CHAPTER II

THE MACHINE PROCESS

Iy its bearing on modern life and modern busi-
ness, the “machine process” means something
more comprehensive and less external than a
mere aggregate of mechanical appliances for the
mediation of human labor. It means that, but
it means something more than that. The civil
engineer, the mechanical engineer, the navigator,
the mining expert, the industrial chemist and
mineralogist, the electrician,—the work of all
these falls within the lines of the modern machine
process, as well as the work of the inventor who
devises the appliances of the process and that of
the mechanician who puts the inventions into
effect and oversees their working. The scope of
the process is larger than the machine.’ In those
branches of industry in which machine methods
have been introduced, many agencies which are
not to be classed as mechanical appliances, simply,
have been drawn into the process, and have be-
come integral factors in it. Chemical properties
of minerals, e.g., are counted on in the carrying
out of metallurgical processes with much the same

1Cf. Cooke Taylor, Modern Factory System, pp. 74-77.
5

6 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

certainty and calculable effect as are the motions
of those mechanical appliances by whose use the
minerals are handled. The sequence of the pro-
cess involves both the one and the other, both
the apparatus and the materials, in such intimate
interaction that the process cannot be spoken of
simply as an action of the apparatus upon the
materials. It is not simply that the apparatus
reshapes the materials; the materials reshape
themselves by the help of the apparatus. Simi-
larly in such other processes as the refining of
petroleum, oil, or sugar; in the work of the indus-
trial chemical laboratories; in the use of wind,
water, or electricity, etc.

Wherever manual dexterity, the rule of thumb,
and the fortuitous conjunctures of the seasons
have been supplanted by a reasoned procedure
on the basis of a systematic knowledge of the
forces employed, there the mechanical industry is
to be found, even in the absence of intricate me-
chanical contrivances. It is a question of the char-
acter of the process rather than a question of the
complexity of the contrivances employed. Chem-
ical, agricultural, and animal industries, as carried
on by the characteristically modern methods and
in due touch with the market, are to be included
in the modern complex of mechanical industry.

1 Even in work that lies so near the fortuities of animate nature
as dairying, stock-breeding, and the improvement of crop plants,

THE MACHINE PROCESS 7

No one of the mechanical processes carried on
by the use of a given outfit of appliances is inde-
pendent of other processes going on elsewhere.
Each draws upon and presupposes the proper work-
ing of many other processes of a similarly me-
chanical character. None of the processes in the
mechanical industries is self-sufficing. Each follows
some and precedes other processes in an endless
sequence, into which each fits and to the require-
ments of which each must adapt its own working.
The whole concert of industrial operations is to be
taken as a machine process, made up of interlock-
ing detail processes, rather than as a multiplicity
of mechanical appliances each doing its particular
work in severalty. This comprehensive industrial
process draws into its scope and turns to account
all branches of knowledge that have to do with the

a determinate, reasoned routine replaces the rule of thumb. By
mechanical ,control of his materials the dairyman, e.g., selectively
determines the rate and kind of the biological processes that change
his raw material into finished product. The stock-breeder’s aim is to
reduce the details of the laws of heredity, as they apply within his
field, to such definite terms as will afford him a technologically accu-
rate routine of breeding, and then to apply this technological breeding
process to the production of such varieties of stock as will, with the
nearest approach to mechanical exactness and expedition, turn the
raw materials of field and meadow into certain specified kinds and
grades of finished product. The like is true of the plant-breeders.
Agricultural experiment stations and bureaus, in all civilized coun-
tries, are laboratories working toward an effective technological con-
trol of biological factors, with a view to eliminating fortuitous,
disserviceable, and useless elements from the processes of agricultural
production, and so reducing these processes to a calculable, expedi-
tious, and wasteless routine.

8 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

material sciences, and the whole makes a more or
less delicately balanced complex of sub-processes.'

Looked at in this way the industrial process
shows two well-marked general characteristics :
(a) the running maintenance of interstitial ad-
justments between the several sub-processes or
branches of industry, wherever in their working
they touch one another in the sequence of industrial
elaboration; and (>) an unremitting requirement
of quantitative precision, accuracy in point of time
and sequence, in the proper inclusion and exclusion
of forces affecting the outcome, in the magnitude
of the various physical characteristics (weight, size,
density, hardness, tensile strength, elasticity, tem-
perature, chemical reaction, actinic sensitiveness
etc.) of the materials handled as well as of the
appliances employed. This requirement of me-
chanical accuracy and nice adaptation to specific
uses has led to a gradual pervading enforcement of
uniformity, to a reduction to staple grades and sta-
ple character in the materials handled, and to a
thorough standardizing of tools and units of meas-
urement. Standard physical measurements are of
the essence of the machine’s régime.”

