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nydus/The Theory of Business EnterprisePublic

Thorstein Veblen examines the modern industrial system as a structure defined by the machine process and investment for profit. He analyzes how business enterprise and the pursuit of financial gain serve as the primary forces directing contemporary economic organization.

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Table of Contents

Process

' If, f.g., he lakes Wj myth-making and personifies the machine or the process and impuU^ purpose and benevolence to the mechanfca appliances, afur the manner ot coimit nnnery tales and pulpit oratory. hp is Hiire to go wrong.

short duration, strict as its discipline may be. and the body of inherited traits and traditions is too comprehensive and consistent to admit of anything more than a remote approach to such a consummation.

The machine process compels a more or less unremitting attention to phenomena of an impersonal character and to sequences and correlations not dependent for their force upon human predilection nor created by habit and custom. The machine I throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to his work, rather than the adaptation of the work to the workman. The machine technology rests on a knowledge of impersonal, material cause and effect, not on the dexterity, diligence, or personal force of the workman, still less on the habits and propensities of the workman's superiors. Within the range of this machine-guided work, and within the range of modem life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the course of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect. It inculcates thinking in terms of opaque, impersonal cause and effect, to the neglect of those norms of validity that rest on usage and on the conventional standards handed down by usage. Usage counts for little in shaping the processes of work of this kind or in shaping the modes of thought induced by work of this kind.

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