Two Models for Enterpreneurship

The traditional model of American enterpreneurship, the type we associate with our national identity, might be considered "artisanship." This indicates the development of business skill through the practice of a particular appropriate trade or craft (or set of them) to a degree that allows independent proprietorship of a small firm in which one was both an owner and a worker.

The newer style is characterized by a formal education in business that allows one to become manager of a firm owned by an investor/investors.

Now, a few things can be noted right off the bat to distinguish between the two:

*Skill: In the artisanship model skill is organic and involves an intimate knowledge of the basic production and maintenance processes embedded in the creation of a good or service or some intermediary step therein. In the education model skill is more removed and abstract, and loses the particularity of understanding of the whole work process. The education model responds to numbers and signs, not concrete knowledge.

*Scale: There is a natural self-limitation in the artisanship model, as work is distributed within bounds of understanding of the owner/worker. The owner/worker serves as the most skilled worker, and so will not extend beyond the work pool in which s/he directly participates.

*Monopoly: The artisanship model functions through the production of master craftspeople with direct, concrete knowledge of basic work processes and experience in most levels of the work process. This means that rather than seek either a vertical or horizontal integration, they would more naturally self-limit the bounds of their role in the marketplace. Rather than a continuously expanding firm, we would see the continuous creation of new niche firms networked together, mostly functioning according to a relatively egalitarian hierarchy of skill in the work process.

*Conservatism: The artisanship model, because it relies on direct knowledge, is more likely to be conservative in its adoptions of major new technologies or techniques. This is a mixed effect. On the one hand, small and direct innovations proliferate fluidly, producing incredible aggregate rates of technical development yet an overall even pace in the development of technology that might radically shift society and its values. A mesh of small innovations is more likely to strike a balance with prevailing practices and attitudes than single lurches of ignorant gambling. It is also more steady, more stable, more robust- it's shocks are smaller and more easily absorped, it's gains steady and progressive.

On the other hand, it will not generate hopeful monsters so quickly as a directed program of general alienation between managerial and expressive aspects of the work process. I.e., between management and labor.

*Power: Yet if we look at the driving edges of market innovation, they are characterized by the direct participation of the most skilled of contemporary "skilled laborers," i.e. co-owners who are the scientists and engineers directly responsible for the R&D of roduct innovation. Perhaps the immediate robustness of the artisanship model guarantees it the dominant position in cutting edge industry.

*Submission: However, in established industry the artisanal model is continuously under attack through scientific management (which is really a backdoor title for outsourcing, lowering and homogenizing standards, etc.). Once their processes are known they are inevitably reduced in complexity, but with a ferocity that destroys the possibility for renewed artisanal invention.This reduction moves too quickly because it does not build up its own surplus of skills through its own artisanly pool.

*Class: As a matter of social justice, which models of enterpreneurship attract which types of people, in their ideals? There is probably a clear class and ethnic divide in styles. Formal education is of course far more expensive than artisanal experience (especially considering the full difference, between paying for an education vs. being paid for work done in the learning process- who can afford to give up two-four-six years of working and who cannot?). There is also a question of style of learning- one based on working experience and one based on signs and power commands and abstract analysis- and clear class difference between them. Finally, there is a basic difference in method of learning, via formal education or via practical experimentation, that might relate to class or ethnic group or even gender, etc.

So it lies in our interest to promote the artisanship model alongside (or even instead of) the education model.

[and of course there is a question here of ontology, or relationship to the underlying structures of the world. the education model one of forms and abstractions, the artisanship model one of direct visceral embodied experience, action building into a virtual memory. so either tendency will lend itself towards the individual experience of either ontological model, alienation or embeddedness.