Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 4

as a time in the evolution of wealth production that was
rich in creative effort and opportunity for the individual worker. The
craftsmanship period is valued in retrospect for its educative influence.
There was opportunity then as there is not now for the worker to gain
the valuable experience of initiating an idea and carrying the
production of an article to its completion for use and sale in the market;
there was the opportunity then also as there is not now, for the worker
to gain a high degree of technique and a valuation of his workmanship.
It is characteristic of workmanship that its primary consideration is
serviceability or utility. The creative impulse and the creative effort
may or may not express workmanship or take it into account.
Workmanship in its consideration of serviceability oftentimes arrives at
beauty and classic production, when creative impulse without the spirit
of workmanship fails. The craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the
high rank which is given it is due in part to its historical relation to the
factory era which followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship
represented expansive development in workmanship, it is not generally
recognized that the Guild organization of the crafts developed modern
business enterprise.[A] Business is concerned wholly with utility, and
not like workmanship, with standards of production, except as those
standards contain an increment of value in profits to the owners of
wealth. It was during the Guild period that business came to value
workmanship because it contained that increment. In spite of business
interest, however, the standard of workmanship was set by skilled

craftsmen, and their standards represented in a marked degree the
market value of the goods produced by them.
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp.
211-212.]
While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of the
owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing
and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse found a
stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and ability of the
worker. It was not until machine standards superseded craft standards
and discredited them that the processes of production, the acts of
fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their educational
value for the worker. The discredits were psychological and economic;
they revolutionized the intellectual and moral concepts of men in
relation to their work and the production of wealth.
As machine production superseded craftsmanship the basis of fixing
the price of an article shifted from values fixed by the standards of
workers to standards of machines, Professor Veblen says to standards
of salesmen. It is along these lines that mechanical science applied to
the production of wealth, has eliminated the personality of the workers.
A worker is no longer reflected in goods on sale; his personality has
passed into the machine which has met the requirements of mass
production.
The logical development of factory organisation has been the complete
coördination of all factors which are auxiliary to mechanical power and
devices. The most important auxiliary factor is human labor. A worker
is a perfected factory attachment as he surrenders himself to the time
and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning; as he supplements
without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks, whatever
imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its needs. If it
lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is without legs; and he
pulls, drags, lifts, if it needs arms. All of these things are done by the
factory worker at the pace set by the machine and under its direction
and command. A worker's indulgence in his personal desires or
impulses hinders the machine and lowers his attachment value.

This division of the workers into eyes, arms, fingers, legs, the plucking
out of some one of his faculties and discarding the rest of the man as
valueless, has seemed to be an organic requirement of machine
evolution. So commendable the scheme has been to business enterprise
that this division of labor has been carried from the machine shop and
the factory to the scientific laboratories where experiment and
discovery in new processes of technology are developed, and where, it
is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is required. The
organization of technological laboratories, like the organization of
construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking
up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution. The
chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they
work out their assigned tasks without specific knowledge of what the
general problem is and how it is being attacked. Small technological
laboratories are still in existence where the general problem in hand is
presented as a whole to the whole engineering staff, and is left to them
as