Gail wrote:
> For example, in raising a barn, the persons involved may be of
> equal status, e.g., local farmers, but they will be pursuing
> different functions at each stage of the task. Even though the
> team may be composed of the same members, it will probably have a
> different leader in raising the beams from the one who sets the
> foundations and from the one leads the roofers. In each case the
> team may organize itself in a manner that is hierarchical, even
> steeply hierarchical, for these functional tasks. They are
> nonetheless working "with" each other as persons of equal
> status.
Well, I can confirm that. I worked several weekends on raising the
frame of a detailed reproduction of a 1740s, framed overhang, two
storey house. The owner had spent two or three years locating
suitable trees, felling them, hauling the logs to his secluded site in
an old pickup, hewing the timbers and cutting all the joints, some of
them rather complicated. Then he invited all his friends to come on
weekends and raise it.
And what you describe was just the case. Authority (or command or
whatever you may call it) passed from hand to hand as needed. Of
course the owner was The Boss but when a 16' oak beam was 20 feet in
the air on a jin pole, everybody followed the word of the riggers. When
it came to fitting a tight dovetail together, the joiner's
word determined that it be rammed home with a big mallet or, if not,
how much to pare off of which part to get a perfect fit.
But this was a hugely unrepresentative convocation. Most were
university educated people who had also learned a trade. Some were
artists. Some, with less formal education, were very bright guys in
trades or crafts who got a kick out of hanging out with the
aforementioned. There were no morons or power trippers and no one
(excepting the owner) was making a career out of this. The only
capital was the frame timbers and the only return on capital a
perfectly fitted house frame. There were no investors, loans,
insurance; no competitors in the house-raising market segment; no
budget, cost accounting, grants, subsidies or quarterly reports.
In retrospect, that was a remarkable experience. Since then, I've
worked in collaborative situations where there were idiots; people
with credentials but no (or only formulaic) knowledge; people
with a private or conspiratorial power agenda; people used to Being In
Charge who expected to be in charge in a situation for which they
had no qualifications; people, like the current US president, who
were sure that decisiveness trumped knowing what they were doing; and
on and on. You can surely add to the list.
The result of even one such person in a collaborative project can be
chaos. With two or three, the whole thing can become
pathological. Cf. the "dysfunctional family".
In my half-in-jest edit of Gail's sentences,
me> 4. If we do this, we can hope that work will come to be much like
me> we imagine it to have been in an idealized small, mid-19th
me> century New England town and strive to make it so.
I didn't mean to suggest a "return to small village life",
Charles> I don't see what you are struggling to describe as being some
Charles> sort of return to small village life, I see it as a
Charles> reinvention of some of the good parts of that life in a 21st
Charles> century context.
only that one might hope that, for a significant part of the workforce,
work and the workplace might come to have similar features. I think
Gail was suggesting that with the barn raising model.
But I'm not very sanguine about that hope. Pre-industrial North
American villages had a social infrastructure -- social fabric -- that
made change-work, barn raising, threshing and other practices
workable. It was not efficient. E.g. the village idiot might be
given a task within his abilities and people would keep an eye on him
to ensure that he didn't cause a disaster because he was, after all,
my family or yours or Aunt Grace's. The community worked out the
difficulties of other problem personalities in similar ways.
Some of the communes of the 1960s -- the one that were not just a
bunch of stoned losers crashing together -- tried all sorts of things
to try to reconstruct this kind of community, where authority devolved
onto whoever had the skill or knowledge needed at a particular time.
The ones of which I have first hand knowledge have all faded away
(although one lasted, from 1968, for over 25 years.)
So I feel kinda stumped when I think about embodying the notions and
relations of the pre-industrial village or the ideals for which some
of the 60s communes strove in the contemporary industrial or
post-industrial economy.
Gail> 19. The path will be strewn with misunderstandings but, as
Gail> William James said, "First a new theory is attached as absurd;
Gail> then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant;
Gail> finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim
Gail> they themselves discovered it."
Well, I didn't say it was absurd, just that I was baffled. :-)
Gail> ...abolishing the employment of one person by another so that
Gail> rather than being "worked for" or "working for" another
Gail> person...
As a last note, I might remark on the sign in a place where I once
worked (with friends, as a per-job contractor, as it happens) as a
mechanic:
Hourly rate: $10
You watch: $15
You help: $50
The last thing that one wants, if one has a difficult and demanding
task to do, is to have the "help" of someone who knows nothing about
the task or, worse, "knows" stuff that's not so. Of course, if the
relationship with the other person comes first, if the other person is
eager to learn, we can do it that way. It will take all day instead
of an hour, we may have to do it over a couple of times due to the
consequences of loss of focus. I'm no fan of Frederick Taylor and
have riffed on him when demonstrating forging, explaining the
difference between the self-directed, idiosyncratic efficiency of the
craftsman and the imposed, industrial efficiency of the engineered
workplace. But "working with" requires that all parties share a
certain level of knowledge and skill if the focus is to be on the
"working" and not on the "with". And that simply isn't going to be
possible for the capitalist who wants to build an aircraft plant and
the building tradesmen; or even, at least typically, for the lawyer
who wants a hand-forged gate and the artist blacksmith who makes it.
FWIW,
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[EMAIL PROTECTED] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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