
plant and its technological processes to other hands, and to devote
their own energies to the pecuniary management of the concern and its
transactions. Hence it follows that as the machine system and the
highly specialised business enterprise that goes with it reach a larger
scale and a higher degree of elaboration the businessmen in charge are,
by training and by progressive limitation of interest, less and less
competent to take care of the technological exigencies of the machine
system. But at the same time the discretion in technological matters
still rests in their hands by force of their ownership. So that, while
the responsibility of technological discretion still rests on them, and
cannot be fully delegated to other hands, the exigencies of business
enterprise and of the training which it involves will no longer permit
them to meet this responsibility in a competent fashion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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