Stratification and Organization: Bureaucratic and craft administration of production: a comparative study

1 “Professionalized” here means lhat work­ ers get technical socialization lo achieve a publicly recognized occupational compe­ tence. “ Public recognition” involves prefer­ ential hiring (ideally to the point of excludin£ all others) of workers who have proved their competence to an agency external to the hiring firm or consumer. Often this agency is a professional association compo:>cd exclusively of qualified persons and more or less exhaustive of the occupation. This professional association itself often enforces preferential hiring rights of its members. The professional's perm anent labor m a r in slum s is not to be confused with permanent firm status (preferential hiring or continued employment of the cur­ rent employees of a firm ). This definition, therefore, differs somewhat from lhat of Nelson Foote in “The Professionalization of Labor in Detroit," A m erica n Journal o j Socio logy , 58 (1953), 371-80. face of economic and technical con­ straints on construction projects. Specifically we maintain that the m ain alternative to professional so­ cialization of workers is communicat­ ing work decisions and standards through an administrative apparatus. B ut such an apparatus requires stable and finely adjusted communi­ cations channels. It is dependent on the continuous functioning of adm in­ istrators in oflicial statuses. Such con­ tinuous functioning is uneconomical in construction work because of the instability in the volume and product mix and of the geographical distribu­ tion of the work. Consequently the control of puce, manual skill, and effective operative decision (the essen­ tial components of industrial disci­ pline) is more economical if left to professionally maintained occupation­ al standards. A fter presenting evidence anil argument for these assertions, we will try to show why work on large-scale tract construction of houses continues to be administered on a nonbuicaucratic, craft basis. Tract housing turns out to be a major revision in the m arketing of construction products, rather than a revision in the tulminislration o f work.