I have walked the chilling halls of the Dachau camp on my visit to Germany in 2004, and witnessed the sickening stains of that camps history coated on its walls. I have read countless articles and many books on the holocaust. I have seen movies, watched survivor interviews, and I have studied and continue to study the holocaust. I have done all of these things because I am disgusted by the pain and deprivation of human care that the Jewish people had to endure. I have studied the holocaust all of this time because I wanted to learn about the worst event in the world’s history. Studying the past helps prevent such horrors from happening again in the future.

Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, Solomon Radasky, Dr. Gisela Perl, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, and millions of other men, women, and children were imprisoned and or put to death because they were Jewish, homosexual, Gypsies, and asocials but most of all, because they were different and less human in the German’s eyes. Millions of those people were victims of the ruthless and disturbing actions of Adolf Hitler, Dr. Josef Mengele, Josef Kramer, Irma Grese, Ilse Koch, Karl Josef Silberbauer, and thousands of other Nazis and SS soldiers. It is important for everyone to know and understand the true tortures that these men, women, and children went through. If not, acts of supreme discrimination, racism, sexism, ageism, and prejudice could lead to another genocide, another holocaust, it could lead us back to the worst years in human history.

Many of the imprisoned lost their entire families, some lost limbs, some lost their mind, and most lost their lives. Death was common in the concentration camps, all of which involved: gas, flamethrowers, bullet to the back of the neck, medical experiment, starvation, dehydration, hangings, sickness, beatings, electrocution, depression, chloroform injections, funeral pyre, and various combinations of them all. It is of the utmost importance that these horrors never leave their mark in our history books again.

If we are to protect our future, our children’s future, and the future others, we need to stress the causes and effects of judging people based on differences. Even though America is the land of the free, where all men, women, and children are created equal despite religion, color, race, sex, and age, there is still discrimination, racism, sexism, ageism, and prejudice. This doesn’t include what happens in Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa, South America, and the other North American countries.

I’ve heard people say that another Holocaust could never happen. Truth be told, there are still genocides happening in other countries throughout the world. It is naïve to think that such a thing couldn’t happen again. I bet the thought of such a thing haden’t crossed a single mind at that time. I bet no one thought it could ever happen. Then one day, one man gave the whole of Germany a reason to believe that they could be better than everyone else. Today, in America, there are still men who think they deserve more or are better than women. There are people of Caucasian, Asian, African American, and European ancestries who think that they are better than everyone else. Humanity is full of false pride, and that is exactly what Hitler indorsed. There is not enough humility in this world, and because of that, another holocaust could happen, it just takes the right time, the right person, and the right trigger to set it off and that is why it is important to educate the children of tomorrow on the appalling acts of our yesterdays.

The prevention lies within students and young children. Adolescent minds are still ripe for change, they’re still open for education, and they are not yet programmed to the exact actions of right and wrong. If they can allow our teachers, parents, and speakers education them on the pain and the hate that discrimination, racism, sexism, ageism, and prejudice provokes and how it can cause destruction and death, then maybe it can open their eyes to a future of good. If they can take it in and do what they can to spread the word, to help educate others, then they give the world a chance to walk out of their homes and not fear like the Jewish men, women, and children did. They give the world a chance to stand out in the open for the rest of their lives and not be forces to hide, to die, to suffer from pain, torment, and injustice like millions of Jewish people did. If we can teach students to relate instead of discriminate, the world can be a safer place.

Reference Page

Nyiszli, M. (1993). AUSCHWITZ A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account In (T. Kremer & R. Seaver, Trans.). New York: Arcade Publishing.

N/A. Victims. Victims of mengele. Retrieved March 16, 2008, from http://www.auschwitz.dk/Mengele/id24.htm

Radasky, S. Survivor Stories. Holocaust Survivors. Retrieved March 16, 2008, from http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/survivors.php

Lagnado, L. M. & Dekel, S. C. (1991). Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. William Morrow & Co.

Wiesel, E. (2006). Night In (M. Wiesel, Trans.). Hill & Wang Pub.

At the heart of popular music is recorded music – the ability to re-create, and re-play – a song or an artist indefinitely.  Classical music was not born to a world of recorded technology.  Each performance was unique, and to take part, either as an artist or as a consumer of classical music before the age of recorded technology, one had to actually be present at a performance.  Three-minute tunes did not suffice for this kind of listening.  The effort of going to the performance venue, the expense of admission, and the purpose of presence meant that listeners wanted to be rewarded for their efforts.  Longer pieces – symphonies, operas, concert programs – were made to satisfy listeners and artists alike in a world where each performance was unique and unrepeatable.

Recorded music changed all of that.  Now, the cost of gaining access to a single performance is perhaps the lowest it has ever been in history, in part because of the industrial nature of the recorded sound industry.  Just as a manufacturer can reduce the cost of a product through mass manufacture, a consumer of music can reduce the cost of a performance by purchasing the recorded version, and participating in multiple listening episodes over time, without sacrificing the fact that she is listening to a unique performance.  The cost of attending a performance is now divided so many times that each episode becomes as nearly free as it is possible to be, while the unique quality of the recorded session remains captured technologically – stuck in a moment, to borrow a phrase from U2, that we don’t want to get out of.

Michael Jackson is one of the best examples of what I am talking about.  Millions of fans love Michael Jackson’s work.  Millions of anti-fans have for long been very critical.  For the critics, it is the very recorded nature of his music that leads to the problem.  His songs have been recorded, and played, replayed, and then replayed again so often that their cost has been reduced, globally, for all of us, to nothing.  We can hear Michael Jackson at the drop of a hat.  Like Theodor Adorno, this causes many to criticize Jackson’s music as ‘low culture” – cheap; a-dime-a-dozen music that lacks artistry, originality, or even meaning.  All of these things, his critics note, seem to have been siphoned away, or better, leeched out, because of the fact of the existence, and re-performance or, the multiple recorded copies of nearly every musical act Jackson ever engaged in.  By this logic, because of the very number of fans Jackson has, and their avid devotion to his music, he is, ipso facto, not a great artist, nor even, perhaps, an artist at all.  He is overplayed.

For fans, this overplayed reality is evidence of his greatness and originality.  His music was so unique, and so appealing in meaningful, though not always definable, ways that millions of people came to want to hear his songs regularly, and shelled out the next to nothing it cost to do so.  If millions were moved by him, and wished to replay him, there must be some human, some artistic, quality to his songs, and thus perhaps to Jackson himself.

