In a very real sense, the problems of management were extremely
personal and correspondingly concentrated in the hands of skillful
acquisitors. Nowhere was the impact of the 1750-1970 revolution more far
reaching than in the area of management.
Economic activities, in the course of the great revolution, had less and
less connection with the homestead, and except for a tiny minority of
the personnel, had no connection with the family of the owner-operator.
The seat of the family--the home--continued to exist, but on a far more
restricted basis. Arts and crafts moved from the household into the
workshop, where they expanded both in extent and in complexity. Domestic
tasks were associated with hand labor and simple tools. The great
revolution filled the workshop with the ancestors of present day
machinery, but with a prodigious difference. In the early step from home
workshop to factory, hand tools in plenty were being used in the
workshops. As "modernization" progressed, hand tools were replaced by
specialized machines.
The implements of specialization--the machine building tools and the
machine tools themselves--were housed in forests of associated
workshops. The mechanics of specialization sprawled over acres and
square miles of factory floor space. Nowhere were the results of the
great revolution more in evidence than in the vast difference between
the workshop attached to the house of the early industrialist and the
forest of chimneys and stacks, and the acres and square miles of
floorspace in present-day industrial establishments, with their
personnel numbered in thousands and the capital invested in plant and
equipment running into the millions or billions of dollars.
Pages:
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296