BREAKING THE CODE
Whatever their other disagreements, advanced Second Wave thinkers shared the conviction that standardization was efficient. At many levels, therefore, the Second Wave brought a flattening out of differences through a relentless application of the principle of standardization.
SPECIALIZATION
A second great principle ran through all Second Wave societies: specialization. For the more the Second Wave eliminated diversity in language, leisure, and life-style, the more it needed diversity in the sphere of work. Accelerating the division of labor, the Second Wave replaced the casual jack-of-all-work peasant with the narrow, purse-lipped specialist and the worker who did only one task, Taylor-fashion, over and over again.
As early as 1720 a British report on The Advantages of the East India Trade made the point that specialization could get jobs done with “less loss of time and labour.” In 1776 Adam Smith opened The Wealth of Nations with the ringing assertion that “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour . . . seem[s] to have been the effects of the division of labour.”
Smith, in a classic passage, described the manufacture of a pin. A single old-style workman, performing all the necessary operations by himself, he wrote, could turn out only a handful of pins each day—no more than twenty and perhaps not oven one. By contrast, Smith described a “manufactory” he Inul visited in which the eighteen different operations required to make a pin were carried out by ten specialized workers, each performing only one or a few steps.Together they were able to produce more than forty-eight thousand pins per day–over forty-eight hundred per worker.
By the nineteenth century, as more and more work shifted into the factory, the pin story was repeated again and again on an even-larger scale. And the human costs of specialization escalated accordingly. Critics of industrialism charged that highly specialized repetitive labor progressively dehumanized the worker.
By the time Henry Ford started manufacturing Model Ts in 1908 it took not eighteen different operations to complete
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