In both cases, the real claim Jackson has to authenticity exists in both his fans and his anti-fans.  Let’s face it, the wearing of a cod-piece and and a single jewelled glove, no matter how you look at it, is an affectation – a performance.  To find meaning in that act requires a personal leap of imagination, and of identification with whatever images are brought to mind by that performance.  It is, in short, a personal choice to assign importance to a pop star.  On the other hand, to give Jackson’s performance the time of day – to notice and be critical of the gloved-one and his glove and crotch patch – is to react to his image and repetitive presence.  Indifference to Michael Jackson is an attitude almost unheard of among people 50 years old or younger, and among many older than 50 as well.  It is for this reason, not just because so many people were fans, but because so many were decidedly anti-fans, even making purchasing decisions based on whether Jacko’s name was associated with a product, that Jackson is/was famous.

Jackson’s body has died.  But Michael Jackson, the beloved gloved one, wacko-Jacko, the King of Pop, remains alive to most of us because we have invested so little in re-playing his work so often.  He speaks to us now, as he always has, through his music, his costumes, and his dancing, and our own industrial reproduction of each of his unique acts.  Like John Lennon and Elvis Presley, and Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson is alive and well and living in our iPods.

Tedlow, Richard S. New and Improved : The Story of Mass Marketing in America. New York: Basic Books, 1990.

If the business of America is business, Richard S. Tedlow would add that it is mass production, the pursuit of profit through volume, that defines American business. Tedlow organizes the book around six propositions, and proposes that American manufacturing developed this unique approach to profit over the course of three phases of business strategy development.

The six propositions include the first, above, that the unique contribution to business made by American manufacturers was the pursuit of profit through volume. Second, that successful mass marketing was always possible only through the guiding vision of an entrepreneur who could bend the firm to his vision. Third, that implementing a strategy of mass marketing required a company to achieve complete vertical integration, from control of basic raw materials through manufacturing, to marketing and distribution, and retail sales to the consumer. Fourth, that the ‘first mover,” the first company in an industry to achieve mass marketing success, was able to gain high profits, and while those high profits encouraged new entrants to the business, they also provided the first mover with the ability to block competitors’ access to the business. Fifth, that competitors’ key strategic choice was then how to attack those barriers to entrance, thus encouraging competitors to change the rules of the game. Sixth, and last, that sustained success or failure in a market was most dependent upon how a firm managed change over the course of the three phases of business development that Tedlow uses to organize the book.

The first phase was a kind of economic “state of nature” which was characterized by what Tedlow calls a multi-local, fragmented market, made so by the absence of trans-continental transportation and communication. This phase was characterized by the existence of few nationally recognized or distributed brands, and lack of vertical or horizontal integration of manufacturing concerns. During this phase, barriers to entry by firms were low. The second phase was what Tedlow calls the unification phase. As railroads and telegraph lines crossed the nation, national distribution and marketing became possible. This phase was characterized by mass production, and sales appeals based on price. The key drive of American companies such as Ford and Coca-cola, was to minimize the cost of production, and maximize product output so as to drive the price of the product as low as possible, and to use price to sell as much as possible of it, making profit on the volume. This phase included a kind of mass-produced sameness in product lines most closely associated with the Ford automobile. During this phase, Tedlow’s second through fifth propositions came into play, as entrepreneurs directed their “first mover” firms toward massive profits and control of their respective markets, and built integrated vertical structures to make and distribute their products. Smaller, less vertically integrated competitors attempting to gain access to these markets then had to find strategies for entry that made them competitive, which led to new business models that changed the rules of the mass marketing game. The Third phase was the segmentation phase, when the primary focus of marketing changed to division of the market, and products tended to attack the mass marketing approach of the second phase. Consumer choice became the key component of mass marketing as firms began to use methods of demographic and psychographic analysis to define and target specific market segments with specialized products and experiences.

Tedlow supports his thesis with four case studies of business success in mass marketing: Coca-cola was very much the product of Asa G. Candler’s personality and faith in his product, and the success of Pepsi as a competitor beginning in the 1930’s was largely due to the ability of Pepsi to create a similar organization and compete on price; Henry Ford’s systematic domination of the mass-produced car and the challenge presented to it by Alfred P. Sloan and General Motor’s Phase III style segmentation of the auto market in order to successfully compete; the story of A&P mass retailing and the competition presented to it by the advent of supermarkets and a legal challenge to its Phase II competitive power; and finally the story of Sears’s general merchandise retailing and the challenge to that company by Montgomery Ward and others who forced Sears to understand and effectively manage change at every part of its vertically integrated network.

Tedlow’s thesis, that marketing in the United States has gone through three major phases of development, and that mass production, entrepreneurship, vertical integration, the challenge presented by competitors changing the game to overcome the barriers presented by first movers’ profit and market strength, and the ability of a firm to manage change have governed the movement of companies, product lines, and even the entire economy of the United States through these phases is compelling, complex, and builds on the organizational ideas of Alfred D. Chandler, the technological histories of Thomas P. Hughes, and the histories of business development provided by others. This work is a powerful achievement. It does rely more than many are comfortable with on a sense of the power of an individual to influence history, but Tedlow argues that the individual has been the missing link in economists’ and business historians explanations of change in American consumption and production patterns over the past century. The addition that the book makes to the field is well worth the time it takes to read.

Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

Donald Worster’s book Rivers of Empire posits the idea of water as the currency of the American West, foregrounding control of water resources as the story that gave form to the region’s geographic, social, and economical development. Worster’s argument is that the American West is not the center of individualism that it is made out to be, but is a hydraulic society, dependent for its current existence on the ability of a complex and expensive network of irrigation systems for its production, and thus dependent upon the capital and the authority by which those irrigation systems were built and are maintained. In many ways, this type of society was similar to that of ancient Chinese civilization, which had based its success on the efficient use and control of water. China organized its social hierarchy around agriculture, which in turn was organized around the efficient use of water through the building of irrigation systems. Karl von Wittfogel called this a “hydraulic society,” and included Mesopotamia, Persia, and pre-Columbian America among the hydraulic civilizations. These ancient civilizations, though, developed as hydraulic societies from a need to feed growing populations, whereas the people of the American West migrated there not out of necessity, but due to boosterism, and for economic and social reasons. Beginning with surveyors in the 1840’s, Americans saw the West in two ways. Either the desert was an alien beauty, to be taken on its own terms or it was an abomination that required human development. Eventually the latter view won out, and developing the desert led to a long series of experiments with irrigation schemes and water rights.

