Crafting Organizational Transition: Applying the Principles of Skilled Trade in Manufacturing
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2014-06
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MA in Cultural Sustainability
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Abstract
As the landscape of American manufacturing has changed over time, social, technological, and economic influences have had a profound effect in shaping broad ideas of quality, craftsmanship, and success. This thesis is an analysis of the transition of “craft” to technological work, and the role of organizational structure in facilitating or inhibiting this transition. Its orientation is neither ethnographic, nor is it properly autoethnographic; instead, it is a candid investigation through the lens of my trade apprenticeship in the postindustrial mill town of Southbridge, Massachusetts, at my own family’s glass manufacturing business.