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What Do Bosses Really Do?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

David S. Landes
David S. Landes
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.
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Abstract

If employers make so much money, why don't workers hire machines and expertise and make the money instead? This question has generated a large body of writing, including Stephen Marglin's much-cited article “What Do Bosses Do?” Marglin draws on history to argue that the employer, who added nothing to technical efficiency, used specialization of tasks to divide labor and impose himself as boss, thereby creating an artificial, unproductive role. These arrangements were embodied in domestic industry and were reinforced when employers turned to the factory system as a more effective disciplinary mode. This article argues that such a thesis misreads history and is essentially ideological.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 1986 , pp. 585 - 623
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1986

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References

1 “What Do Bosses Do?: Part I”, The Review of Radical Political Economy, 6 (Summer 1974), pp. 60–112.Google Scholar The article was republished as “What Do Bosses Do?” in Gorz, André, ed., The Division of Labour: The Labour Process and Class Struggle in Modern Capitalism (London, 1976), pp. 13–54. Page references in this article are to the reprint in Gorz.Google Scholar

2 Marglin, Stephen, “Knowledge and Power”, in Stephen, Frank H., ed., Firms, Organization and Labour: Approaches to the Economics of Work Organization (London, 1984), pp. 146–64;Google Scholar on samizdat, p. 156. In fact, the article is part of a larger stream of revisionist literature on the organization of labor and the structure of the firm and has drawn notice from mainstream as well as from radical economists.Google Scholar See, for example, Williamson, Oliver E., “The Organization of Work: A Comparative Institutional Assessment”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1 (03 1980), pp. 6–11;Google Scholar and Kindleberger, Charles P., “The Historical Background: Adam Smith and the Industrial Revolution,” in Wilson, Thomas and Skinner, Andrew S., eds., The Market and the Slate: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1976). Marglin's new article does make some changes in his earlier thesis, and I shall advert to these when relevant to the discussion that follows.Google Scholar

3 Page references in The Wealth of Nations are to the Modern Library edition, edited by Cannan, Edwin (New York, 1939).Google Scholar

4 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 47, n. 2.Google Scholar Kindleberger, “The Historical Background,” argues that Smith's emphasis on the division of labor actually came from Plato, rather than from his immediate predecessors or from experience; he cites on this point Foley, Vernard, “The Division of Labour in Plato and Smith”, History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), pp. 220–42.Google Scholar

5 As does Marx, who never misses a chance to diminish Smith: Capital, vol. 1, p. 335, n. 1. Page references are to the Moscow edition, Progress Publishers, which is a translation of the third German edition, edited by Friedrich Engels.Google Scholar

6 Thus Martyn, Henry (Martin), Considerations on the East India Trade (1701);Google Scholar and Mandeville, Bernard de, The Fable of the Bees (5th ed., London, 1728).Google Scholar

7 Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 5. Kindleberger, “The Historical Background”, p. 7, remarks that the consequences of division of labor “can be found worked out complete with references to pins” in Carl, Traité de la richesse des princes et de leurs états et des moyens simples et naturels (1722).Google Scholar

8 Smith's “machines” were not necessarily engine-powered devices. He specifically remarks that the hand mill is also a machine. Lectures, p. 167, cited by Cannan in Smith, Wealth of Nations, p.9, n. 17. In his discussion of the gains to division of labor, moreover, Smith makes no explicit reference to what we could call a factory, that is, a large manufacturing unit using machines driven by nonhuman power. There is no evidence that Smith had ever seen such a unit, which had only recently appeared in cotton spinning. But such units had existed since early in the century in silk throwing, and Smith must have known of their existence. Even so, my sense is that Smith's world was prefactory, prepower machinery; and that he had no awareness of the Industrial Revolution, then in its inception. There is some disagreement on this: most economic historians say he was unaware; historians of economic thought say he was not. Like Charles Kindleberger (“The Historical Background”) I think the “unawares” have it.Google Scholar For a similar point of view, see Caton, Hiram, “The Preindustrial Economics of Adam Smith”, this JOURNAL, 45 (12 1985), pp. 833–53. For this reason, I find incongruous the statement that “Marglin and Smith agree in allowing early factories, both mechanized and nonmechanized [that is, powered and nonpowered], considerable potential for measured productivity growth”.Google ScholarSokoloff, Kenneth L., “Was the Transition from the Artisanal Shop to the Nonmechanical Factory Associated with Gains in Efficiency?: Evidence from the U.S. Manufacturing Censuses of 1820 and 1850,” Explorations in Economic History, 21 (1984), p. 352. Not that Smith would have had trouble incorporating factories—that is, true, powered factories—into his division-of-labor paradigm.Google Scholar

