Abstract
The newspaper industry provides an ideal context for studying the impact of industrial and technological change on the labor process. Sociologists have long noted the exemplary craftsmanship and occupational pride of the printing trades.1 These authors viewed printing as “an anachronism in the age of large scale industrial organization,”2 where the venerable traditions of craftsmanship, pride in one’s work, and control over the immediate work process remained virtually undaunted by technological change. Yet recent advances in automating nearly all phases of newspaper production have rendered obsolete Blauner’s original portrait of the printing craftsman. Indeed, it is difficult to think of an industry where the transformations wrought by technological change have been so profound. Smith has recently remarked that the newspaper industry is “the dove sent from the ark of mechanical society to test the waters of computerization.”3 Surely, there are few other industries that, in the span of a single generation, so embody the remembrances of our preindustrial past and prefigure the future of an automated society.
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Reference
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© 1987 Plenum Press, New York
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Kalleberg, A.L., Wallace, M., Loscocco, K.A., Leicht, K.T., Ehm, HH. (1987). The Eclipse of Craft. In: Cornfield, D.B. (eds) Workers, Managers, and Technological Change. Plenum Studies in Work and Industry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1821-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1821-7_3
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