This connection is usually underrated, particularly by those historians who assume that the new works recruited free labour only." So widespread does he find this and other systems of coercion that he concludes that “the modern industrial proletariat was introduced to its role not so much by attraction or 10 monetary reward, but by compulsion, force and fear.
Legal compulsions and a paralegal structure of punishment within factories were often enlarged into an entire social system covering whole townships. Pollard gives the example of the enterprise of Ambrose Crowley, a large mixed ironworks which carried on both primary processes of iron production and fabricating. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century this firm employed more than 1,000 workers, scattered over its central works, warehouses, and company ships. An extraordinary Book of Laws has survived from this enterprise:
The firm provided a doctor, a clergyman, three schoolmasters and a poor relief, pension and funeral scheme, and by his instructions and exhortations Crowley attempted to dominate the spiritual life of his flock, and to make them into willing and obedient cogs in his machine. It was his express intention that their whole life, including even their sparse spare time (the normal working week being of eighty hours) should revolve around the task of making the works 11
profitable.
In this method of total economic, spiritual, moral, and physical domination, buttressed by the legal and police constraints of a servile administration of justice in a segregated industrial area, we see the forerunner of the company town familiar in the United States in the recent past as one of the most widely used systems of total control before the rise of industrial unionism.
In all these early efforts, the capitalists were groping toward a theory and practice of management. Having created new social relations of production, and having begun to transform the mode of production, they found themselves confronted by problems of management which were different not only in scope but also in kind from those characteristic of earlier production processes. Under the special and new relations of capitalism, which presupposed a “free labor contract," they had to extract from their employees that daily conduct which would best serve their interests, to impose their will upon their workers while operating a labor process on a voluntary contractual basis. This enterprise shared from the first the characterization which Clausewitz assigned to war; it is movement in a resistant medium because it involves the control of refractory masses.
The verb to manage, from manus, the Latin for hand, originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manège. As capitalism creates a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest, and as the employment contract between parties sharing nothing but the inability to avoid each other becomes prevalent, management becomes a more perfected and subtle instrument. Tradition, sentiment, and pride in workmanship play an ever weaker and more erratic role, and are regarded on both sides as manifestations of a better nature which it would be folly to accommodate. Like a rider who uses reins, bridle, spurs, carrot, whip, and training from birth to impose his will, the capitalist strives, through management, to control. And control is indeed the central concept of all management systems, as has been recognized implicitly or explicitly by all theoreticians of management.\* Lyndall Urwick, the rhapsodic historian of the scientific management movement and himself a management consultant for many decades, understood the historical nature of the problem clearly:
In the workshops of the Medieval "master," control was based on the obedience which the customs of the age required the apprentices and journeymen to give to the man whom they had contracted to serve. But in the later phase of domestic economy the industrial family unit was controlled by the clothier only in so far as it had to complete a given quantity of cloth according to a certain pattern. With the advent of the modern industrial group in large factories in urban areas the whole process of control underwent a fundamental revolution. It was now the owner or manager of a factory, i.e., the “employer" as he came to be called, who had to secure or exact from his “employees” a level of obedience and/or co-operation which would enable him to exercise control. There was no individual interest in the success of the enterprise other than the extent to which it provided a livelihood.13
It was not that the new arrangement was “modern," or “large," or “urban” which created the new situation, but rather the new social relations which now frame the production process, and the antagonism between those who carry on the process and those for whose benefit it is carried on, those who manage and those who execute, those who bring to the factory their labor power, and those who undertake to extract from this labor power the maximum advantage for the capitalist.
Notes
46 Labor and Monopoly Capital
The Origins of Management
47
\* For example, Leffingwell: “Effective management implies control. The terms are in a sense interchangeable, as management without control is not conceivable."12