The Mormon Church in Utah established a hydraulic a hydraulic society and the church itself held authority over rights to water in Mormon controlled territory. In Colorado, two legal doctrines regarding water rights developed in opposition to each other – the right of prior appropriation mixed with a corporatist system within which groups managed water by appointing a mutually recognized central authority. California developed a combination of legal doctrines in which large ranchers claimed control of whole rivers simply by owning the land on the banks, but smaller farmers depended for their water upon irrigation created by government authorities or by real-estate developers. In all three cases, conflicts between big ranchers and smaller farmers, and the involvement of government in surveying and building irrigation systems obscured the needs of individuals for the simple reason that no individual could manage to build or maintain irrigation systems alone. Farmers and ranchers alike required vast resources to build thousands of miles of canals and ditches, and so they established associations of private capital, and these wrestled with each other for control of water. As control of the canals also led to control of the wealth of the West, a new class hierarchy was built along with the building of the canals, and abetted by the federal government, whose financing and engineering made the canals possible. The actual builders of the canals and ditches were not the owners of the land that received benefit from the irrigation systems, however. Instead, the hydraulic society of the West was built on the backs of laborers who had no say in where or how the canals were built.

The development of diverse systems of water rights management was important in two ways. It demonstrated the difficulty in sharing inadequate water resources and it encouraged the United States government to step in as a central authority in water issues in order to protect the development of farming. Thus federal regulations tended to favor large concentrations of land over small, and economic development over the needs of the natural environment or of individuals. This solidified the class and economic divisions of the West, and made it less, not more, individualistic in its social structure. As the differing laws regarding water rights in different states began to come into conflict with each other at the turn of the Twentieth Century. California’s production capacity, and its close connection to national markets through railroads made it too big to deprive of water. Other states began to have to defer to California’s needs in a developing national hierarchy in water management. The greater need for water by arid California presented a a water trap to the nation as a whole – population and economic growth required development of California, and to a lesser extent other hydraulic states of the West, which required continued appropriation of water by the government and private interests for commercial purposes. Water came in the West to have the same importance that capital had in Marx’s analysis. Control of water meant wealth and power, while lack of control meant relegation to the lower classes, struggle for existence, and a lack of individual choice. The West is not a world of rugged individuals, then but a constructed space built around engineered irrigation resources for purposes of profit-making.

Lawrence Rakestraw, the late environmental historian from the Pacific Northwest, was very critical of Worster’s work, saying that the book covers California and Arizona, with only minimal attention paid to the rest of the Western states, and that it concentrates primarily on five major river systems, almost all of which are in California, leaving out or barely mentioning major systems such as that of the Columbia river. Rakestraw saw Rivers of Empire as little more than an attempt to turn Wittfogel and Marx into environmentalists. While I do think the book was more limited than its title leads a reader to believe, and certainly has a political point of view, I do not share Rakestraw’s sense that this book has little to redeem it. Rather, it needs to be read in a larger context of books about the West.

Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

If there is a “New Labor History” that takes into account the lives of workers and their families and social class outside of factories in the United States, then Philip Scranton has written a book that would fit squarely within a “New Business History” that similarly takes previous narratives and seeks to contextualize them in the larger world of American business experience. In Endless Novelty, Scranton was determined to correct what he saw as a major shortcoming in American business history; namely, that it concentrated on the development of big business to the exclusion of all else. This concentration on the growth, business and organizational models, and attempts to control the market – the visible hand of management ala Alfred D. Chandler – was at its root only a part of the story, and yet historians such as Chandler had told it as the whole of the story, leading to the use of the criteria for evaluating business practices for such core firms as the de-facto criteria for the evaluation of all business – a fundamental analytical error.

In fact, Scranton named five different analytical problems with the familiar narrative of the history of big business, including the fact that such a narrative came from a fallacy of composition – that the questions and answers given within it did not come from a comprehensive review of all American business realities, and so could not hold for generalizations on American business history; that such a narrative was effectively teleological, circumscribing research efforts and conclusions through deterministic and functionalist views that privileged big business strategies as the goal of all; that it ascribed a fundamental rationality to the ways in which core firms emerged in the course of history, creating a an ever-deepening path of pseudo-analysis, or redescription, which disallowed other points of view, and finally, that this narrative limited analysis of the diversity of the processes of emergence even for core firms.

Instead of a single movement toward mass production, American business developed during the “Second Industrial Revolution” in four primary approaches, because not all products had similar end uses nor all customers identical needs. Those four different approaches to manufacturing included custom manufacturing, in which products whose market was not constant, predictable, or large were manufactured to specification by hand; batch manufacturing, or the making of various items in small groups to fit a certain market demand, and often involving some customization of the goods in question; bulk manufacturing, which was a process using general purpose machines to manufacture large amounts of various differing products for sale in a large quantity; and mass or flow production, the system that constituted the core industries’ use of economies of scale, and high levels of throughput and required a stable, consistent market. Each approach was different, and suited differing product and consumer needs. Each also had its own impact on the American economy, on solutions to manufacturing techniques, and even on the development of manufacturing within urban areas. One of the best examples of custom production is the building of railroad locomotives, which employed thousands of workers, but could not be undertaken on a mass production basis because the engines themselves were so large, because demand was unpredictable and stock was impossible keep.

The differences in size, manufacturing approach, product market, and numbers of employees meant that specialist companies employed different strategies from those of the core firms that have traditionally been the focus of business historians. Those strategies included differentiating products, the use of general purpose machines which could easily be re-purposed for the making of many different products, giving a manufacturer some product flexibility, a focus on quality of product or to meet complex specifications that allowed price to become a secondary consideration for customers, differentiating marketing strategies to help find a niche for specialty products, and the cultivating of skilled workers with shop floor problem-solving abilities that kept the manufacturing process nimble and maintained quality. As the specialist companies developed these business strategies, they also developed management techniques that helped to keep them profitable. These specialist companies often cultivated personal relations between management and employees, rather than the bureaucratic style of the large core firms. They also had to develop systems for tracking orders and itemizing costs because of the greater diversity of goods they manufactured. Marketing frequently required close contact with clients, and the process of manufacturing a final product might involve several smaller firms, making location within industrial districts preferable for reasons of communication and transportation.

Scranton looks at industries as diverse as book printing, engraving, locomotive manufacture, and machine tools. The geographical range of the study is impressive, too, taking into its view most of the American Northeast. This is an important book in the field of business history because it calls into question the dominant narrative in the field and elucidates a new set of strategies and structures for historians to consider while analyzing business history in the United States, opening the field for new and useful work.

Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism. In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were. Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories. Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events. The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers. In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside. What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture. In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan. Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese. This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese. It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture. As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms. As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1] According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture. We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism. Totoro works as nostalgia on this level. In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood. This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories. That frame of reference has to do with time. Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s. This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble. Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ‘empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them. But the film is set in the 1950’s. The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house. The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose. There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door. It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s. To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey. The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s. For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside. The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling. But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside. The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film. The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down. It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2] The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited. The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters. All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside. They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters, and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20^th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization. Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region. But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar. Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin. As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine. Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3] Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt. For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched. That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood. As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world. Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film. The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it. First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood. In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia. Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside. I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie. Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother. The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child. The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro. This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood. This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers. For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda. Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4] When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories. Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories. These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching. They can be triggered by the situation on-screen. Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other. We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories. By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie. This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers. Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy. Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart. Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced. Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her. But she is also distinctly female. She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father. She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child. Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female. Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window. She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet. But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it. As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self. The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time. In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia. It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all. Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children – not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital was both the most difficult, and the most Marxist, book I have read this semester. As that reading list includes selections from Karl Marx’ Capital, Vol. I, I have to add that I do not think saying this is an exaggeration. Braverman, a laborer by experience with an intellectual and socialist bent, intends to document the decline of labor in a number of senses – the reduction of work to the lowest level of skill, and its reduction as much as possible to the status of automated mechanical activity. But Braverman is also interested in how these reductions tend to cause reduced wages, reduced job satisfaction, and the reintegration of lost craft skills within the machines that do the majority of work in twentieth century industry. The object of interest is the subjection of all facets of work to the needs of the capitalist. Braverman’s book in fact follows many of the key themes in Capital but expands upon them to include changes occurring in the 20^th century, and Braverman seems if anything more ardent than Marx about the need for workers to understand these changes and act upon them. He discusses the failure of unionism, and the concomitant failure of Marxism because it became tied up with unions. He is fascinated with the increasing use of the worker as automaton. He is also interested in the way that capital hides the deskilling of labor under a blanket, allowing only minimal glimpses at work and its meaning, even by those who perform it, by literally removing work as a meaningful part of a laborer’s life.

As Marx made so clear, one of the key problems with the relationship of labor to capital is that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[1] Braverman takes this idea beyond Marx’s comments, claiming that the process of “deskilling” labor results not just from the use of machines, but from the nature of management in a large corporation. His primary target here is “Taylorism,” the theory of Scientific Management developed in the United States in the early 20^th Century in which even the movements of workers were scrutinized in order to find the one best system which minimized movement and time on task, but maximized the results – productive work.

Working off of Marx’s idea that work is purposeful, and conceptual as well as transformative of nature, Braverman says that “Labor that transcends mere instinctual activity is thus the force which created humankind, and the force by which humankind created the world as we know it.”[2] Work is the prime creative force that makes us human. Thus the reduction of work to mere process – the deskilling of work in the industrial factory and the modern corporation, which is what Taylorism aims to do, is also the process of dehumanization.

Braverman asserts that the conceptual function, as well as the coordination function, that belonged to skilled craft workers is transferred to management workers in industrial capitalism.[3] This is an interesting extension of the production process model of labor which is often discussed by Adam Smith and by Marx, and which is a fundamental component of Taylorism – namely that the separation of tasks in industrial capitalism not only separates workers according to function, but also adding managerial workers to the functional process by giving them a separate piece of the puzzle – the conceptual piece. This certainly would only add to the process of deskilling labor. Braverman shows this by giving a history of the development of management, and concentrating on the change in the goals of capital from, in line with Marx’s theories in Capital, the goal of purchasing and owning labor completely, “in the same way he bought his raw materials: as a definite quantity of work, completed and embodied in the product” to a preference for the purchase of labor power – the direct hiring of laborers, the control of which gives the ability to wring more value from the labor, particularly through the device of management – a further division of labor that provides a brain to operate the warm bodies on the production floor.[4]

Braverman goes further in his discussion of the division of labor, however, making another very Marxist argument that while a “social division of labor” is common and natural to human societies, the breakdown of specific industrial processes into constituent parts is not a natural process, but one unique to the capitalist mode of production. He illustrates this with Adam Smith’s famous pin-making example, showing how even simple manufacturing processes can be made more productive through a division of labor into its constituent parts. He then makes the point that Smith and others make about division of labor: “in a society based upon the purchase and sale of labor power, dividing the craft cheapens individual parts.” This is thus the goal of capitalism – as Marx outlines in Capital – to increase the value of the product through the creation of excess value by increasing the productivity of workers. Braverman calls this the “general law of the capitalist division of labor.”[5]

When he directly confronts Taylorism (or Scientific Management), Braverman makes the point that Scientific Management is not concerned with technology, nor is it really scientific, but is simply the application of the needs of capital to the process of controlling work. It takes as a given the idea that management and labor exist in opposition to each other, and does not attempt to resolve that tension, despite its claim to approach work from a humanistic point of view. Taylorism, according to Braverman, is only a new way to gain excess labor from the workforce. Taylor, he says, had two categories into which he slid management practices. The first he called “ordinary management” – the control of the general conditions of work, and the second, “scientific management” which was the control of every phase of the work process. Management should, he said, plan out each act in the work process precisely. One goal was to remove the thinking process from work. The job of management was to reduce craft knowledge to a set of tasks and rules and time tables, and return it to the worker as a decided plan which only needed to be carried out physically. This is the deskilling process that modern management in large industrial corporations carry out in the name of improving productivity by reducing the cost of labor.[6]

The results of this division of labor in capitalist society are a persistent and inexorable loss of skill among workers, and, moreover, Braverman says, the loss of craftsmanship and the place in society of the craftsman that went along with it. Braverman gives the example of the rise of the profession of engineering – engineers, who connect technology–and science in their work – came into existence, he says, because the deskilling of the labor force took that position, and capacity, away from craftsmen, who were in the past the group within society who bridged science and work through their intimate knowledge of their crafts. This contributes to an acute level of dissatisfaction for workers, and a great loss to society.

The dissatisfaction of workers, primarily because of the increasingly de-humanization of working conditions, has been ameliorated by modern industry, according to Braverman, by the manipulation of the labor force, both through modern personnel techniques that accept labor conditions as a given and profess to help workers adjust to “reality,” and through the use of pay, benefits, and other parts of work that make it desireable, (Braverman uses an example the institution of the $5 day at Ford Motor Co.) to help workers accept industrial conditions as reality and limit protests and strikes. This is the primary function of personnel and human resources departments in large corporations.[7]

Along with labor, science has become the most important item employed by capital to create excess value. Braverman makes some interesting observations while discussing how science began as what can essentially be called invention (the steam engine probably contributed more to science than science did to the steam engine, he says), but became systematically integrated into large industrial firms as a part of the means of production itself. Science and technology became a commodity that added value to the production process, and therefore were sought after by corporations attempting to increase the value of their capital and products.[8]

Combining his ideas about the tension between management and labor, and the increasing importance of automation and machinery, Braverman then moves into perhaps his most original and most important argument. Machinery, what Marx called the “instruments of production” are improved to the point where they are no longer controlled by the worker, but instead actually do the work of the worker, and control the worker as if he/she were part of the machine itself. Moreover, the machines in the twentieth century actually reintegrate the labor process, so that the division of labor, which cheapened work, and deskilled workers, created a mass of low-paid, low-skilled workers who come only to operate machines. This completes the dehumanization process, because it removes thinking, skills, and even production from the workers, and then reintegrates all of those things within machines, asking the workers only to operate the machines at the pace, and according to the rules, set by management. There is no more of the humanizing process of work that Marx, and Braverman, say is what defines us as human beings.

