III. THE EFFECTS OF MASS PRODUCTION But it is not the history and principle of mass production which provoke the widest discussions ; the effects of it have been placed under scrutiny. What have been the effects of mass production on society? (1) Beginning with management, where unquestionably mass production methods take their rise, there is a notable increase in industrial control, as distinguished from financial control. The engineer's point of view has gained the ascendancy and this trend will undoubtedly continue until finance becomes the handmaid instead of the mistress of productive industry. Industrial control has been marked by a continuous improvement of the standard, for standardization does not mean stagnation, but the instant adoption of the better method to the exclusion of the old, in the interests of production. Financial control was not, in its heyday, marked by a tendency to make costly changes in the interests of the product. The economy of scrapping old equipment immedi ately upon the invention of the better equipment was not so well understood. Engineering control, entrenched in mass production methods, brought in this new readiness to advance. Management has been kept close to the shop and has reduced the office to a clearing-house for the shop.
Managers and men, as well as the manufacturing process, have been brought to greater singleness of purpose.
(2) The effect of mass production on the product has been to i give it the highest standard of quality ever attained in output of great quantities. Conditions of mass production require material of the best quality to pass successfully through the operations.
The utmost accuracy must control all these operations. Every part must be produced to fit at once into the design for which it is made. In mass production there are no fitters. The presence of fitters indicates that the parts have been produced unfit for imme diate placement in the design. In works of art and luxury this accuracy is achieved at the cost of careful handiwork. To intro
duce hand methods of obtaining accuracy into mass production would render mass production impossible with any reference to price-convenience. The standard quality of the product is guaran teed by the fact that machines are so constructed that a piece of work cannot go through them unless it exactly accords with speci fications. If the work goes through the tools, it must be right. It will thus be seen that the burden of creation is on management in designing and selecting the material which is to be produced by the multiple processes utilized in mass production.
(3) The effect of mass production on mechanical science has been to create a wide variety of single-purpose machines which not only group similar operations and perform them in quantity, but also reproduce skill of hand to a marvellous degree. It is not so much the discovery of new principles as the new combination and application of old ones that mark this development. Under mass production the industry of machine making has increased out of all comparison with its previous history, and the constant designing of new machines is a part of the productive work of every great manufacturing institution.
(4) The effect of mass production on employees has been vari ously appraised. Whether the modern corporation is the destruc tion or salvation of arts and crafts, whether it narrows or broadens opportunity, whether it assists or retards the personal develop ment of the worker, must be determined by observable facts. A cardinal principle of mass production is that hard work, in the old physical sense of laborious burden-bearing, is wasteful. The physi cal load is lifted off men and placed on machines. The recurrent mental load is shifted from men in production to men in designing.
As to the contention that machines thus become the masters of men, it may be said the machines have increased men's mastery of their environment, and that a generation which is ceaselessly scrapping its machines exhibits few indications of mechanical subjection.