9 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 323.Google Scholar

10 Caton, Hiram, “The Preindustrial Economics of Adam Smith”, this JOURNAL, 45 (12 1985), pp. 833–53., p. 329, n. 4.Google Scholar

11 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.i.10. Marx's criticism (Capial, vol. 1, p. 329, n. 4), then, is not justified. But then, Marx saw in Smith what he wanted to see.Google Scholar

12 Capital, vol. 1, p.340. And in a rhetorical fiuonsh: “As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labor brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital” (p. 341). A characteristic jibe by Marx, who bore in his own features “the sign manual of Jehovah”. As is generally true with people who run from their origins, so with this reincarnation of a biblical prophet, Jewish by descent, Christian by parental decision, atheistic and antireligious by conviction, and vocally anti-Jewish because of this deliberate break with a distinguished Jewish lineage.Google Scholar

13 On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London, 1832)Google Scholar, chap. 19. See also the comments in Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London, 1974), pp. 79–82. Braverman's revival of this issue was badly needed.Google Scholar

14 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 18.Google Scholar

15 ibid.

16 Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 734.Google Scholar

17 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 16.Google Scholar

18 There is an irresistible temptation on the part of social critics to idealize past arrangements by way of contrast with an undesirable present. (See Friedrich Engel's view of the putting-out system in The Condition of the Working Class in England) In fact, the traditional apprentice contracted to obey his master and did what he was told—even to the extent of non-work-related errands and tasks for the master's household. That was in the nature of an open-ended relationship between “parent” and “child”. As for graduate departments in universities today, it is true that the students, unlike apprentices, have a great deal of autonomy. There are limits, however, as in a large course in which professor and teaching assistants disagree about method or content.Google Scholar

19 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 16.Google Scholar

20 ibid, p. 20.

21 ibid.

22 See, for example, Develle, E., Les horlogers blésois au XVIe et au XVIIe siècle (3rd ed., Nogent-le-Roi, 1978) pp. 58–59.Google Scholar

23 Cited in Aspin, C., Lancashire, the First Industrial Society (Helmshore, 1969), p. 36. The book has no footnotes, even for quotations.Google Scholar

24 Some critics of the concept of proto-industrialization have tried to discredit it by noting that areas of cottage industry have not always (or have often not) moved on to the factory stage (Marx's Modern Industry). But this is precisely what one would expect. For an example of this kind of reasoning, see Houston, Rab and Snell, K.D.M., “Proto-industrialization? Cottage Industry, Social Change and Industrial Revolution”, The Historical Journal, 27, no. 2 (1984), pp. 490–91.Google Scholar In fairness to Messrs. Houston and Snell, the word “proto-industrialization” does seem to imply a promise, and that promise is not always fulfilled. We might have done better to stick with good old “cottage industry” and “putting out”. On new locations and new labor, see Clark, Gregory, “Authority and Efficiency: The Labor Market and the Managerial Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century”, this JOURNAL, 44 (12 1984), p. 1077 and n. 31;Google ScholarLandes, David S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 289, 380 Table 2, on the introduction of machine manufacture into the Swiss watch industry and the incorporation of a new labor force;Google Scholar and Helm, Carol, “Structural Transformation and the Demand for New Labor in Advanced Economies: Interwar Britain”, this JOURNAL, 44 (06 1984), pp. 585–5. The emphasis of economists on the value of “firm-specific” skills, therefore, is one-sided. Such skills do matter within a given technological context; but change the technology (introduce new machines, for example) and an asset turns into a handicap.Google Scholar On the value of firm-specific skills, see Williamson, Oliver, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Anti-Trust Implications (New York, 1975).Google Scholar

