Jumping the Gun.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Bill" wrote:

> Unfortunately the knowledge economy arguement in manufacturing
> doesn't really hold.

It holds up fine.

> Product manufacturing facilities don't design as they go.

No one argued that position.

> The knowledge of how to build an airplane is already decided and
> defined before the first rivet is used.

No one said otherwise.

> Many of the manufacturing workers require very little knowledge of
> what, they are producing.

You mean like the steelworkers who control the minimills and each
worker today has the productivity of 100 men from 1900. The
steelworkers from a century ago did backbreaking work shoveling coal
into furnaces. Then they had to learn how to operate heavy equipment
in order to move larger quantities of raw materials. Today, the
front line steel worker may be sitting at a computer console and
have to understand statistical quality control procedures, and the
basic chemistry of steel making so that they can understand what is
going on and make decisions if something goes wrong.

How about the secretary of days of old. She had to know how to use a
typewriter, perform shorthand, and file. Today she has to know how
to use a computer, understand all of the formating processes buried
within the programs, understand how to use spreadsheet, database,
presentation, and a myriad of other programs.

How about the farmer who doesn't have to rely on horses any longer.
Now they have to understand how to operate different pieces of
mechanized equipment and they have to be aware of pharmacology as
they drug and monitor their livestock. They have to be aware of soil
chemistry, fertilizer toxicity, and optimum crop rotation and
balancing in order to manage their land more efficiently.

There are many job functions that have grown more complex because of
the need to master technology. The jobs that really do require
nothing more than muscle are simply not cost-competitive in the
first world.

> Many manufacturing facilities (example heat treatment plants,
> stamping plants, plastic molding, etc) the worker doing the work
> doesn't even know what the final product is today.

They don't have to know what they are making. What they have to know
to do their job efficiently is how to operate the equipment.

> In another example, previous to Ford purchasing Austin Martin,
> Austin Martin workers built every car by hand. After purchase, Ford
> introduced Assemply line methods, and the quality of the product
> went up. By decreasing the knowledge requirements of the workers,
> and introducing workflow that isolated the worker from knowing too
> much, they produced better products.

You're confusing craftsmen, or tradespeople, with manufacturing.
Your anology suffers because the skill and knowledge sets are not
directly comparable. The trade-off is not one of knowledge for less
knowledge, as you assert, but the knowledge used by a craftsman is
replaced by the knowledge used by a technician who controls
machinary.

> In fact it is the condition that
> Drucker was talking about. Small scale production of multiple items
> where no one can really specialize on anything and specialization
> is not a desirable thing.
>
> Bill

Either you've never read Drucker of you're mischaracterizing some
point of his so that I have absolutely no idea what you're actually
referring to. Can you provide a reference to your assertion that
Drucker said that specialization is not a desirable thing.

TangoMan