The modern industrial communities show an
unprecedented uniformity and precise equivalence
in legally adopted weights and measures. Some-

1 Cf. Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, vol. Il. ch. II.
2 Cf. Twelfth Census (U.S.): ‘‘Manufactures,” pt. I. p. xxxvi.

THE MACHINE PROCESS 9

thing of this kind would be brought about by the
needs of commerce, even without the urgency
given to the movement for uniformity by the re-
quirements of the machine industry. But within
the industrial field the movement for standardiza-
tion has outrun the urging of commercial needs,
and has penetrated every corner of the mechanical
industries. The specifically commercial need of
uniformity in weights and measures of merchant-
able goods and in monetary units has not carried
standardization in these items to the extent to
which the mechanical need of the industrial process
has carried out a sweeping standardization in the
means by which the machine process works, as well
as in the products which it turns out.

As a matter of course, tools and the various
structural materials used are made of standard
sizes, shapes, and gauges. When the dimensions,
in fractions of an inch or in millimetres, and the
weight, m fractions of a pound or in grammes, are
given, the expert foreman or workman, confidently
and without reflection, infers the rest of what need
be known of the uses to which any given item that
passes under his hand may be turned. ‘The adjust-
ment and adaptation of part to part and of process
to process has passed out of the category of crafts-
manlike skill into the category of mechanical
standardization. Hence, perhaps, the greatest,
most wide-reaching gain in productive celerity and

10 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

efficiency through modern methods, and hence the
largest saving of labor in modern industry.

Tools, mechanical appliances and movements,
and structural materials are scheduled by certain
conventional scales and gauges; and modern
industry has little use for, and can make little use
of, what does not conform to the standard. What
is not competently standardized calls for too much
of craftsmanlike skill, reflection, and individual
elaboration, and is therefore not available for
economical use in the processes. Irregularity,
departure from standard measurements in any of
the measurable facts, is of itself a fault in any
item that is to find a use in the industrial process,
for it brmgs delay, it detracts from its ready
usability in the nicely adjusted process into which
it is to go; and a delay at any point means a more
or less far-reaching and intolerable retardation of
the comprehensive industrial process at large.
Irregularity in products intended for industrial
use carries a penalty to the nonconforming pro-
ducer which urges him to fall into line and submit
to the required standardization.

The materials and moving forces of industry are
undergoing a like reduction to staple kinds, styles,
grades, and gauge.’ Even such forces as would

1 #.g. lumber, coal, steel, paper, wool and cotton, grain, leather,
cattle for the packing houses. All these and many others are to an
increasing extent spoken for, delivered, and disposed of under well-
defined staple grades as to quality and dimensions, weight and efficiency.

THE MACHINE PROCESS i KS

seem at first sight not to lend themselves to
standardization, either in their production or their
use, are subjected to uniform scales of measure-
ment; as, ¢.g., water-power, steam, electricity, and
human labor. The latter is perhaps the least
amenable to standardization, but, for all that, it is
bargained for, delivered, and turned to account on
schedules of time, speed, and intensity which are
continually sought to be reduced to a more precise
measurement and a more sweeping uniformity.

The like is true of the finished products. Mod-
ern consumers in great part supply their wants
with commodities that conform to certain staple
specifications of size, weight, and grade. The
consumer (that is to say the vulgar consumer)
furnishes his house, his table, and his person with
supplies of standard weight and measure, and he
can to an appreciable degree specify his needs and
his consumption in the notation of the standard
gauge. As regards the mass of civilized mankind,
the idiosyncrasies of the individual consumers are
required to conform to the uniform gradations
imposed upon consumable goods by the compre-
hensive mechanical processes of industry. “ Local
color,” it is said, is falling into abeyance in modern
life, and where it is still found it tends to assert
itself in units of the standard gauge.