25 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 20.Google Scholar

26 Ashton, “The Records of a Pin Manufactory, 1814–21”, Economica, 15 (11 1925), pp. 281–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The most common ailment was a nervous stomach. The above quotations are from Spenceley, G.F.R., “The Health and Disciplining of Children in the Pillow Lace Industry in the Nineteenth Century”, Textile History, 7 (1976), pp. 166–69.Google Scholar Depressing but important. See also the classic study by Pinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1930), pp. 232–35.Google Scholar

28 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 16.Google Scholar

29 Spenceley, G.F.R., “The Health and Disciplining of Children in the Pillow Lace Industry in the Nineteenth Century”, Textile History, 7 (1976), pp. 166–69., p. 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 In his second article (“Knowledge and Power,” p. 150), Marglin explicitly recognizes this: “the essence of the capitalist's contribution is not capital, but organizing ability”. But then he goes on to say that that ability was unnecessary: it is only because the capitalist has “imposed” an organizational form that makes him essential that he is able to “secure a reward” from the production process. So the capitalist could (and can) be dispensed with. See also Gorz, André, “The Tyranny of the Factory: Today and Tomorrow”, in Gorz, , ed., The Division of Labour, p. 55.Google Scholar

31 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 20.Google Scholar

32 Landes, Revolution in Time pp. 252–53.Google Scholar

33 There is good material in Jones, S.R.H., “The Country Trade and the Marketing and Distribution of Birmingham Hardware, 1750–1810,” Business History, 26 (03 1984), pp. 24–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 See Landes, Revolution in Time, chap. 13: “The Good Old Days that Never Were”.Google Scholar

35 ibid, p. 451, n. 30. A report of 1798–1799 stated that one hundred and fifty workers contributed in one way or another to the making of a watch–probably an exaggeration, but still strong evidence of the strategy that made Switzerland synonymous with watches.

36 The paragraphs that follow draw heavily on Millward, Robert, “The Early Stages of European Industrialization: Economic Organization under Serfdom”, Explorations in Economic History, 21 (1984), pp. 406–28. An important piece, but marred by heavy jargon. Do economic historians feel that they have to sell their competence to economists? They would do better to communicate their results to historians as well. It might help recruit people into the discipline.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Wadsworth, A. P. and Mann, Julia de L., The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1790 (Manchester, 1931), p. 277.Google Scholar

38 On middlemen in hosiery, Rule, John, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century English Industry (New York, 1981), p. 141f., who may not be saying quite the same thing as I am.Google Scholar See also similar arrangements in hardware in Jones “The Country Trade”, p. 25.Google Scholar

39 Letter of Josiah Wedgwood to Bentley, Thomas, 19 05 1770, in Finer, Ann and Savage, George, eds., The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (London, 1965), p. 92.Google Scholar

40 On the development of “white-collar” specialties, see Rowlands, Marie B., Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trades before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1975), pp. 84–87.Google Scholar

41 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 21.Google Scholar

42 A further encouragement to the separation of roles is the desire to avoid the confusions of fellowship and intimacy. Such a consideration could be important for both sides, especially in situations of disagreement and conflict of interest. See Price, Richard, Masters, Union and Men: Work Control in Building and the Rise of Labour, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1980), p. 129:Google Scholar what was probably the first business manual for builders urged employers not to work along with the men, because that would confuse the true character of the relationship. And from the workers' point of view, see Hobsbawm quoting Stedman-Jones quoting Hodgskin: masters who belong to the “useful classes” are “labourers as well as their journeymen,” and insofar as they are needed “to direct and superintend labour, and to distribute its produce,” are all right; but they are also “capitalists or agents of capitalists, and in this respect their interest is decidedly opposed to the interests of their workmen.” Hobsbawm, E. J., “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 37 (08 1984), p. 361.Google Scholar

43 The best description of this pattern is to be found in Braun, Rudolf, Industrialisierung und Volksleben: Veränderungen der Lebensformen unter Einwirkung der verlagsindusrriellen Heimarbeit in einem ländlichen Industriegebiet (Zürcher Oberland) vor 1800 (Erlenbach-Zürich, 1960; 2d ed., Göttingen, 1979).Google Scholar This was written before the invention of the term protoindustrialization, but it was the first major study of this phenomenon in its social and cultural as well as economic aspects, and it is still the best book on the subject. Further on this: Mendels, Franklin F., “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” this JOURNAL, 32 (1972), pp. 241–61;Google Scholar and Kriedte, Peter, Medick, Hans, and Schlumbohm, Jürgen, Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism (Cambridge and Paris, 1981).Google Scholar

