IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-06663-6_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Knowledge and Power

In: Firms, Organization and Labour

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen A. Marglin

Abstract

‘What Do Bosses Do?’ (Marglin, 1974) theorized that the detailed division of labour characteristic of capitalist production owed more to the advantages of control which it afforded the capitalists than to advantages of efficiency shared more or less equally by the population as a whole. One criticism has persistently been levelled at this argument: if the detailed division of labour was, as I asserted, the artificial creation of the capitalist, and the capitalist the parasite that I pictured him, what sustained capitalistic production in free and open competition with other forms of enterprise? What prevented the individual workman from setting up shop for himself, producing directly for the market rather than for the capitalist? As Paul Samuelson has put the question, recalling Adam Smith’s story of beaver and deer, ‘What hold does the capitalist have on the worker … who hunts where he pleases on superabundant acres?’ (Samuelson, 1971).

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen A. Marglin, 1984. "Knowledge and Power," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Frank H. Stephen (ed.), Firms, Organization and Labour, chapter 9, pages 146-164, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-06663-6_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-06663-6_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Raghuram G. Rajan & Luigi Zingales, 2001. "The Firm as a Dedicated Hierarchy: A Theory of the Origins and Growth of Firms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(3), pages 805-851.
    2. Bruno Tinel, 2013. "Why and how do capitalists divide labor? From Marglin and back again through Babbage and Marx," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-00763837, HAL.
    3. Bruno Tinel, 2013. "Why and how do capitalists divide labor? From Marglin and back again through Babbage and Marx," Post-Print hal-00763837, HAL.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-06663-6_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.