Response to
Hookway, Branden. Pandemonium: The rise of predatory locales in the postwar world. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
Summary
In Pandemonium: The rise of predatory locales in the postwar world, it is argued that industrialists had contrived better ways of exploiting artisan workers by closely monitoring them on how they did their work to learn their skills and later transform them into machine use. Here, the author views workers as the people who need supervision to provide good quality work and at the same time contribute their skills to improve the productivity of the organizations they were working for. Management was viewed as a tool to spy on the workers and secretly learn how best to exploit them for economic gain. Industrialists viewed leadership to be the best tool to use to spy on the workers.
Response 1
“The skills of the artisan machinist, because they are located within the density of the individual’s bodily experience and not translated into an abstracted and numerical context, provide a quotient of viscosity and an obstacle to frictionless flow in the circuit of information capital” (Hookway 1999, 8). The author argues that a machine has no intelligence to learn the skills of an artisan because machines lack the capability and intelligence necessary to learn as human beings do.
I agree with the above statement. It is clearly illustrated in the statement that industrialists desired to exploit human skills to the maximum for better profits to achieve economies of scale by employing a smaller number of workers in their firms. Here, it is clear that the industrialists were driven by a desire to convert the skills of the artisan skills into numerical skills so that they could eventually be used to automate the machines, which could subsequently substitute the artisans by doing the same work at a lower cost.
“The new mental or nervous discipline required of the worker now invested with a small and carefully defined degree of initiative and local intelligence, has generated new techniques of surveillance and control aimed at extracting imitative from the worker” (Hookway 1999, 15). The author argues that managers and industrialists were finding decision making and knowledge acquisition very important tools for managing the workers.
I disagree with the statement because the new initiatives were not instituted to help the worker enhance their skills, but were being used as tools to exploit the workers. The new methods emphasized on ‘bounded rationality’ by empowering leaders to make decision that benefited the organisation they worked for and not the workers they were supervising.
“Yes this shift should not be seen as empowerment. The new mental or nervous discipline required of the worker, now invested with a small and carefully defined degree of initiative and local intelligence, and has generated new techniques of surveillance and control aimed at extracting initiative from the worker” (Hookway 1999, 23).The author asserts that the new leadership approaches enabled the managers or those in positions of authority to extract the best information from the workers using better intelligence and initiatives.
I agree with the statement because the purpose of coming up with new ways of managing the workers was not for the benefit of the employees, but the new methods provided better ways to closely monitor the workers. The statement is contrary to the claim that the new leadership techniques enabled the workers to make decisions without the intervention of those in authority.
Bibliography
Hookway, Branden. Pandemonium: The rise of predatory locales in the postwar world. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999