Engineers and the Price System Author:Thorstein Veblen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HI THE CAPTAINS OF FINANCE AND THE ENGINEERS In more than one respect the industrial system of today is notably different from anything that has gone befor... more »e. It is eminently a system, self- balanced and comprehensive; and it is a system of interlocking mechanical processes, rather than of skilful manipulation. It is mechanical rather than manual. It is an organization of mechan- ical powers and material resources, rather than of skilled craftsmen and tools; although the skilled workmen and tools, are also an indispensable part of its comprehensive mechanism. It is of an impersonal nature, after the fashion of the material sciences, on which it constantly draws. It runs to " quantity production " of specialized and standardized goods and services. For all these reasons it lends itself to systematic control under the direction of industrial experts, skilled technologists, who may be called " production engineers," for want of a better term. This industrial system runs on as an inclusive organization of many and diverse interlocking me- chanical processes, interdependent and balanced among themselves in such a way that the due working of any part of it is conditioned on the due working of all the rest. Therefore it will work at its best only on condition that these industrial experts, production engineers, will work together on a common understanding; and more particularly on condition that they must not work at cross purposes. These technological specialists whose constant supervision is indispensable to the due working of the industrial system constitute the general staff of industry, whose work it is to control the strategy of production at large and to keep an oversight of the tactics of production in detail. Such is the nature of this industrial system on whose du...« less
ISBN-13: 9780678000588 ISBN-10: 0678000581 Pages:172 Edition:New issue of 1921 ed Rating: