{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":157,"pdf_page":165,"physical_index":165,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"1230a851086e305aa228c079463bac3f5ab18adcff441ad65441ecd6167f2b48"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Despite the variety of things and processes to which the term got applied, historians and social scientists have tended to interpret standardization primarily in terms of the logic of production in an industrial capitalist economy. The classic case study of industrial standardization is Alfred Chandler’s (1977) account of the agreement on a standard gauge for railroad tracks in the nineteenth century. Chandler sees standardization as the means whereby technical economies of scale and scope were realized in a developing industrial economy. The increasingly complex division of labor after industrialization meant that there was pressure on firms and public organizations to agree to implement common standards for products and parts. Standardization provided a solution to coordination problems in integrated, technologically sophisticated national economies.22\n\nBut while standardization was certainly driven to a large extent by technical considerations of the kind described by Chandler, I want to approach the topic from a diferent angle, by emphasizing the significance of standardization in an emerging Fordist moral economy, at the core of which lay the relationship between wage labor and consumer entitlements. Standardization certainly served to increase the eficiency of industrial production, but at the same time, it entailed the stabilization of the properties of consumer commodities. The professed motivation for standardizing product properties was not just to make production more eficient but also to improve the quality, and especially the durability, of consumer products. The engineer’s focus on product function thus came to inform the way in which consumer products were regarded more generally. Standardization thus concerned consumption as well as production. And the project of standardizing consumption was bound up in an emerging moral economy concerning the entitlement of wage-earning consumers to a fair share of the use values churned out by industrial production.\n\nThe importance of the perspective and interests of consumers in standardization is indicated by the fact that, when making decisions about product standards, the National Bureau of Standards (at least in theory) gave equal weight to input from consumers and industry.23 The purpose of standardization, for the bureau, was to give “better value” to the consumer while also making the properties of products more transparent in the marketplace. So, while standardization was, to be sure, one part about the rationalization of production, it was also about endowing mass-produced consumer commodities with stable quantities of use value. Stabilizing the use value of commodities had the efect of reinforcing the moral economy underlying the wage relation, by facilitating what Meg Jacobs (2005) calls the “purchasing power paradigm.” For Jacobs, the commitment to increasing the purchasing power of wage workers—a commitment that was shared by organized labor, the state, and to a significant extent industry also—defined the political economy of the great compromise that began to emerge in America in the 1930s and continued into the Golden Age years of the postwar period. Yet this focus on the purchasing power of the wage could only make sense if the quality of wage goods was reasonably stable and invariant. As mentioned earlier, this is because in order for purchasing power to be meaningfully measurable, the properties (and hence quality) of consumer goods must be held at least relatively constant. Standardized consumer goods were therefore an important element in what the political economists of the regulation school have described as the Fordist regime of accumulation (Aglietta [1977] 2000; Boyer 1990; Boyer and Saillard 2002).\n\nStandardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages\n\n157","previous_page":156,"next_page":158}