From this mechanical standardization of con-
sumable goods it follows, on the one hand, that the

12 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

demand for goods settles upon certain defined lines
of production which handle certain materials of
definite grade, in certain, somewhat invariable forms
and proportions; which leads to well-defined meth-
ods and measurements in the processes of production,
shortening the average period of “ripening” that
intervenes between the first raw stage of the product
and its finished shape, and reducing the aggregate
stock of goods necessary to be carried for the supply
of current wants, whether in the raw or in the
finished form.’ Standardization means economy at
nearly all points of the process of supplymg goods,
and at the same time it means certainty and
expedition at nearly all points in the business
operations involved in meeting current wants.
Besides this, the standardization of goods means
that the iterdependence of industrial processes is
reduced to more definite terms than before the
mechanical standardization came to its present
degree of elaborateness and rigor. The margin of
admissible variation, in time, place, form, and
amount, is narrowed. Materials, to answer the
needs of standardized industry, must be drawn
from certain standard sources at a definite rate of
supply. Hence any given detail industry depends
closely on receiving its supplies from certain,

1 Well shown in the case of wheat and flour; but the like is true
as regards the stocks of other commodities carried by producers,
{obbers, retailers, and consumers.

THE MACHINE PROCESS 3

relatively few, industrial establishments whose
work belongs earlier in the process of elaboration.
And it may similarly depend on certain other,
closely defined, industrial establishments for a
vent of its own specialized and standardized prod-
uct.' It may likewise depend in a strict manner
on special means of transportation.”

Machine production leads to a standardization of
services as well as of goods. So, for instance,
the modern means of communication and the
system into which these means are organized are
also of the nature of a mechanical process, and in
this mechanical process of service and intercourse
the life of all civilized men is more or less inti-
mately involved. To make effective use of the
modern system of communication in any or all of
its ramifications (streets, railways, steamship lines,
telephone, telegraph, postal service, etc.), men are
required to adapt their needs and their motions to
the exigencies of the process whereby this civilized
method of intercourse is carried into effect. The
service is standardized, and therefore the use of it
is standardized also. Schedules of time, place, and
circumstance rule throughout. The scheme of
everyday life must be arranged with a strict

1 Well illustrated by the interdependence of the various branches

of iron and steel production.

2 As seen, e.g., in the dependence of oil production or oil refining
on the pipe lines and their management, or in the dependence of the
prairie farmers on the railway lines, ete.

14 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

regard to the exigencies of the process whereby
this range of human needs is served, if full advan-
tage is to be taken of this system of mtercourse,
which means that, in so far, one’s plans and _proj-
ects must be conceived and worked out in terms
of those standard units which the system imposes.

For the population of the towns and cities, at
least, much the same rule holds true of the dis-
tribution of consumable goods. So, also, amuse-
ments and diversions, much of the current amenities
of life, are organized into a more or less sweeping
process to which those who would benefit by the
advantages offered must adapt their schedule of
wants and the disposition of their time and effort.
The frequency, duration, intensity, grade, and
sequence are not, in the main, matters for the free
discretion of the individuals who participate.
Throughout the scheme of life of that portion of
mankind that clusters about the centres of modern
culture the industrial process makes itself felt and
enforces a degree of conformity to the canon of
accurate quantitative measurement. There comes
to prevail a degree of standardization and precise
mechanical adjustment of the details of everyday
life, which presumes a facile and unbroken work-
ing of all those processes that minister to these
standardized human wants.

As a result of this superinduced mechanical
regularity of life, the livelihood of individuals is,

THE MACHINE PROCESS 15

over large areas, affected in an approximately
uniform manner by any incident which at all
seriously affects the industrial process at any point.’

As was noted above, each industrial unit, repre-
sented by a given industrial “plant,” stands in
close relations of interdependence with other in-
dustrial processes going forward elsewhere, near or
far away, from which it receives supplies — mate-
rials, apparatus, and the like—and to which it
turns over its output of products and waste, or on
which it depends for auxiliary work, such as trans-
portation. The resulting concatenation of indus-
tries has been noticed by most modern writers. It
is commonly discussed under the head of the divi-
sion of labor. Evidently the prevalent standardi-
zation of industrial means, methods, and products
greatly increases the reach of this concatenation of
industries, at the same time that it enforces a

1Tt may be noted in this connection, on the one hand, that a
population which is in no degree habituated to the modern industrial
process is unable to adapt its mode of life to the requirements of this
method of supplying human wants, and so can derive but little benefit,
and possibly great discomfort, from a forcible intrusion of the
machine industry ; as, for instance, many of the outlying barbarian
peoples with whom the Western industrial culture is now enforcing
a close contact. On the other hand, it is also true that even the most
adequately trained modern community, among whom the machine
industry is best at home, does not respond with faultless alacrity to
the demands and opportunities which this system holds out. The
adaptation of habits of life and of ideals and aspirations to the exi-
gencies of the machine process is not nearly complete, nor does the
untrained man instinctively fall into line with it. Even the best-
trained, severely disciplined man of the industrial towns has his
seasons of recalcitrancy.