I found Braverman’s analysis to be very compelling. It updates Marx so that his theories, developed in the mid-nineteenth century, can be seen to be applicable to modern industry and work. His argument that clerks and office workers are new skilled workers, but that there work is being controlled, deskilled, and divided as well, and that the vast majority of workers are thus dissatisfied with their jobs, goes far toward the conclusion that de-humanization is a trend of modern industrial society. I found here a critique of a number of other works that I have read, including journalistic accounts of labor, and capitalism, that is compelling and useful.

Like Marx, though, I think that Braverman has a blind spot. He is a proletarian intellectual. He has no place in his analysis for intellectuals, however. At one point he mentions the profession of engineering, but really only in passing, and only as an example of the deskilling of crafts. Academic pursuits, and knowledge-based careers do seem to me to be on the rise over the late part of the Twentieth Century. However, as the introduction and the preface note, this may not – is probably not – enough to offset the loss of skills and satisfaction in industrial labor.

If Braverman were writing today, I think that he would find the growth of the service sector in the American economy, and the increased economic importance of the financial services industry in particular, to be further proof that the trends he identifies – deskilling of the labor force, increasing domination of the economy by capital, and increasing levels of job-dissatisfaction throughout the United States.

Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974/1998.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Penguin ed. 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1867, 1976. Reprint, 1976.

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Hughes, Thomas P. American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, 2004.

Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis is a foundational work in the area of American Technological history. Hughes’ primary thesis is that the United States is a nation of inventors and system builders, rather than a nation of business. America is the original “modern technological nation.”[1] For Hughes, the business of America is not business, but invention of systems for control of the natural and human world. Hughes hopes to look at the work of inventors in three major stages of American History: the era of independent inventors, from 1870 to the First World War; the era of the scientists, from World War I to the Great Depression and World War II, and the era of government supported invention beginning in World War II and running to the counter-culture era of the 1960’s.[2] The goal, ultimately, is to take an academic approach to the history of American inventiveness and to dig deeper than the hagiography so commonly found in literature on the subject. Hughes wants to know what the inventors have in common with each other in terms of method, choice of problem, and sources of funding. To some degree, Hughes seems to hope to explain why, as he says, America has been the most inventive nation in history through this work.

The book is remarkably disciplined in its approach and organization. Hughes has given a relatively simple thesis, and supported it with numerous generalities about the state of science and invention in the industrializing West, in order to put American inventiveness in the context of world culture. His assertion that Americans are the most inventive nation on earth seems at first to be a very subjective statement, but he does provide some examples to support the idea. The distribution of chapters and their content is, though, well done, easy to read, and helps the reader to follow Hughes argument easily. The book is also written well, and is very interesting. It is one of the few academic books that seem well suited for the trade market as well.

The first two chapters are maybe the most fascinating of all for readers used to the vast collection of hagiography on American inventors. Hughes’ academic approach does not concentrate on the genius of these people, but rather looks for similarities in method, and in choice of problems to solve, and links those to the ever-present problem of finding funds to support their work. He sees this period as the “American genesis” – launching the United States on the trajectory of great inventiveness he wants to claim as its historical legacy. Still, he does not make that claim based on un-measurable claims of intellectual brilliance. Instead, he explains, and then takes on, the measure of success that most of these inventors used themselves – counting patents. Hughes provides some amazing statistics in this regard. Edison, for example, produced more than 1000 patents over his inventive lifespan.

In these first chapters Hughes delves into what these inventors did and finds patterns. They often worked in scientific style using experimentation. They uniformly conducted research into the problem and earlier attempted solutions. They rarely worked alone, but instead almost always had assistants who were craftsmen and could turn their ideas into models and real prototypes. Finally, most had private laboratories, libraries, and large inventories of equipment so that whatever might be needed in the heat of experiment was easily found.

Chapter two is specifically about the way in which the inventors chose the problems they were going to work on. Here, Hughes tries to make the point that they were always attempting to solve problems that were already identified and the subject of study by others. They also studied these problems intently, often combing through former patent applications, studying prior proposed solutions deeply to try to identify their weak points, then choosing to work on them. But, the problems were inevitably big ones. For the most part, independent inventors like Edison, Sperry, and Tesla were not interested in improving systems that already worked, but in creating new inventions that were generative of such systems. The first Hughes takes pains to identify as “innovation” – the improvement and distribution of a new solution to a problem, whereas the second Hughes calls “invention” and defines as the creation of a new solution to a major problem.

In Chapter three, Hughes identifies the military industrial complex as existing long before World War II. In fact, he pushes it back to the turn of the twentieth century, and notes that in the search for funding and practical use of their inventions, even such lionized inventors as the Wright Brothers hoped that the military might be the first and most important purchaser of airplanes. Others, such as Maxim, and even Edison and Tesla identified the U.S. Military as the most likely entity to be interested in the practical applications of many of their inventions, and often lobbied hard to get the military to see the utility of inventions. After 1911, this lobbying began to pay off as the Navy began to fund testing of inventions intended for its use.[3]

This leads Hughes into the era of World War I, and the beginning of the era of scientist inventors. Hughes paraphrases Raymond Aron in The Century of Total War in introducing this new era of inventions by remembering World War I as a war of technological surprises.[4] Concerns about American preparedness for war led the United States to look to its inventors to help with innovation as well.[5] To do this, Edison was recruited (he practically asked for the job) to head a “Naval Consulting Board.” Edison conceived of this board’s responsibilities as helping to modernize the United States military by preparing it to use labor saving machines in the “factory of death” that he conceived the modern battlefield to be.[6] In the end, the creation of this board, and Edison’s exclusion from it of academic scientists led to a wartime competition between the independent inventors and the scientists to determine who was more the source of innovation.[7]

In Chapter four, Hughes returns to his separation of “invention” from “innovation”, and makes the case that because the independents’ stock in trade was invention of new systems to solve new problems, they became less important in the postwar world, where the need of the government and manufacturers was for new designs to improve systems already in operation. This conservative approach to invention, what Hughes calls “innovation” was exactly what the academic scientists were good at. In addition, the profits brought by improvements in existing systems became the battleground for inventors claiming patents on their improvements, or control of patents that improved basic systems they had built. The legal and business implications of invention and patent became more byzantine, requiring more organization. In addition, often the improvement of a patented system brought more profit than the original system as invented. Thus inventors came to require more organization, and more capital.

