Chapter 2 The Organization of Work in Preindustrial Times

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has been most evident in preindustrial societies, where fathers, mothers, children, and other members of the family all have certain kinds of tasks assigned
to them. Family structure also provides a ready-made hierarchy that reflects
age and gender, with fathers and older males usually exercising authority over
women and younger members of the family. The fairness of this arrangement
can certainly be questioned, but it does provide a basis for allocating and
coordinating the work performed by individual family members, as well as a
way of justifying who has authority over whom.
Families also offer something that is vital to the functioning of effective
organizations: trust. To be sure, one may learn through bitter experience that
not all family members are trustworthy, but because of their duration and
intensity, family ties offer a better basis for relationships of trust than social
connections that are more distant and ephemeral. This is especially true in
societies where it can be presumed that extra-familial organizations such as
the government, military, and even organized religious bodies are primarily
out for themselves and that their relationships with individuals are likely to
be exploitative. Under these circumstances, membership in a family unit constitutes a bulwark of protection and mutual support in a world full of dangers, uncertainties, and real and potential enemies.
Trust, of course, is a two-way street. In return for the physical and emotional benefits of family membership, individuals are usually expected to pull
their own weight, and a great deal of pressure can be applied to those who
dont. This aids considerably in addressing another issue confronting all
organizations: motivation. An outside employer can punish or fire an
employee for dishonesty or poor performance, but the loss of the respect of
family members (and in extreme cases, expulsion from the family) is likely to
be a far more severe sanction. More positively, the honor and respect that
come from supporting ones family can be a powerful stimulus for hard work,
as exemplified by the millions of immigrants from poor countries who send
substantial portions of their incomes to their families back home.7

____________________________________________ Slavery
Ascriptive statuses derived from family membership may result in the exploitation of some members of a family to the benefit of other members. But
work roles based on other forms of ascription can be far more exploitative.
The worst of these has used ascriptive statuses as the basis of involuntary
servitude or, to put it more bluntly, slavery. In some slaveholding societies, the
basis of ascription was ethnicity and often followed the conquest of one
group of people by anotherin fact, the word slave is directly derived from
Slav, the predominant ethnicity of Eastern Europe. A less common basis
for the enslavement of a people was race, as was practiced in the American
South prior to the Civil War. At the same time, racial and ethnic distinctions,
both real and perceived, were reinforced by legal, social, cultural, and political power that maintained the boundary between the free and the enslaved.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK AND OCCUPATIONS

Slavery has been widely practiced throughout much of human history;

sad to say, it exists even today.8 Slavery was a major source of labor in
ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian societies, although to a somewhat lesser extent in the latter. Slavery was tightly woven into the
fabric of society throughout antiquity. Much of the work done in
Greece and Rome was performed by slaves, and it is no exaggeration
to say that slave labor was the foundation of a large portion of economic life in the ancient world. Under these circumstances, ideas about
individual dignity and freedom were not universally applicable. In
Athenian democracy, for example, a sharp division between the
rights of slaves and citizens was taken for granted.

Photo 2.1 Slave auction in the antebellum South

SOURCE: Leonard de Selva/CORBIS.

The number of slaves and their ratio to free citizens in ancient Athens and
Greece as a whole have been matters of considerable debate among scholars.
The number of slaves in Athens by the end of the 4th century B.C. has been
estimated as ranging from 20,000 to 400,000, with a modal figure of about
100,000. This last number implies a ratio of one slave to every three free
citizens, about the same proportion found in the American South on the eve
of the Civil Waralthough slaveholding was probably more widely diffused
through Greek society.9

Chapter 2 The Organization of Work in Preindustrial Times

Slave labor continued to be used in early medieval Europe, as there was

nothing in contemporary Christian doctrine to discourage it, even when the
slave and his or her owner were both Christians. At the same time, however,
the spread of slavery was inhibited by the belief that Christians should not
wage war against fellow Christians in order to enslave them. Even so, some
substantial enterprises made abundant use of slave labor. For example, in the
13th century, Frederick II, emperor of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, had
several textile workshops in Italy and Sicily in which the work was performed
by female slaves.10 Slavery continued to exist in urban settings, and some of
the great merchant city-states such as Venice and Genoa gained a fair portion
of their wealth by trafficking in slaves.11 By the 13th century, the buying and
selling of Christian slaves was forbidden by the Church, but people of other
faiths, notably Muslims, continued to be fair game.
Slavery was less prominent in farming, and by the early Middle Ages, it
had been replaced by serfdom as the primary form of unfree agricultural
labor in western Europe. Under the conditions of serfdom, rural people were
nominally free, but they were bound to the land they lived and worked on,
which meant that when the land was sold to a new owner, they were included
in the transaction. The freedom of serfs was further circumscribed by mandatory work on the landowners properties, and they were required to hand
over a portion of the crops they had grown. Serfs also had to use the landowners facilities for milling grain (and pay for it), and they could be
impressed as soldiers should the need arise. Although serfdom began to go
into decline in England as early as the 14th century, it persisted on the
European continent. Many French peasants had the legal status of serfs prior
to the Revolution that began in 1789, and serfdom was not legally abolished
in Russia until 1861.
Urban slavery also had considerable staying power in western Europe.
After diminishing in the early Middle Ages, it became more common during
the 14th century when the Black Death produced a substantial labor shortage.12 Involuntary servitude was particularly prominent in the lands along the
Mediterranean, where slaves were extensively used as domestic servants.13 It
wasnt until the late 15th century that slavery began to wane as the Turkish
control of the Black Sea region cut off the supply of potential slaves, but even
so, some vestiges of slavery could be found in Italy as late as the
18th century.
While slavery was slowly declining in Europe, it was gaining a new lease
on life in the New World, where the plantation economies of the West Indies,
the American South, and parts of Latin America created an enormous
demand for slave labor. Unlike the situation in antiquity, military conquest
was not the primary source of slave labor. Large numbers of slaves were supplied by profit-seeking enterprises that took advantage of the highly lucrative
trade in humans from Africa to the New World. In another departure from
ancient and medieval practices, slavery in the Americas was based solely on
the ascribed characteristic of race. As noted above, race is a problematic,