16 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

close conformity in point of time, volume, and char-
acter of the product, whether the product is goods
or services.'

By virtue of this concatenation of processes the
modern industrial system at large bears the char-
acter of a comprehensive, balanced mechanical
process. In order to an efficient working of this
industrial process at large, the various constituent
sub-processes must work in due codrdination
throughout the whole. Any degree of maladjust-
ment in the interstitial codrdinations of this
industrial process at large in some degree hinders
its working. Similarly, any given detail process or
any industrial plant will do its work to full advan-
tage only when due adjustment is had between its
work and the work done by the rest. The higher
the degree of development reached by a given
industrial community, the more comprehensive and
urgent becomes this requirement of interstitial
adjustment. And the more fully a given industry
has taken on the character of a mechanical process,
and the more extensively and closely it is corre-
lated in its work with other industries that precede
or follow it in the sequence of elaboration, the more

1 The dependence of one process upon the working of the others
is sometimes very strict, as, for instance, in the various industries
occupied with iron, including the extraction and handling of the ore
and other raw materials. In other cases the correlation is less strict,
or even very slight, as, e.g., that between the newspaper industry
and lumbering, through the wood-pulp industry, the chief component
of the modern newspaper being wood-pulp.

THE MACHINE PROCESS 17

urgent, other things equal, is the need of maintain-
ing the proper working relations with these other
industries, the greater is the industrial detriment
suffered from any derangement of the accustomed
working relations, and the greater is the industrial
gain to be derived from a closer adaptation
and a more facile method of readjustment in
the event of a disturbance,—the greater is
also the chance for an effectual disturbance of
industry at the particular point. This mechanical
concatenation of industrial processes makes for
solidarity in the administration of any group of
related industries, and more remotely it makes for
solidarity in the management of the entire indus-
trial traffic of the community.

A disturbance at any point, whereby any given
branch of industry fails to do its share in the work
of the system at large, immediately affects the
neighboring or related branches which come before
or after it in the sequence, and is transmitted
through their derangement to the remoter portions
of the system. The disturbance is rarely confined
to the single plant or the single line of production
first. affected, but spreads in some measure to the
rest. A disturbance at any point brings more or
less derangement to the industrial process at large.
So that any maladjustment of the system involves
a larger waste than simply the disabling of one or
two members in the complex industrial structure.

18 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

So much is clear, that the keeping of the balance
in the comprehensive machine process of industry
isa matter of the gravest urgency if the productive
mechanism is to proceed with its work in an effi-
cient manner, so as to avoid idleness, waste, and
hardship. The management of the various indus-
trial plants and processes in due correlation with
all the rest, and the supervision of the interstitial
adjustments of the system, are commonly conceived
to be a work of greater consequence to the com-
munity’s well-being than any of the detail work
involved in carrying on a given process of produc-
tion. This work of interstitial adjustment, and in
great part also the more immediate supervision
of the various industrial processes, have become
urgent only since the advent of the machine indus-
try and in proportion as the machine industry has
advanced in compass and consistency.

It is by business transactions that the balance
of working relations between the several industrial
units is maintained or restored, adjusted and read-
justed, and it is on the same basis and by the same
method that the affairs of each industrial unit are
regulated. The relations in which any indepen-
dent industrial concern stands to its employees, as
well as to other concerns, are always reducible to
pecuniary terms. It is at this point that the
business man comes into the industrial process as a
decisive factor. The organization of the several

THE MACHINE PROCESS 19

industries as well as the interstitial adjustments
and discrepancies of the industrial process at large
are of the nature of pecuniary transactions and
obligations. It therefore rests with the business
men to make or mar the running adjustments of
industry. The larger and more close-knit and more
delicately balanced the dustrial system, and the
larger the constituent units, the larger and more
far-reaching will be the effect of each business
move in this field.