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From Joseph Bensman From Joseph Bensman On the cover: Portrait of Joseph Bensman by Lydia Csato Gasman, reproduced with the permission of Marilyn Bensman, in association with the art gallery Les Yeux du Monde and the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives, both in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Lindsay Ann Nolin. The artist’s inscription reads: “With gratitude. I’ll always remember you Joe. Lydia Csato Gasman. 1976.” From Joseph Bensman Essays on Modern Society Edited and introduced by Robert Jackall and Duffy rahamG Newfound Press THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LIBRARIES, KNOXVILLE From Joseph Bensman: Essays on Modern Society © 2014 by Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham Digital version at newfoundpress.utk.edu/pubs/bensman Newfound Press University of Tennessee Libraries 1015 Volunteer Boulevard Knoxville, TN 37996-1000 newfoundpress.utk.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-9846445-9-9 ISBN-10: 0-9846445-9-8 Bensman, Joseph. From Joseph Bensman : essays on modern society / edited and introduced by Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham. Knoxville, Tennessee : Newfound Press, University of Tennessee Libraries, ©2014. 1 online resource (vi, 696 pages) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bensman, Joseph -- Political and social views. 2. Sociologists -- United States – History – 20th century -- Biography. 3. Sociology. I. Jackall, Robert. II. Graham, Duffy. III. Title. HM585 .B465 2014 Book design by Jayne W. Smith Cover design by C. S. Jenkins Contents Acknowledgments vii Creator and Disturber 1 Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham Autobiographical Essay: The Sociologist on the Cutting Edge 17 Joseph Bensman PART I. Bureaucracy 1. The Meaning of Work in Bureaucratic Society 41 Joseph Bensman with Bernard Rosenberg 2. Power Cliques in Bureaucratic Society 67 Joseph Bensman with Arthur J. Vidich 3. Bureaucratic and Planning Attitudes 79 Joseph Bensman with Robert Lilienfeld PART II. Crime and Morality 4. Crime and Punishment in the Factory 111 Joseph Bensman with Israel Gerver 5. Official and White-Collar Crime in the United States and the Soviet Union 135 Joseph Bensman 6. The Advertising Man and His Work 145 Joseph Bensman 7. Ethics and Social Structure 213 Joseph Bensman vi CONTENTS PART III. Leadership and Legitimacy 8. The Crisis of Confidence in Modern Politics 243 Joseph Bensman 9. Charisma and Modernity 271 Joseph Bensman with Michael Givant 10. Max Weber’s Concept of Legitimacy 325 Joseph Bensman PART IV. Expertise 11. Toward a Sociology of Expertness 375 Joseph Bensman with Israel Gerver 12. The Springdale Case 401 Joseph Bensman with Arthur J. Vidich 13. Who Writes What in the Bureaucratic University? 459 Joseph Bensman 14. The Aesthetics and Politics of Footnoting 469 Joseph Bensman PART V. Culture and Community 15. Changing Institutions and Ideologies 507 Joseph Bensman with Bernard Rosenberg 16. Art and the Mass Society 551 Joseph Bensman with Israel Gerver 17. The Cultural Contradictions of Daniel Bell 565 Joseph Bensman with Arthur J. Vidich 18. A Theory of the Contemporary American Community 583 Joseph Bensman with Arthur J. Vidich 19. Freedom, Bureaucracy, and Styles for Dissent 619 Joseph Bensman with Arthur J. Vidich Note on the Editors 637 Index 639 Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank Marilyn Bensman, David Bensman, Miriam Bensman, Rhea Bensman, and the Willmott Family Pro- fessorship at Williams College for supporting this project. Special thanks also to Peggy Weyers of Williams College and Jayne Smith of Newfound Press for outstanding technical assistance. Creator and Disturber Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham In “Crime and Punishment in the Factory,”1 Joseph Bensman and Israel Gerver analyze the use of a simple tool, the tap, in the wing- assembly unit of a military airplane manufacturing plant in 1953-54. The authors bring to life complex and contradictory social behavior across the factory floor and up the hierarchy of corporate manage- ment. In doing so, they elucidate the moral rules-in-use typical in bureaucracy, the central institution of our epoch. The essay introduces the tap with a straightforward description. “The tap is a tool, an extremely hard screw, whose threads are slotted to allow for the disposal of the waste metal that it cuts away. It is sufficiently hard so that when it is inserted into a nut it can cut new threads over the original threads of the nut.” Plainly, by design, the tap is a destructive tool. But if recognizing the tool’s inherent subversiveness raises the reader’s eyebrows, then understanding its role in wing assembly triggers an alarm. Large-scale mass production of complex machines presents special challenges and, inevitably, is perfect only on paper. There is, for example, the problem of alignment of parts. “In wing- assembly work, bolts or screws must be inserted in recessed nuts, which are anchored to the wing in earlier processes of assembly. Copyright © 2014 by Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham. 