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Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators by Helen Marot
page 11 of 106 (10%)
valuation of his workmanship. It is characteristic of workmanship that
its primary consideration is serviceability or utility. The creative
impulse and the creative effort may or may not express workmanship
or take it into account. Workmanship in its consideration of
serviceability oftentimes arrives at beauty and classic production,
when creative impulse without the spirit of workmanship fails. The
craftsmanship period deserves rank, but the high rank which is given
it is due in part to its historical relation to the factory era which
followed and crushed it. While craftsmanship represented expansive
development in workmanship, it is not generally recognized that
the Guild organization of the crafts developed modern business
enterprise.[A] Business is concerned wholly with utility, and not like
workmanship, with standards of production, except as those standards
contain an increment of value in profits to the owners of wealth. It
was during the Guild period that business came to value workmanship
because it contained that increment. In spite of business interest,
however, the standard of workmanship was set by skilled craftsmen, and
their standards represented in a marked degree the market value of the
goods produced by them.

[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen; Instinct of Workmanship, pp. 211-212.]

While the exploitation of the skill of the workman in the interest of
the owners of raw materials and manufactured goods, had its depressing
and corrupting influence on creative effort, the creative impulse
found a stimulus in the respect a community still paid the skill and
ability of the worker. It was not until machine standards superseded
craft standards and discredited them that the processes of production,
the acts of fabrication, lost their standards of workmanship and their
educational value for the worker. The discredits were psychological
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