Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

hine production discredited handwork, art for art's sake, work for the love of work, were conceivable human emotions. But to-day, a Cezanne who paints pictures and leaves them in the field to

uct in use, as well as an appreciation of the act of creating, would be evident if modern production of wealth, under the influence of business enterprise and machine technolo

s workmanship. It is characteristic of workmanship that its primary consideration is serviceability or utility. The creative impulse and the creative effort may or may not express workmanship or take it into account. Workmanship in its consideration of serviceability oftentimes arrives at beauty and classic production, when creative impulse without the spirit of workmanship fails. The craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the high rank which is given it is due in part to its historical relation to the factory era which followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship represented expansive development in workma

Veblen; Instinct of Wor

e respect a community still paid the skill and ability of the worker. It was not until machine standards superseded craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production, the acts of fabrication, lost their standa

ines, Professor Veblen says to standards of salesmen. It is along these lines that mechanical science applied to the production of wealth, has eliminated the persona

time and the rhythm of the machine and its functioning; as he supplements without loss whatever human faculties the machine lacks, whatever imperfection hampers the machine in the satisfaction of its needs. If it lacks eyes, he sees for it; he walks for it, if it is without leg

to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked. Small technological laboratories are still in existence where the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and associated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the pr

her man to the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to be one and the same thing, his place in an industrial establishment has some bearing on his intrinsic worth. Und

en's creative potentiality there is no provision in our industrial institution for the common run of men to function creatively. There is no attempt in the general scheme for trueing-up or estimating the creative ability of workers. In the market, where the value of goods is determined, a machine tender has a better chance than a craftsman. The popular belief is that the ability of workers has native limitations, that these limitations are absolute and that they are fixed at or before birth. This belief is a tenet among those who hold positions of in

s something which people endure for the sake of being "paid off." Being paid off, it seems abundantly clear, is the only reason a sane man can have for working. After he is paid off the assumption is his pleasure will begin. A popular idea of play is the absence

nation of machine industry and modern factory organization. The French work shop, averaging six persons, is as characteristic of France as the huge factory organization with the most modern mechanical equipment is characteristic of American industry. As the workers in these shops participate more intimately in the fabrication of goods they come more near

production as the labor movements of other countries have laid stress exclusively on its economic value to them. The syndicalists' theory takes for granted the readiness of workers to ass

bor are new factors; they have both, through long centuries, repressed in varying degree the inspirational and intellectual interest of workers in productive effort. It is not the economic burdens which followed the introduction of machinery and the division of labor that distinguish these new factors in industry, but the discredit which they throw around man's labor power. They have carried the discredit of labor in its social position further than it had

ces but as substitutes for human initiative and effort. They have not, indeed, saved labor to the advantage of labor itself, and they have inhibited interest in production. Outside of business enterprise and diplomacy-the political extension of business-mechanical devices have lost the surprise reaction and resentment which they originally set up. As a competitor with human labor they have established themselves as its fit survivor. The prophesy of Theophrastus Such

roduction of all of these goods is unrelated to the motive of men's participation in their production; the actual production in relation to the motive is an incident. The sole reason for the participation in the productive effort is not the desire for creative experience or the satisfaction of the creative impulse; it is not an interest in suppl

epreciation of its value. Access to a mass of goods made cheap by machinery has had its contributing influence in the people's depreciation of their own creative efforts. As people become

g for the development of technology and mechanical science; and high regard for the manipulation of money. "Doing nothing" does not mean that manual workers, managers of productive enterprises, speculators in the natural resources of wealth production and manufactured goods, as well as financiers, are not busy people, or that their activity does not result in accomplis

es its creation by "paying men off." Commonly he is peevishly expectant that those he pays off will have a creative intention toward the work he pays them to do, although in the scheme of industry which he supports the opportun

of the worker as well as of the business man. To get, as I have said, something for (doing) nothing is the dominating motif

ty to capture goods. This motive together with the possibilities which machine production opened up for wealth exploitation, gave birth to the dismal science of Political Economy; it suggested the materialistic interpretation of history, and brought to earth utopian schemes of brotherhood. Political science is dismal because it is an interpretation of dismal institutions. It may be ungenerous

ations to prove that exploitation, carries with it its own seeds of destruction. The position of the socialists is passing out of theory and propaganda through the hands of diplomatists, into statutes. Both the socialists and their s

ions have grown out of a predatory concept instead of a creative one, as capture has been rewarded rather than work, as the possessive desire has been stimulated and the creative desire has been sacrificed, as employers of men and owners of machines have engaged in production because of their interest not in the process or in the use of the product, but in the reward, as wage workers have hired out for the day's

ng tendency in our system is due to the fact that production is dependent for its motive force on the desire to possess. It is also obvious that a rational system of industry which sought to give that desire among all men full opportunity for satisfaction would a

erests at any time adjusted the institutions and customs governing wealth production to their own advantage. As the controlling interests in our present scheme are the business interests, it is the business man, not the workman, who directs industry and determines its policy as well as the

making over might be vitalized by methods which had belonged to earlier periods, but neither the methods nor the periods, we can safely say, will live again. Neither our own nor future generations will escape the influence of modern technology. It will play its part. It may be a part which will lead away from some of the destructive influences which developed in the era of craftsmanship and which dominate the present. But a society too enfeebled to use its own experience will not

en the present allowance of happiness incident to our own immature method of capturing what wealth we can without relation to social factors. As unfortunate as we are in pursuit of tha

e, sooner or later, seems inevitable if civilization is scheduled to advance. The labor union movement, unlike the political socialist revolutionary movement, undertakes in its operation to supply labor with a certain working content, which the administrative scheme of industry has excluded from the experience of its workers. But this content is not sufficient to stimulate the imagination of the tra

the actual increase which labor secured in wages and leisure were a real increase. But exploiting capital provides for such exigencies as high wages by increasing the price of products, thus reduci

holds out. Industry as a creative experience, it is safe to predict, would be as rare a personal experience and as foreign an influence in social existence under state management as it is under business mana

food for general consumption, is blind and historically unwarranted. The signs are that a socialist state would lean exclusively on the consumption desire for production results, just as the present system of business now does. Neither fat incomes nor large leisure have furnished the world with its people of genius. In spite of the inhibiting influence of exploitation, they have come, what there are of th

apable of achieving mass production, but neither insures a democratic control of industry, neither provides for growth, for education in the productive process. A democracy of industry re

lied to common needs, an environment has been evolved, filled with situations incomparably more dramatic than the provincial affairs of detached people and communities. Although this technological subject matter, rich in opportunities for associated

, unless it happens that the present methods fail, in time, to carry forward industrial enterprise on a profit-making basis; or unl

roperty and the strengthening of property laws against human laws, it was not a socializing force. While the craftsmanship period strengthened personal claims on workmanship and interest in it, mechanical power and division of labor have impersonated industry.[A] In the labyrinth of mechanical processes and economic calc

Veblen-Instinct of Wo

perty of society than of any one individual. And this merging of claims which has resulted in the submerging of all wage wo

n is one of individuals, with the impulse for association and for creative effort left out. The interests of some ninety workers associated together in the making of a shoe are not common but

e social intercourse, and has the power, we may discover, to sublimate the inordinate desire for the intensive satisfaction of personal life. Although the division of labor has given us a soc