Comment: In search of the modern job
31 12, 14 10:32 Filed in: Comment
Catching up with the (as usual) interesting Planet Money podcasts today, I was intrigued by Adam Davidson’s search for the first modern “job” holder. He initiates this search as part of a book project focused on what he describes as the “massive transformation” of today’s economy. In essence, in order to indicate how work has changed in the new economy, he has to establish the nature of what characterizes work in the old economy --that is, the modern “job”.
Bottom line of Davidson’s report is he finds his “job-holder zero” in A.M. Greer, a technical assistant working in the smokeless powder division of DuPont Corporation in 1915 whose name happens to show up first in the company’s relevant archives. The “discovery” is qualified in all sorts of ways, but why let facts stand in the way of offering an entertaining podcast? That aside, there seems to be something to the view that modern notion of the job did emerge with the development of formalized positions within the modern corporate organization. It is an interesting -- if hardly original -- argument.
Of course, equating the notion of job with corporate positions begs more questions than it answers, not the least being why corporate entities found it useful (if not necessary) to turn toward position formalization -- and how it was done. Was it a development of the modern corporation, or was it an approach adopted from elsewhere? In spinning his narrative, Davidson avoids these more fundamental questions and goes with the more simplistic view that assumes the modern job does not exist until it becomes part of the corporate economy.
Davidson, it should be emphasized, is a journalist -- a very good one with a talent for educating the public about the economy. So it is probably not fair to assess his work using scholarly standards. Nevertheless, the projected book is bound to get attention as an authoritative analysis by a well-known and well-regarded reporter-as-expert, and so we cannot dismiss its flaws and errors so quickly. My sense is that Davidson has in fact fallen into one of the basic traps of social science research, best described as the “streetlight effect” or the “drunkard’s search”. All too often we find amateur (or simply careless) researchers looking for evidence where it is easiest to see. Davidson’s sense that the first modern job -- which he effectively pre-defines as formalized corporate positions --can be found in the employment records of one of the first modern corporations is hardly surprising; that is, after all, where one is likely to find formalized corporate positions, i.e., the presumed notion of modern jobs. It is an effort to connect the dot -- to itself. It would be generous to call this research effort “flawed.”
Before tossing Davidson’s effort aside as still another example journalism-as-bad-social-science, I want to make the case for undertaking the effort itself. Assuming that Davidson’s “modern job” is a credible concept that demands elaboration, then we ought to begin with some sense of what factors or features characterize it. I would put forward a different view, one that regards a job as the formalized constructions of a work space. These formalized work spaces are often reflected in organization charts, but they are also found in laws and professional standards. What Davidson should have been looking for is the presence of such formalized work spaces, and had he done so his search would have (at least) led him to the civil service reforms in the late 1800s, and to the many forms of bureaucratization (formalization) of government offices that had taken hold in Europe (as well as China) many years earlier. In fact, jobs in Davidson’s sense were central to Weber’s classic “bureaucracy” construct which , in turn, were drawn from observation rather than theorizing.
As for DuPont’s adoption of formalized jobs, a strong case can be made that the modern corporation had actually adopted the practices already in place in the military, government offices, and even on the factory floor (e.g., Taylorism); and that all this had occurred years prior to Pierre DuPont’s decision to impose job formalization on the family business. (Side note: according to bios of Pierre, before taking over the family business he spent years as apprentice manager at a steel mill operated under Taylorist principles, including its approach to the structure of jobs.)
And so as interesting as Davidson’s insight might be, one hopes he will take steps to amend his seriously flawed approach to discovering the first modern job before.
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