Industrial capitalism’s workplace practices reshaped twentieth-century society to fit mass production.
Evidence
Just as the division of labor migrated from the economic domain to society in the twentieth century, Nadella’s construction site is the economic petri dish in which a new division of learning mutates into life, ready for translation to society. In the twentieth century the critical success factors of industrial capitalism—efficiency, productivity, standardization, interchangeability, the minute division of labor, discipline, attention, scheduling, conformity, hierarchical administration, the separation of knowing and doing, and so forth—were discovered and crafted in the workplace and then transposed to society, where they were institutionalized in schools, hospitals, family life, and personality. As generations of scholars have documented, society became more factory-like so that we might train and socialize the youngest among us to fit the new requirements of a mass production order. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1309
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Weberian rationalization and Foucault’s disciplinary society — the factory-to-society template anticipates Zuboff’s argument that surveillance capitalism will transpose its logic outward. — connects to: US businesses chose machines over worker skills decades ago — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 571; Industrial capitalism defined workers by the very labor it extracted; Mass culture and mass markets were integral to corporate capitalism’s ascendancy (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass culture and mass markets were integral to corporate capitalism’s ascendancy
#expands(0.85) - Industrial capitalism defined workers by the very labor it extracted
#expands(0.82) - Containing qualitative social change is industrial society’s defining achievement
#expands(0.80) - Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction
#expands(0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122 - Capitalism becomes a whole form of social life through the superstructures, not just production.
#expands(0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 526