Hughes locates the beginning of corporate invention in Bell Telephone’s establishment in 1894 of an engineering department, which was responsible for improving systems, but eventually became the company’s research and development arm.[8] Discussing AT&T, General Electric Corp., and du Pont, Hughes comes to the conclusion that the major changes in the invention landscape do not include the complete loss of place for the independent inventor. Instead, corporate laboratories prove to be good at “routinizing invention” – providing large sums of money, and large numbers of minds, for concentration on innovation in existing systems. Corporations like du Pont, found this when they attempted to develop new technologies in the dyestuffs industry internally, but overinvestment and lack of return eventually forced them to follow the AT&T pattern by acquiring smaller companies that already had the knowledge and patents to allow them to move forward with diversification plans.[9] The upshot of this chapter is evidence of the current assumption that while big business can and should do research and development, only the independent inventor (called, today, an ‘entrepreneur’, combining business and technological invention in a single term) is nimble enough to come up with the really new ideas.[10]

In his fifth and sixth chapters, Hughes elaborates on the idea, discussed in the introduction as a part of his thesis, that invention in the United States has not been limited to machines, or in mechanical and electrical solutions to problems. Instead, Hughes wants to think of invention as having to with the invention of systems that ultimately come to create and control a kind of built environment that is separate from and in control of nature. In other words, inventions are only parts of ever-larger systems, and the American genius has been to invent these systems. To show how this works, Hughes first discusses Taylorism, or “scientific management” – the idea that humans should be a part of the manufacturing process, rather than apart from it, making humans, in a way, part of the machinery. This is the source of the title of the chapter: “The System Must Come First” – the idea being that in the past, production and technology existed for the service of people, but in the modern invented world, the people exist for the system. These systems include manufacturing, such as the system for Midwestern power distribution created by Samuel Insull, including the systematic way of understanding load and profit maximization, and the system for automobile manufacture created by Henry Ford at his giant River Rouge plant.[11] This service of people to the system, and the ever-increasing size and integration of systems in society – is the essence of American modernism for Hughes. That essence of modernism is what, he claims, is of interest to the Soviet Union, and to Weimar Germany, when they began adopting, with mixed success, the manufacturing processes, scientific management, and integration of industrial systems of the United States after World War I.

In the seventh chapter, Hughes claims that the invention of systems, industrial, social, economic, and political, in the United States was a cultural transformation, and that this transformation was better recognized from outside the United States than by those taking part in it. Americans saw the transformation as technological and industrial, but Europeans came to see it as cultural.[12] Hughes supports this point by discussing the futurism of people like Louis Mumford, whose predictions of a “neotechnic” society where future technology and manufacturing processes would exist in small, de-centralized factories operated by highly skilled technicians amounted to a prediction in change of culture characterized by a retreat from the massive centralized factories and cities and an expansion into better lifestyles, less population congestion, and better, more efficient use of communications technology and natural resources.[13] Hughes also locates cultural change in the connection of art to the invented technology of the day, celebrating the order and precision of the systems, from mechanical to social, of inventive America. Art celebrated inventions, and inventions and innovations became art.[14]

In Chapter eight, Hughes takes on the third phase of his thesis, discussion the era of government supported invention. The key difference here from the support of government in the era of the two world wars is that, beginning with the Great Depression, government harnesses its support of invention and innovation not only to military technology, but also to civilian uses, and not only to mechanical innovation, but also to social engineering. The point of the entire chapter can be captured in the way Hughes uses the Tennessee Valley Authority to represent the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority is shown to be a model of technical innovation, but at the same time an effort in social engineering, used to put people to work, re-build the economy of a large local area, and transform the political and social, as well as economic and technical, climate of the nation.[15] In many ways, this chapter gives us a microcosmic view of continuation of the cultural change Hughes discussed in his previous chapter.

As Chapter eight ends, appropriately, with the Manhattan project – the design and construction of the most destructive weapon ever made, Chapter nine begins with the assertion than since World War II, Americans have come to increasingly distrust technology, industry, and system-building.[16] Here, Hughes brings attention to the perception, exemplified by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring, for example, that over-enthusiasm for technological change and development has caused us to destroy, or lose touch with, many parts of the natural world and the past which we may not be able to reclaim. Returning to Mumford, this time Hughes tells us that he came to see the scientific and technical world as a “sterile wasteland.”[17] Jacques Ellul, says Hughes, came to see modern humans as selling themselves as slaves for a plethora of goods and services.[18] In the end, though, Hughes sees modern humans as unable to wean ourselves from technology, and perhaps at the edge of a new fascination with it.

I found this book fascinating, and Hughes’ organization lends itself well to his thesis. There are two weak points which I think deserve some attention, though. First is Hughes’ claim that the United States is the most inventive nation in history. By some of his criteria, including number of patents granted, and perhaps sheer number of inventors, this estimation may work. But it is such an un-provable proposition that it almost smacks of American exceptionalism. For such a well-organized and well-researched book, and one that claims to turn the discussion of inventors into an academic discourse, this seems a somewhat unhelpful claim to make. Second, it seems, looking over Hughes’ timeline, that the three stages he wants to claim in the history of American inventiveness really occurred almost simultaneously, or at least overlap each other to a degree that makes the claim that they are successive stages somewhat difficult to support.

In all, however, this book seems to me to rank with those of Thomas Kuhn, as seminal in the way it looks at the history of a society and at the history of a phenomenon – the process and effect of invention and inventiveness. The book is well worth reading, and the more one reads, I suspect, the more one will find.

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Chandler,Alfred D.. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1962.

Alfred D. Chandler has written a lucid, interesting, and informative work about the history of organization and industry in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Chandler’s thesis is that in the development of American business, structure (the organization of a business entity in order to carry out its current functions) follows strategy (the long term plan for change in the organization’s activities in order to continue to participate in the market over time.). In order to make the case that this has historically been so, Chandler provides case studies of four major U.S. Corporations whose organizational innovations were at the forefront of the creation of the modern multi-divisional decentralized corporate structure. All four, Chandler asserts, became to some degree models for other expanding corporations after World War II as American business spread overseas, and into new product lines and markets.

