Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 59.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 07:46:45 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: post-Fordism
Simone Turchetti, Mauro Capocci and Elena Gagliasso, in "Production,
Science and Epistemology", argue that the industrial, economic and social
organization of developed countries has had a profound effect on how
science and its epistemology have been conceived and practiced. Although
few of us here actually do science properly so-called (in English), what
Turchetti &al. have to say is at least relevant to us indirectly in how we
conceptualize our nascent practice.
In the 20th Century, as they tell the story, the development of new
technologies moved production from linear mechanisms such as the Fordist
assembly line to complex industrial networks of smaller, interdependent
units, in which communication plays a major role. Hence the post-Fordist
world in which we now operate.
They analyze production under four headings: organization and architecture,
production policy, the role of the state and production-subjects or
workers. Under Fordism, then, the organization and architecture of science
are hierarchical and linear, as in "big science" laboratories exemplified
in the Manhattan Project; production policy is defined by mass-production
of knowledge; the state is heavily interventionist, providing the funding
and therefore controlling research; and the production-subjects are
subordinate to machinery that embodies job-descriptions, with alienation of
these subjects as a result -- typically the scientist-as-craftsman becomes
a machine-tender or manager of machine-tenders. Under post-Fordism
organization is "fractal", typically embodied in interlinking networks of
small laboratories, exemplified by the Human Genome project; production
policy, as in the just-in-time model, depends heavily on communication,
much less on fixed process; the state backs away from support, so that the
individual scientist becomes his or her own fund-raiser; and the
production-subjects are left to their own devices in a free-market economy,
broadly speaking.
I am radically simplifying an already simplified argument -- to draw your
attention to an interesting set of ideas. Again, we need to think carefully
before we construct for ourselves a model of "knowledge production" (a
binomial whose two terms both give me trouble and whose conjunction in our
context DEMANDS an apology) that fails to recognize the post-Fordist
revolution.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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