2 FROM JOSEPH BENSMAN The bolt or screw must pass through a wing plate before reaching the nut.” These alignments between nuts and plate-openings can be off. Solutions to the problem of failed alignment include returning the wing plates to an earlier stage in the manufacturing process for adjustment or even returning to the drawing board for an entirely new design. Another solution lies in the tap. “When the nut is not aligned with the hole, the tap can be used to cut, at a new angle, new threads in the nut for the purpose of bringing the nut and bolt into a new but not true alignment. If the tap is not used and the bolt is forced, the wing plate itself may be bent.” The solution achieved by the tap, however, deviates from design specifications. “On the basis of engineering standards true alignments are necessary at every stage in order to achieve maximum strength and a proper equi- librium of strains and stresses.” The use of the tap, in other words, overrides design to achieve a tenuous, superficial, and dangerous solution. It compromises the structural integrity of the aircraft. It conceals defects. It also creates maintenance problems for another day. Moreover, it is grounds for termination of employment for indi- vidual workers and of business relationships for the company. It is, in short, a threat to the entire enterprise. The authors are explicit: “The use of the tap is the most serious crime of workmanship conceivable in the plant.” Officially, with obvious good reason, the tap is contraband, its use forbidden, its mere possession grounds for dismissal. Yet, the authors observe, wing-assembly workers widely, even routinely, use the tap. At least half of the workers in a position to use a tap have at least one in their toolbox. The intellectual problem that arises from this paradox is, why and how does this airplane factory accommodate the use of the tap? Or, more generally, why and how does an organization accommodate criminal conduct? CREATOR AND DISTURBER 3 The answer, Bensman and Gerver explain, is that production demands use of the tap and compels individuals and occupational groups within the factory to strike bargains amongst themselves to set the terms of its use. Factory work is classically segmented and layered, broken into parts vertically and horizontally. One part has no control over, and indeed little knowledge of, another. Each part focuses on its own task, not on the whole. At the apex, the factory’s obligation to the military is to produce a certain number of airplanes at a certain rate according to certain specifications. At the bottom, individual workers have discrete, routine tasks. In between, for office managers, for plant managers, and not least for foremen on the plant floor directly in charge of groups of assembly-line workers, the obli- gation comes down to ensuring that fixed amounts of work get done in fixed amounts of time at predetermined costs, so that the product can come together in a timely way, each unit ready to forward fin- ished work and to receive incoming work on schedule. This obligation takes the form of workload requirements, monitored by production charts. Failure to meet unblinkingly the constant demand of the pro- duction chart jeopardizes the factory’s commitments to the military, the ability of other departments or units to meet their obligations on time, the standing of one’s bosses, and one’s own employment. This pressure is felt at every level in the factory and the business office. Accordingly, failed alignment poses a serious, material problem. To cope, experienced workers apprentice new workers in the use of the tap and, crucially, accompanying etiquette; foremen authorize work- ers to use the tap in coded, often nonverbal language; inspectors and workers choreograph their interactions to avoid confronting the problem—all while strictly maintaining the official, public condem- nation of the tap. Breaches of these agreements are opportunities, never wasted, to censure publicly the use of the tap while covertly reestablishing the terms of the agreements. For the individual, these 4 FROM JOSEPH BENSMAN bargains constitute an ad hoc reconciliation of competing and con- tradictory demands: the tap is forbidden, but the tap is required; one must “get the work out” but also respect the rules of craftsmanship; one fosters collegial relationships, not least because of the protection they provide, or one insists on proper but inevitably contentious rela- tionships with the risks these carry. Thus, one engages in behavior that is officially criminal because it is essential to satisfy bureaucratic imperatives. Those affected accom- modate this moral ambiguity through a series of specialized social transactions. These transactions are complex, provisional, subject at all times to renegotiation, and feature public and private dimensions involving “coercion, sanctions, genuine cooperation, and altruism,” as well as ritual, ceremony, and the invocation of situational moral rules-in-use. So understood, use of the tap is not an act of rebel- lion, not a departure from norms, not “unethical”—and certainly not a crime.
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