Chandler begins his history with the context of the changes these four corporations underwent. In the first chapter, Chandler gives a summary explanation of the development of administrative structure in American business. Before 1850, he says, American business was usually a family or small shop affair, and little future planning was necessary. Business usually involved an owner doing both planning and working within the business on daily operations. After 1850, a few businesses did begin to develop administrative structures, but these structures continued to reflect the operational, rather than strategic needs of the business.

As Chandler warms to his subject, though, he opens up one of the key concepts in his thesis – that the expansion of a business enterprise dictates the need for new structure. The primary example that Chandler uses here is the development of railroads, whose extension to farther-flung locations required ever more careful coordination of operational activities, and for whom the growing market, defined by the expansion of the American frontier, required strategic planning in order to find profitable routes, and sufficient financing. This expansion led to the creation by the railroads of an organizational model that included a central administrative office which controlled a number of departments whose responsibilities were divided by function.[1] This centralized departmental structure served large and growing enterprises well until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. At that point, Chandler says growth became a major issue for several of the largest corporations in America.

Chandler also explains that growth can come in a four different ways: growth from continued expansion of the same business with the same type of customers; growth from vertical integration; growth from expansion to overseas markets; and growth from expansion into new product lines. It is also true that enterprises might be growing in two or more of these ways at once. Yet the most important, from the perspective of requiring new organizational patterns, is the last – growth from expansion into new product lines.[2] Chander’s goal is to show how this growth led to a new model for American business organization.

The four firms studied by Chandler: du Pont, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Sears, Roebuck and Co. all found that to make their diversified and complex businesses work, and to continue to work into the future, they had to reorganize. Each seems to have developed a “decentralized, multi-divisional structure” independently of the others, by different paths, and for somewhat different reasons, but ultimately ending up with a similar structure in which the general administrative office is in charge of planning and distributing (particularly financial) resources, and the divisions each work as multi-departmental companies in charge of a specific part of the business, with the divisions created based on the business needs.[3]

The largest section of the book is made up of Chandler’s four case studies. Among these, he takes care to note differences in enterprise, market, and style. He begins with the earliest corporation to become decentralized and multi-divisional, du Pont Chemical, and ends with the last, Sears, Roebuck and Co.

Du Pont, specialized in explosives manufacture for sale mostly to the United States Government. The downturn in this market after World War I, however, forced DuPont to diversify into chemical products for industrial, agricultural, and domestic use among consumers and businesses. The success of the company in doing this eventually caused so much stress in the central administrative office, which was organized around functional departments before 1921, that the administrators of the company, mostly concerned with daily operational tasks in any case, had little or no ability to understand what was going on over the entire company. In other words, du Pont’s conscious decision to change its approach to the market through diversification, a new strategy, caused a serious workload problem, particularly for administrators, and this required the development of a new structure – a decentralized multi-divisional organization that allowed central planning and control of resources, while the divisions themselves were able to autonomously work within their own markets at an operational level. This provided maximum operational efficiency and the best flexibility possible to react to changing market conditions. As Chandler says, “At du Pont, then, structure followed strategy.”[4]

The change at General Motors from a centralized, departmental structure to a decentralized multi-divisional structure came from the opposite impetus. General Motors did not require the creation of a set of autonomous divisions to serve a diversifying product line. Rather, General Motors was already diversified to a point where central control was becoming impossible, and so the reorganization there came from the creation of a general office.[5] The strategy of William C. Durant, who created the General Motors Corporation, was from the beginning big. He was already by 1908 the largest auto manufacturer in the nation. That very size left GM difficult to manage because communications were poor, and financing was difficult. In 1920, GM’s new President, ironically Pierre du Pont, implemented a multi-divisional organization plan created by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.[6] That plan placed a general office at the center of a vast multi-divisional corporation whose divisions were based on brand and product. These divisions were each responsible for manufacturing and marketing their own products, and for reporting back to the general office regarding finances, sales, and other key information.[7] In return, the general office would take the information from those reports, and plan market and manufacturing strategy. Once again, structure followed strategy.

The third enterprise that Chandler discusses is the Standard Oil Corporation (New Jersey), or what he calls “Jersey Standard”. Here, the fact that the enterprise was primarily a refining company after being required to make major divestments in accord with a Sherman Anti-Trust Act decision by the Supreme Court in 1911 was one of the key issues. Chandler explains that while Standard Oil continued to be a refiner of oil, staying with basically the same business, expansion of the market as the automobile became popular drove a need to secure downstream resources and upstream distribution – a drive for vertical integration in a growing market. Thus, the “Jersey Company” grew based on “responses to immediate short-term pressures in the marketing, refining, and producing of oil…” – operational concerns created a tension in administrative work, because the company was moving from crisis to crisis with little or no strategy.[8] In 1925, an inventory crisis made the organizational problem impossible to ignore, and after a series of organizational failures, the Jersey Company became a decentralized, multi-divisional organization, like du Pont and General Motors, though in a much less deliberate fashion. Still, Chandler’s point is that structure follows strategy – the crisis in administration required better planning, accounting, and resource distribution. Answering that strategic need with a new organizational structure that fit the growth needs of the company was the solution.

Sear, Roebuck and Co. was again different from the other three companies in Chandler’s study. First of all, Sears was a mail order company which had decided to expand into over-the-counter retail operations. Its function was essentially the same, but it was enlarging and decentralizing its distribution network.[9] Early responses to the growth problem led Sears into a hybrid organization, in which half the organization was of the older functional model, and half was based on territory.[10] By 1940, it was clear that a territorially delineated structure of multifunction divisions, linked by a centralized general office in Chicago was the most effective structure. Sears then went about defining the administrative roles of managers within the central office.[11] Once again, then, structure followed strategy in the case of Sears.

Chandler spends his penultimate chapter comparing these four companies, concluding that while they all realized the need for a new organization after experiencing different kinds of growth, and different types of problems related to that growth, they all also came to organizational change because of the perceptions of effective managers whose work was affected by the difficulties inherent in the older organization systems under the strain of growth. In the end, despite different product lines and business trajectories, all found that the decentralized, multi-divisional structure was the most efficient organization for dealing with operational realities, while providing information, planning, and financing functions that helped to be flexible and reactive to market realities.

In the end, Chandler wants his readers to recognize a broad arc of business organizational development in U.S. History, beginning with the realities of family and shop-size firms concerned with local, single- or limited-product-line production, and which were primarily operational in organization, sparing little time for strategic adjustment to new market realities. His arc continues through the development of larger transportation and manufacturing, through the development of railroads and broad distribution networks and the advent of machine manufacturing, through which enterprises needed to become more carefully organized in order to continue to deal effectively with growing size and distance. The administrators of these second-generation firms were still primarily concerned with operational matters.

