II The Separation of Thinking from Doing
The production of scientific management.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1880-90s developed this theory)
Efficiency in workflow processes. Waste reduction in movement and materials. Empirical methods of understanding what matters in a process. Workers as parts (replaceable).
Taylorism defines American Efficiency. It puts the control of all processes in the hand of a rational management structure. Shifts decision making from labor to manager groups. Optimizes work to a single critical path for production. Problem with this is that it stifles pathways for innovation. Trains workers in "best practices." Plan workflow for workers and eliminate interruptions. Provide economic incentives to workers for increasing output. (This is two sided, provide more wages, but provide more things for them to work towards.)
39 "Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process."
The crux, though, is that skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower pay rate. Economically, this is fine and well, but when you ask questions about what this does for education, reflections of self-worth, overall feelings of well-being, and livelihoods, you need to begin to seriously consider the experience of labor. To work as hard, with less pay, less to stimulate the individual creative mind, the innovative side of production (changing vonage sign), you have to wonder what the overall gain is, or for who the gain is for. This brings us to one of our first questions about justice... is this fair? People want jobs, but do the people providing jobs have a responsibility to those working in those positions?
Assembly line is introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford. Ford was seeing so many people leaving the line (963 hired, 100 stuck around). To keep people around, Ford increased the pay. However, people tended to only work less because they were paid more. Most people had fixed needs, so other incentives to spend their money were necessary. The car, for many, was one of the first examples. Consumption was key, stimulate imaginations, marketing... became the modus operendai.The management of desire... the field of marketing.
44 "Indebtedness (credit debt) could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."
We have now taken this same approach to education.
45 Standardized tests remove a teacher's discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.
45 "extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity."
46 It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized.
What is cognitive stratification? Why is it a product of the modern economy? What would be meant by a "creative class" of individuals?
51 Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.
Crawford argues for "work that engages the human capacities as full as possible". (Our video games attempt this, so why can't our jobs?)
How much do you feel your future has been mapped out for you by others? How much is your current situation has been mapped out by you?
III Being the Master of One's Own Stuff
55 Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry through a desire to be master of one's own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
Time is money. Granted, but when does one make the investment in time to learn how to do something versus going to an expert?
57 To be a master of your own stuff entails being mastered by it.
60 Technical proficiency and manual mastery "seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an interest of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated - both chastened and focused - so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants. Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education."
63 Agency versus autonomy. "Grime-under-the-fingernails, bodily involement with the machines we use entails a kind of agency. Yet the decline of such involvement, through technological progress, is precisely the development that makes for an increase in autonomy. Is there a paradox here?"
64 Such an account might illuminate the appeal of manual work in a way that is neither romantic nor nostalgic, but rather simply gives credit to the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, as an element of human flourishing.
66 Borgmann's categories (things versus devices) help us to see that the tension between agency and autonomy can manifest in the meanings of things themselves, or rather in our relationship to them.
Instrumental rationality
68 "But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is a really fundamental way human beings inhabit the world?
69 For the early Heiddeger, "handiness" is the mode in which things in the world show up for us most originally: "the nearest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things which has its own kind of 'knowledge'. If these thinkers are right, then the problem of technology is almost opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodies kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
The production of scientific management.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1880-90s developed this theory)
Efficiency in workflow processes. Waste reduction in movement and materials. Empirical methods of understanding what matters in a process. Workers as parts (replaceable).
Taylorism defines American Efficiency. It puts the control of all processes in the hand of a rational management structure. Shifts decision making from labor to manager groups. Optimizes work to a single critical path for production. Problem with this is that it stifles pathways for innovation. Trains workers in "best practices." Plan workflow for workers and eliminate interruptions. Provide economic incentives to workers for increasing output. (This is two sided, provide more wages, but provide more things for them to work towards.)
39 "Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process."
The crux, though, is that skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower pay rate. Economically, this is fine and well, but when you ask questions about what this does for education, reflections of self-worth, overall feelings of well-being, and livelihoods, you need to begin to seriously consider the experience of labor. To work as hard, with less pay, less to stimulate the individual creative mind, the innovative side of production (changing vonage sign), you have to wonder what the overall gain is, or for who the gain is for. This brings us to one of our first questions about justice... is this fair? People want jobs, but do the people providing jobs have a responsibility to those working in those positions?
Assembly line is introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford. Ford was seeing so many people leaving the line (963 hired, 100 stuck around). To keep people around, Ford increased the pay. However, people tended to only work less because they were paid more. Most people had fixed needs, so other incentives to spend their money were necessary. The car, for many, was one of the first examples. Consumption was key, stimulate imaginations, marketing... became the modus operendai.The management of desire... the field of marketing.
44 "Indebtedness (credit debt) could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."
We have now taken this same approach to education.
45 Standardized tests remove a teacher's discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.
45 "extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity."
46 It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized.
What is cognitive stratification? Why is it a product of the modern economy? What would be meant by a "creative class" of individuals?
51 Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.
Crawford argues for "work that engages the human capacities as full as possible". (Our video games attempt this, so why can't our jobs?)
How much do you feel your future has been mapped out for you by others? How much is your current situation has been mapped out by you?
III Being the Master of One's Own Stuff
55 Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry through a desire to be master of one's own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
Time is money. Granted, but when does one make the investment in time to learn how to do something versus going to an expert?
57 To be a master of your own stuff entails being mastered by it.
60 Technical proficiency and manual mastery "seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an interest of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated - both chastened and focused - so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants. Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education."
63 Agency versus autonomy. "Grime-under-the-fingernails, bodily involement with the machines we use entails a kind of agency. Yet the decline of such involvement, through technological progress, is precisely the development that makes for an increase in autonomy. Is there a paradox here?"
64 Such an account might illuminate the appeal of manual work in a way that is neither romantic nor nostalgic, but rather simply gives credit to the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, as an element of human flourishing.
66 Borgmann's categories (things versus devices) help us to see that the tension between agency and autonomy can manifest in the meanings of things themselves, or rather in our relationship to them.
Instrumental rationality
68 "But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is a really fundamental way human beings inhabit the world?
69 For the early Heiddeger, "handiness" is the mode in which things in the world show up for us most originally: "the nearest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things which has its own kind of 'knowledge'. If these thinkers are right, then the problem of technology is almost opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodies kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
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