44 Houston and Snell, “Proto-industrialization?” (cited in fn. 24, above), are skeptical, because they assume that if cottage industry promoted the development of modern industry, one should find factories appearing in areas of dispersed manufacture. They miss the implications of lower-cost rural manufacture for the extent of the market and rising demand, hence as a stimulus to a change in the mode of production, not necessarily in situ. Karl Marx, who had no access to the information we now have on the historical role of cottage industry, stressed the role of handicraft shops and the manufactory as the preliminary to modern industry. He may have been influenced in this by the history of manufacture on the Continent, where efforts to industrialize from above accorded the manufactory a special role as vehicle for investment and technological change. But Marx would surely have been pleased to incorporate putting-out into his stage schema, for it would have provided him with a congenial social explanation for the shift from hand tools and machines to powered equipment, in terms of the internal contradictions of the older mode. See Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe, 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 58–60.Google Scholar Marx's discussion of the problems caused by worker insubordination refers to skilled handicraft labor (Capital, vol. 1, pp. 346–47).Google Scholar

45 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 35.Google Scholar

46 ibid, p. 37.

47 I learned this very important point from my teacher Abbott P. Usher. He hinted at it in his still valuable Introduction to the Industrial History of England (Boston, 1920). And he stressed it in class.Google ScholarPubMed

48 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 347.Google Scholar

49 These economies, as Marx pointed out, are determined in large part by the appropriate combination of specialists: an efficient unit is one that exhausts the potential contribution of each worker (Capital, vol. 1, pp. 326–29). On the tendency to growth of handicraft shops n the United States, see the Sokoloff article cited in fn. 8, above. This is an analysis of census data and establishes conclusively the tendency to growth and the gains to efficiency from increasing size. On the other hand, the association between size and efficiency is not an explanation, and the article invites attention to the techniques of the branches studied.Google Scholar

50 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 31.Google Scholar

51 In the west Country woolen manufacture, large workshops were almost invariably linked with beginning and end processes that used power and heat, while adopting the new machines (carding and scribbling engines and the jenny) in sizes (eighty-spindle jennies) that exceeded the resources of the cottage worker. In this branch of the trade, manufacturers were slow to introduce water and steam power, using instead adult males (blind men sometimes) to turn the wheels; or horse gins, a dirtier and more troublesome source of power than the water wheel. There is considerable material in Rogers, Kenneth, Wiltshire and Somerset Woollen Mills (Edington, Wilts., 1976). Even in the more advanced Yorkshire woolen manufacture, the first mills did not appear until the 1770s and then multiplied as the technical problems of machine treatment of the recalcitrant natural fibers were progressively solved.Google Scholar See the tables and maps in Jenkins, D. T., The West Riding Wool Textile Industry, 1770–1835 (Edington, Wilts., 1975), pp. 15, 17, 20–21;Google Scholar also Jenkins, , “Early Factory Development in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1770–1800,” in Harte, N.B. and Ponting, K.G., eds. Textile History and Economic History (Manchester, 1973), pp. 247–80.Google Scholar

52 Defoe, Daniel, A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain… (1st ed., 3 vols., 1724–1726; reprint 2 vol., London, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 600–2.Google Scholar

53 ibid, vol. 1, pp. xiv–xv. Even so, he was significantly different from the clothiers of the rapidly growing worsted branch around Bradford, who gave out all their work to dispersed cottage weavers, employed far greater numbers, disposed of much more capital, and were far quicker to move from putting-out to factory manufacture. On the divergent character of the two branches, see the excellent and well-documented article of Hudson, Pat, “Proto-industrialisation: the Case of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries,” History Workshop, no. 12 (Autumn 1981), pp. 34–61. One caution: Hudson, like Houston and Snell (see footnote 24, above), makes much (too much?) of rectifying what she sees as an erroneous “proto-industry model,” which is portrayed as linear: rural industry is essentially homogeneous and progresses normally and naturally to the next stage, factory production. Hudson clearly demonstrates that this is not so and (following in Braun's footsteps) that the agrarian context shapes both the forms of rural industry and its development.Google Scholar

