The Capitalization of Social Development

Abstract

THIS paper is an advance report of the results of several years' work in an imperfectly cultivated field. As its title suggests, it relates to social development broadly. It is now a commonplace that civilization is the result of a growth-process. But the doctrine of evolution as applied to human society has thus far given us a gross map of a territory, a set of highly abstract formulas, a standpoint from which to approach the subject, rather than an intimate and practical working idea of the facts. Dazzled by the late achievements of evolutionary science, we are prone to think the whole story has been told. The great fact of social development from the levels of animality having been flung out into relief, we have tended to accept it without pausing to inquire just how, as a practical matter of fact, such a vast upward movement could have taken place. This paper, without pretension to severe scholarship, attempts to indicate briefly one of the main channels through which natural forces have differentiated the phenomena of human association out of anterior orders of reality, and made a science of sociology possible.i. The beginnings of social growth, as recovered by modern research, can be indicated in a general way within the limits of a single paragraph somewhat as follows:Man once lived an animal life, without knowledge of the industrial arts, scattered about in small groups, depending for food upon a precarious natural supply, and fighting with the lower animals and his own kind for the means of existence. Nothing like society, as we now understand the term, was to be found on the earth. But, making progress from this condition, man learned to fashion rough tools of wood and stone, then implements of polished stone, and at length utensils of copper and bronze. Meanwhile he became expert in hunting and fishing, acquired the use of fire, and domesticated some of the lower animals. During the prehistoric period he also learned to save seeds for planting, and thus made the beginnings of agriculture.

Configurations of Craft: Alternative Models for Organizing Work

“…Focusing specifically on labor, he describes how traditional craft involved "unfree" forms of work that persisted until the mid-19 th century when increasingly firms began to operate according to a "factory system" that relied on "wage labor" and, thus, increasingly on the market for coordinating work. This was not unique to the U.S., but also appears to be characteristic of Europe before the emergence of the guilds (Wallis, 1902) or Southeast Asia before industrialization (Koo, 1990). The modern heir of these traditional market-buffering institutions around craft work is perhaps the "craft union" (Hannan & Freeman, 1987), which follows an "occupational logic" by seeking "work control, often monopolizing the supply of labor … [and] enforcing craft standards as gate-keeping mechanisms" (Yu, 2013, p. 109).…”

“…Third, these hierarchical structures are socially embedded in inescapable networks of dense ties without separation of the public and private sphere that are characteristic of the "gemeinschaft" form of community (Adler, 2015;Adler, Kwon & Heckscher, 2008;Tönnies, 1957). Medieval guilds performed this function to the extreme (Kieser, 1989), though this communal dimension also characterizes other, non-guild examples of traditional craft where the family, the feudal lord or the geographic community serves a similar role (Ruef, 2020;Sasaki et al, 2019;Wallis, 1902).…”