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK AND OCCUPATIONS

ambiguous characteristic only weakly grounded in biology, but owners of

slaves were not troubled by such subtleties; any fraction of African ancestry
rendered a person black and, hence, subject to enslavement. Early slavery
in the New World had some of the flexibility found in other slaveholding
societies in that some men and women of African ancestry could eventually
attain their freedom. But as the plantation system became the foundation of
the economies of the American South and islands of the Caribbean, slavery
and racial differentiation powerfully reinforced each other.14
Slavery, in turn, had direct consequences for the way work was apportioned. In the antebellum South, slaves were forced to labor as field hands, or,
if a bit more fortunate, they were put to work as domestic servants or workers
in plantation-based industries such as sugar refining. Some slaves even worked
as skilled craftsmen and as operatives in industrial enterprises. But whatever
the tasks they performed, slaves in the New World worked under an economic
and social order far more confining than many other examples of involuntary
servitude. Slaves were defined as chattel, and their legal status was no different from that of the inanimate property held by slave owners.
In contrast, slavery in ancient Rome and Greece was a looser system in
some respects. For one, slavery was not always based on race or ethnicity,
although the warfare that was the wellspring of slavery often pitted one ethnic group against another, as when Romans successfully took up arms against
Germanic barbarians and brought them back as slaves. Slavery in the
ancient world did have a strong hereditary component; no matter what talents they may have possessed, being born the child of a slave (especially when
ones mother was a slave) usually destined a person to a slaves existence. At
the same time, however, the working lives of some slaves might have entailed
the exercise of considerable skills and responsibilities. Most slaves in the
ancient world were agricultural workers, artisans, and household servants.
The least fortunate worked under appalling conditions in underground
mines, where free labor scarcely existed. But some slaves were employed in
positions that required a fair amount of skill and responsibility, serving as
artists and craftsmen, musicians, scribes, teachers, physicians, and even
minor government officials.
Most important, to be a slave in the ancient world was not necessarily a
permanent condition. Some slaves in the Roman empire were able to earn
money through various means, such as taking on jobs outside their usual
duties. In some cases, slaves even owned slaves of their own, who could be
the source of a substantial income.15 Over time, a few slaves amassed sufficient savings to buy freedom for themselves and their families. Other slaves
were set free by their masters, an act known as manumission. Some slave
owners ordered that their slaves be freed after their death, while others occasionally freed their slaves through humanitarian impulses or simply because
they no longer could afford to keep them. A freed slave, however, did not
immediately vault to the status of citizen; in Rome, full political status was
not attained until two generations had followed the initial manumission.

Chapter 2 The Organization of Work in Preindustrial Times

Before leaving the topic of slavery, something should be said about slaverys effects on work and worker motivation. Unlike wage earners, slaves
were a fixed cost for the owners; their food, clothing, and shelter were not
directly linked to their output or general work performance. Moreover, slave
labor usually was highly inefficient when compared with most forms of free
labor. Work could be (and often was) coerced through a variety of punishments, but this necessitated a high level of supervision, and it was poorly
suited to any kind of work that required initiative, innovation, or attention
to detail. For the most part, slavery was an effective form of labor organization only when tasks were repetitious and relatively simple and when work
could be closely monitored. Under these circumstances, slavery was hardly
conducive to the development of a skilled labor force.
It frequently has been asserted that slavery also inhibited the development of labor-saving technologies. This is not altogether convincing; after
all, if they were so inclined, slave owners could have increased their incomes
by making their slaves more productive through the invention and use of
newer and better ways of doing things. More likely, slavery inhibited technological advance in an indirect manner by causing work, especially physical labor, to be disparaged as an activity unworthy of free men. This
attitude occasionally appears in statements by Greek philosophers, who of
course were members of the privileged slaveholding class. When Aristotle
claimed that no man can practice virtue when he is living the life of a
mechanic,16 his objection to manual work centered on the workers need
to sell his wares or serve as someones employee. As Aristotle saw it, work
done for another, even if it entailed selling items one had made, implied
servitude, and this was not an appropriate role for citizens, whose chief
concerns were supposed to be politics and pursuit of learning.17 From this
perspective, work done for an employer or a paying customer was bad
enough, but slavery was the ultimate form of servitude. This belief may
have been appropriate for an elite that had no qualms about being supported by slave labor, but it also constituted an obstacle to the development
of productive technologies. Technological advance requires the mental
capabilities prized by the Greek philosophers, but it also depends on the
willingness of inventors and entrepreneurs to engage in the sort of hands-on
activities that Aristotle found distasteful.
The ancient worlds attitude toward work contrasts sharply with the
Protestant Ethic described in Chapter 1. Neither perspective, that of Greek
philosophers nor Protestant businessmen, was the decisive element in shaping
the trajectory of economic change, but the denigration of work characteristic
of the ancient world surely contributed to a slow pace of economic advance.
In similar fashion, the perpetuation of slavery in the European Middle Ages
and the enormous expansion of slavery that accompanied the settlement and
colonization of many parts of the New World also inhibited the creation and
development of workplace technologies that ultimately made slavery obsolete
and unnecessary.

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