54 Hudson, Pat, “From Manor to Mill: the West Riding in Transition,” in Berg, Maxine, Hudson, Pat, and Sonenscher, Michael, eds., Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 124–44. Hudson notes that similar services were supplied, at least in an earlier period, by mills built and financed by landowners, who linked their operations to the needs of tenant clothiers and saw the combination of land, shop, and access to mill as a package designed to attract renters and enhance the revenue of their estates. The biggest such operator, Lord Dartmouth, owned nineteen mills in 1805 (p. 139). Such were some of the varieties of enterprise in an enterprising society.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 On hard times in the woolen trade, see ibid, p. 143.

56 Testimony of a leading Manchester fustian manufacturer to the House of Lords in 1785, cited in Chapman, Stanley, “Workers' Housing in the Cotton Factory Colonies, 1770–1850”, Textile History, 7 (1976), p. 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57 ibid.

58 On the significance of tramp labor for the early textile mills, see Edwards, M. M. and Lloyd-Jones, R., “N. J. Smelser and the Cotton Factory: A Reassessment,” Textile History and Economic History (Manchester, 1973), p. 309.Google Scholar

59 Involuntary labor was not so productive as free labor, for understandable want of motivation, to say nothing of active hostility. See the fascinating testimony of James McConnel to the Children's Employment Commission of 1841–1842, in Parliamentary Papers, 1843, vol. 14, b-63. The firm of McConnel & Kennedy, then the largest in the kingdom, had acquired a country mill worked by parish apprentices and decided to offer them their freedom—to leave or stay on as free wage labor. The reason for this apparent benevolence was purely practical: these indentured young women were more trouble than they were worth—obviously unhappy, sensitive and quarrelsome in the smallest matters, ripe for rebellion. They sang, he said, revolutionary songs as they marched in ranks to and from the mill.Google Scholar

60 On labor recruitment for the early factories and the creation of a factory work force over a period of generations, see Collier, Frances, The Family Economy of the Working Classes in the Cotton Industry, 1784–1833 (Manchester, 1964; this is the printed version of her M.A. thesis of 1921);Google Scholar and Smelser, Neil, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1770–1840 (London, 1959).Google Scholar For a critique of the Collier-Smelser thesis, see Edwards and Lloyd-Jones, “N. J. Smelser and the Cotton Factory,” pp. 304–19. Edwards and Lloyd-Jones used the 1816 report to the House of Commons to show that at Preston (Lancashire), only 11.6 percent of the children were employed by a parent, brother, or sister.Google Scholar (What about friends and neighbors?) In a recent article based primarily on the Lords' report of 1819, Freudenberger, Herman, Mather, Frances J., and Nardinelli, Clark (“A New Look at the Early Factory Labor Force,” this JOURNAL, 44 [12 1984], pp. 1085–90), come to the same conclusion: “the evidence suggests that individuals, not families, were the basic units of labor in cotton factories” (p. 1087).Google Scholar

61 Such arrangements reflect the inability of centralized management to extract “full” labor for wages: a small group bidding for the work and assigning tasks by consent, or working under the direct eye of a producer-entrepreneur, would deliver more product for the money. The shift to centralized control was a response to efforts by workers to constrain or withhold performance, for good and bad reasons, and called forth new, more effective techniques of supervision and record-keeping. On “monitoring” and similar matters, see Alchian, Armen A. and Demsetz, Harold, “Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review, 62 (12 1972)Google Scholar, a seminal theoretical analysis that has brought forth a stream of comment and reaction; also Williamson, , Markets, and Hierarchies, , and “The Organization of Work” and the thoughtful article by Gregory Clark, “Authority and Efficiency: The Labor Market and the Managerial Revolution of the Late Nineteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 44 (12 1984), pp. 1069–83. Clark writes: “If radical economists are correct (that giving control of production to workers is more efficient) then, ironically, the efficient organization disappeared because workers used control of production to drive up wages and limit output. If workers had not managed to exercise power within firms, they would have had more control over their production activities” (p. 1072).Google Scholar

