Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators by Helen Marot
page 13 of 106 (12%)
page 13 of 106 (12%)
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enterprise that this division of labor has been carried from the
machine shop and the factory to the scientific laboratories where experiment and discovery in new processes of technology are developed, and where, it is popularly supposed, a high order of intelligence is required. The organization of technological laboratories, like the organization of construction shops to which they are auxiliary, is based on the breaking up of a problem which is before the laboratory for its solution. The chemists, physicists, machinists and draftsmen are isolated as they work out their assigned tasks without specific knowledge of what the general problem is and how it is being attacked. Small technological laboratories are still in existence where the general problem in hand is presented as a whole to the whole engineering staff, and is left to them as a group for independent and associated experimentation. But even in such cases the technological content does not necessarily supply the impulse to solve the problem or secure a free and voluntary participation in its solution. Those who are interested in its solution are inspired by its economic value for them. In all technological laboratories, either where the problem is broken up and its parts distributed among the employees of the laboratory, or where it is given to them as a whole for solution, it is given not as a sequence in the creative purpose of the individuals who are at work on it, nor is its final solution necessarily determined by its use and wont in a community. Problems brought to the laboratory are tainted with the motive of industry which is not creative, but exploitive. The tenure of each man employed in production is finally determined not by any creative interest of his own or of his employer but by whether in the last analysis, he conforms better than another man to the exigencies of profits. If profits and creative purpose happen to |
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