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
Latterly many inconveniences have beset the community at large as well
as particular sections and classes of the industrial community, due
in the main to a consistent adherence to these business principles
in the management of industrial affairs. The capitalist-employers,
on the one hand, have gone on the full powers with which the modern
institution of ownership and its broad implications has vested them;
with the result that the public at large, investors, consumers of
industrial products, users of “public utility” agencies serving such
needs as light, fuel, transportation, communication, amusement, etc.,
feel very much aggrieved; as do also and more particularly the workmen
with whom the capitalist-employers do business on the lines laid down
by the authentic business principles involved in the discretionary
ownership of the industrial plant and resources. On the other hand the
workmen, resting their case on the same common-sense view that the
individual is a self-sufficient economic unit who owes nothing to the
community at large beyond what he may freely undertake “for a good
and valuable consideration in hand paid,”--the workmen stand likewise
on the full powers given them by the current institutions of ownership
and contractual discretion, and so work what mischief they can to
their employers and to the public at large, always blamelessly within
the rules of the game as laid down of old on the pecuniary principles
of business discretion, and in the light of such sense as their
training has given them with regard to efficiency in the industries
that have fallen into their hands. And then the “money power” comes
in as a third pecuniarily trained factor, with ever increasing force
and incisiveness, to muddle the whole situation mysteriously and
irretrievably by looking after their own pecuniary interests in a
fashion even more soberly legitimate and authentic, if possible, than
the workmen’s management of their own affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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