Chandler sees a paradigm shift with the development of large firms with centralized functional departmental structures, capable of handling marketing, manufacturing, finance, procurement, and service under a single roof efficiently. This, too, though, eventually became insufficient for the growth of the largest corporations in American history during the end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century. The backups, logjams, and structural problems these firms experienced led them to understand a need for efficient sharing of information and use of that information to efficiently distribute resources and plan for future market moves. This need could only be answered, by the decentralized multi-divisional structure that the four companies in his study represent.

In all, Chandler’s book is very useful for creating a framework for understanding the development of big business in the United States, particularly over the course of the twentieth century. The broad arc of business history that he paints does not spend much time with earlier forms of organization, stopping mostly with the statement that these were mostly operationally oriented and spent little time on planning. The focus on the twentieth century, though, and on big business, does occasionally lead a reader to wonder where all of the other enterprises are in this arc of history. Never the less, Strategy and Structure is a critical work necessary for anyone wishing to really begin to understand the development of American business.

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As I read through Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I a second time, I noted a number of general ideas that stood out more clearly than they had the first time through. These included Marx’s clear use of terminology to support his observations, the concepts revolving around the definition of “the Working Day,” the discussion of growing worker dependence upon machinery, and interpretations of the struggle for better wages. Capital also has come to seem to have a kind of double quality.

Marx was writing about his own time as if he were a journalist, but at the same time, so many of Marx’s ideas and complaints are relevant to debates about business and labor in our own time. Clearly Marx’s definition of capital is far deeper and broader than I had ever imagined, and so much a part of my own understanding, not only of economics, but of social and political realities in my own world, that I have come to see this book as marking what Michel Foucault has called an “epistemic shift”: a change in the general understanding of how society functions that is so great that those who live within it cannot imagine how earlier worldviews might have functioned. I got the sense that Marx and I were talking about the same reality, and that it was a reality neither of us would share with someone from the century before Marx.

In the second reading, not looking for the Marx of the Communist Manifesto, I was able to read Marx as a social critic, an academic, and a journalist examining important events in his own time. This lack of expectation of the political allowed me to see the analysis taking place in the text, and I found myself trying harder to understand the terminology that Marx presented. His writing is really quite easy to read, and he presents terms which he defines clearly in order to create a clear foundation for the observations he makes about society. His specific definitions, for example, of the terms “means of production,” “implements of production,” “labour,” and “capital” make his work very accessible. I had never understood to the degree I do now how all of this fits together. With a clear understanding of these terms, I am both more able to criticize Marx, and to read critically those who have used or referred to Marx in their own later work. The second reading was useful for this purpose alone.[1]

In another example of Marx’s clear use of technology, but with even greater implications, I was very interested to learn Marx’s definition of “raw materials” not as the most basic materials removed from nature for manufacturing, but as the means of production which have already been changed through the process of labor. In other words, every manufacturing system creates new value out of “use-values” that themselves were products of the labor process. This helped me to better understand the idea that once a product is finished, the labor and means of production that went into it are eradicated, and only the value of the manufactured item remains, to be used again in the next process of creating surplus value. This is a complex set of ideas, but ultimately, it means that the process of production is always removed from nature by at least one degree, and usually more. This seems to be another kind of alienation – if one of the characteristics of capitalism is the alienation of the worker from the product, another is the alienation of the product from nature.[2]

The section concerning “The Working Day” had presented a number of problems for me the first time around. The concept of surplus value as a function of surplus labor was extremely difficult to comprehend. I came to understand this as including what we today call ‘productivity’ after the second reading. I understood the historical context of the issue by reading the evidence Marx presents, and came to recognize that the wage structure differed from the hourly wages of factory workers today. This means that Marx’s discussion of the way in which factories extended the time that workers labored in the factories on a daily basis has to be translated into our own productivity conceptions. To do this is very difficult because the daily wage structure Marx was confronting was far simpler, and perhaps easier to subvert, than our own structures today. It was the examples that Marx gave to support his ideas, and the evidence he provided, that helped me begin to see the process of working toward hourly wages, and made me wonder where I might find further information on the goals of labor reform in order to discover if the hourly wage came to be in response to the abuses of other wage structures by factory owners. The effect of this was to make me see the vast spaces open for analysis of wage and management structures in terms of the way they exploit labor and force increases in productivity – I was able to understand the appeal and analytical power of Marx’s ideas, and why they might have such impact on the field of historical analysis. I also developed a great interest in labor history here.[3]

Marx’s discussion in Capital of the nature of the wage struggles of his own time clearly shows the roots of later analysis of labor and business. Marx says that these wage struggles are a part of the manufacturing system as it has come to exist, and not in opposition to it.[4] This reads as a kind of foreshadowing of the 20th century argument about the admissibility and efficacy of labor unions in the economies of the belligerents in World War I, and the post- World War II economies of Europe, Japan, and the United States, in which labor unions are defined as ways to work for equity within the existing manufacturing system, rather than attempts to destroy it.[5]

Marx was already interested in this question when he published vol. I of Capital in 1867. I find this fascinating in the sense that it seems that Marx is talking about an economy and a society that I can understand and relate to in the United States of the twenty-first century. While the size, organizational structure, level of automation, and degree of capitalization has changed dramatically, the economy Marx is discussing, almost journalistically as existing in his own time is very much like the economy of our time. In a sense, we share a reality with Marx that I don’t think we share with people of the 16th century, for example. Mill, Smith, and Ricardo were also talking about ideas and realities that, while different, are recognizable and understandable to people living in today’s economy. It therefore occurred to me as I read that Capital is one marker that an epistemic shift – a change in understanding that removes clear access to earlier ways of understanding the world – had occurred by the mid 19th century in industrial societies.

There are many other examples of ways in which Capital seems to mark an epistemic shift. The way in which Marx foreshadows the ideas that eventually became “scientific management” in twentieth-century America is uncanny. For example, he wrote that “[the] technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instrument of labour…gives rise to a barrack-like discipline…thereby dividing the workers into manual laborers and overseers, into the private soldiers and N.C.O.s of an industrial army,” and that while an individual craftsman makes use of tools, “in the factory, the machine makes use of him.”[6] Both of these passages make it clear that Marx was looking at the way that the process of manufacturing on a large scale is driven more by the needs of the machines than by the workers who operate them. This has overtones of the redesigned Ford Motor Co. factories in the second decade of the twentieth century, where worker action and machine needs were integrated in such a way as to make the workers a part of the machinery, and to create an atmosphere in which human working patterns were subordinated to the working patterns of the machines.

In all a second reading of Capital was rewarding. I know that I understand Marx better now than I ever have, and look forward to reading further.