62 There was good precedent for the employment of alien workers in large shops using new technologies: thus in the silk industry; and in the smaliwares trade, in connection with the introduction of the Dutch loom, to the point where agitation by conventional weavers against this “develishe invention” took the form of xenophobic riots. Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade, pp. 101–2.Google Scholar

63 There were several precedents that served as models: thus the Dutch loom or engine loom, invented in 1604 and used in the manufacture of smallwares (tapes, ribbons, garters, and such), though a weaving rather than a spinning machine, set the example of multiplying the working parts by replication so that one mztortiiId drive them and one person could make a dozen or more pieces at a time. The earliest, experimental spinning devices followed a similar logic: see the patent granted to Richard Dereham and Richard Haines in 1678, which promised a device that would drive six to a hundred spindles, by human power no less (ibid, pp. 98–106, 413–14).

64 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 33.Google Scholar

65 ibid, p. 33f.

66 Blackner, J., History of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1816)Google Scholar, cited in Chapman, S. D., “Enterprise and Innovation in the British Hosiery Industry, 1750–1850,” Textile History, 5 (10 1974), p. 25.Google Scholar

67 On the importance of unpatented invention in advancing technique in the British iron industry, see Allen, Robert C., “Collective Invention,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 4 (1983), pp. 1–24. Allen lays stress on information-sharing within the industry: “If a firm constructed a new plant of novel design and that plant proved to have lower costs than other plants, these facts were made available to other firms in the industry and to potential entrants.” And he offers some valuable insights into the material advantages of altruism.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 France, Archives Nationales, F12 1325A, memorandum of Breguet, A. L. to the Controller General, 6 09. 1786.Google Scholar

69 See Allen, “Collective Invention,” pp. 13–14;Google ScholarSchmookler, Jacob, “The Level of Inventive Activity,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 36 (05 1954), pp. 183–90,Google Scholar and “Changes in Industry and in the State of Knowledge as Determinants of Industrial Invention,” in Nelson, Richard R., ed., The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, 1962), pp. 195–232.Google Scholar

70 Marglin, “Knowledge and Power,” p. 151.Google Scholar

71 ibid, p. 150.

72 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 25.Google Scholar

73 Marglin, “Knowledge and Power,” p. 150.Google Scholar

74 On the lace industry, see the introduction by Chapman, Stanley D. to Felkin's History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (Newton Abbot, 1967), p. xxviii. Cf. the comparable transfer of ownership (and risk) in the American silk manufacture—a remarkably effective way of turning contentious workers into motivated capitalists.Google ScholarMcLewin, Philip J., “Labor Conflict and Technological Change: The Family Shop in Paterson,” in Scranton, Philip, ed., Silk City: Studies on the Paterson Silk Industry (Newark, 1985), pp. 135–58.Google Scholar

75 Parliamentary Papers, 1806, vol. 3 (268). The next three passages quoted are from pp. 10, 12, and 13.Google Scholar

76 Hobsbawm, E.J., “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 37 (08 1984), p. 362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77 My italics; Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 37. In his 1984 essay, Marglin admitted that he had in fact underestimated the ability of labor to retain some control over the work process and pace, even in a factory environment. See “Knowledge and Power,” p. 164, n. 12. But it must be recognized that historically, much of this countervailing power has been exercised by a small fraction of the work force, composed of those highly skilled craftsman whose dexterity and experience remained valuable if not indispensable even in the presence of machinery, and who were therefore in a position to open or shut the flow of work. Much of the sharpest labor conflict of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has focused on attempts of management to free itself of this constraint by substituting capital for labor and thereby deskilling these specialties. Even so, the organized power of such crafts was such as to maintain their leverage even in the absence of technological indispensability. But as Hobsbawm points out in “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat” (pp. 367–68), this was a precarious power base, the more so as these privileged workers often set themselves off from, and sometimes against, the unskilled remainder of the work force. To paraphrase Marglin, otiose property rights are an invitation to expropriation. For a recent study of this battle in the American machine-tool industry, with special reference to General Electric, see Noble, David F., Forces of Production: A Social History of Machine Tool Automation (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, and my review, “Machines and Their Masters,” in The New Republic, 11. 19, 1984, pp. 37–41.Google Scholar

78 Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do?” p. 14.Google Scholar