{"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":177,"pdf_page":185,"physical_index":185,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"34c8036d50e1429707496ea316d2bfce2b0d7bb4e139ad7698c7159a6af870e2"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"rather than in nominal terms, drew attention to the wage goods in terms of which that power was gauged. With wages rationalized on the one hand, and wage goods stabilized on the other, the notion that wage labor could constitute a fair exchange of equivalents became more plausible.\n\nThe idea that wages should be standardized, and that product properties should be fixed for a given good, was presupposed in the formula that governed industrial relations in the years following the Second World War, which formed a central pillar of economic regulation in the Fordist era. As mentioned earlier in this book, according to that formula, first established by the 1948 agreement between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and General Motors, yearly changes in pay were determined by a combination of increases in productivity and changes in the consumer price index (Piore and Sabel 1986; H. Katz 1985). The principle became generalized in the economy at large, with even nonunion workers, public sector workers, and management taking their lead from pay negotiations of the big industrial unions, most prominently the UAW. In one form or another, it was adopted across the advanced capitalist world in the postwar era. The formula directly linked mass purchasing power to the increasing capacity of industrial production, thus ensuring some degree of coordination between production and consumption in the industrial economy. It formalized and institutionalized a dynamic conception of fair wages that was quite diferent from earlier notions, which were anchored to absolute standards of living. Yet the governing formula in postwar industrial relations was also a result of the growing consensus, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, that wage levels ought to be determined by an objectively reasonable procedure. The linking of wage levels to changes in the cost of living only made sense once product properties became standardized. For changes in real prices can only work as an index of purchasing power, and thus as an independent gauge of the value of a wage, if the properties of wage goods—the basis of their value—can be held constant.\n\nStandardization of products and of labor was a prerequisite for generalized commensuration in economic exchange—for commensuration between categories of object or action. This is because the question of the ratio at which things of a given type should be exchanged for other categories of object can only be addressed once things (and perhaps also actions, if we consider services) within categories are made uniform, such that each thing can be easily recognized as a token of its type. If individual instances of a given category of thing were to vary too wildly, then the category itself would become unstable, threatening to become an arbitrary set of singular things rather than a set logically anchored by the (suficiently) uniform predicates of its elements. Where the things in question are commodities, that instability would lead to higher transaction costs in commerce. For high variation in product quality would mean that goods would have to be carefully inspected, with prices adjusted for units where deviations from the ideal standard version of each kind of good are found. And where careful inspection proves dificult, this would lead to the kind of problem of marketplace uncertainty (potentially leading to market failure) that economist George Akerlof describes in his famous account of the market for lemons (Akerlof 1970). Perhaps, therefore, one of the limiting conditions on the extent of the development of the market economy is the degree to which categories of object become standardized. Rather than thinking about what sociologist Lucien Karpik (2010) calls economic singularities—singular products and services that have unique properties, such as works of art—as anomalous phenomena, in need of special explanation, we might instead think about how it came to be the case that, in general, individual goods are not singularities but rather have become tokens of supposedly uniform types.101 This would raise at least two questions. What social, cultural, and technological conditions are required for the creation of stable, uniform types of product? And what efect did the organization of the economy around the exchange of this kind of product have on economic and social behavior? The answer to both questions, I suspect, would involve the moral economy around wagelabor commensuration.\n\nStandardization of Consumption, Work, and Wages\n\n177","previous_page":176,"next_page":178}