The craft guilds of old are prototypes for the legend of European craftsmanship. This paper discusses three managerial principles used by the guilds: regulation, standards of accomplishment, and apprenticeship. The rationale behind, and the implementation of, each principle is outlined with reference to historical sources on guild operations. A consistent weakness of guild administration on these principles has been a bias toward self-interested conservatism. As science and technology progressed, society has responded by abandoning guild administration in favor of independent professional organizations. The paper concludes by noting that, while independent professionalism is progressive, it also minimizes the benefits that guilds obtained from experience-based knowledge.We know that a belief is commonly held when it is parodied in daily life. Take, for example, the following from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin: We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without an appreciation of grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries? We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship! Calvin's teacher: You had two days to write that paper. Calvin: Two days! Two days is nothing! Calvin is expressing a common belief that hand-crafted goods are superior expressions of a uniquely human spirit. Scholars not only agree but go on to claim that the day of craftsmanship, of pride in work, and of independently expressing one's best have been forsaken in the quest for greater profits through automated production of mass-marketed products. Take, for example, the following commentary in an organization theory journal: Quality started at a very high level before quantity management ever came along. Quality then started dropping as quantity went up. Nobody noticed this, however, until quality dropped below a tolerable level -a zero point beyond which consumers had trouble differentiating the product [from] a pile of junk (Hummel, 1987). This paper is not about whether the ideal of craftsmanship is valid. Instead, it is about the managerial principles that seem to account for a widespread belief. Specifically the paper is an inquiry into the managerial principles used in prototypes of craftsmanship, the European craft guilds (Piore and Sabel, 1984).

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Recent research and continued experience in practice has highlighted the fact that much of our difficulty in achieving implementation of management science is due to the complexity of the problem. Complexity is not a simple matter of the number of issues subsumed under one label; rather, complexity is a function of a lack of structure for systematically thinking about a problem. The purpose of this paper is to present such a structure, that is a paradigm of the process of adopting managerial technology which has been adapted from recent work on the diffusion of technological innovations.

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