Clearly there are certain types of industry to which they are only partially relevant. It can hardly be assumed, for example, that the degree of skill and energy brought to his work by a surgeon, a scientific investigator, a teacher, a medical officer of health, an Indian civil servant and a peasant proprietor are capable of being expressed precisely and to the same degree in terms of the economic advantage which those different occupations offer. Obviously those who pursue them are influenced to some considerable, though uncertain, extent by economic incentives. Obviously, again, the precise character of each process or step in the exercise of their respective avocations, the performance of an operation, the carrying out of a piece of investigation, the selection of a particular type of educational method, the preparation of a report, the decision of a case or the care of live stock, is not immediately dependent upon an exact calculation of pecuniary gain or loss. What appears to be the case is that in certain walks of life, while the occupation is chosen after a consideration of its economic advantages, and while economic reasons exact the minimum degree of activity needed to avert dismissal from it or “failure,” the actual level of energy or proficiency displayed depend largely upon conditions of a different order. Among them are the character of the training received before and after entering the occupation, the customary standard of effort demanded by the public opinion of one’s fellows, the desire for the esteem of the small circle in which the individual moves and to be recognized as having “made good” and not to have “failed,” interest in one’s work, ranging from devotion to a determination to “do justice” to it, the pride of the craftsman, the “tradition of the service.”
It would be foolish to suggest that any considerable body of men are uninfluenced by economic considerations. But to represent them as amenable to such incentives only is to give a quite unreal and bookish picture of the actual conditions under which the work of the world is carried on. How large a part such considerations play varies from one occupation to another, according to the character of the work which it does and the manner in which it is organized. In what is called par excellence industry, calculations of pecuniary gain and loss are more powerful than in most of the so-called professions, though even in industry they are more constantly present to the minds of the business men who “direct” it, than to those of the managers and technicians, most of whom are paid fixed salaries, or to the rank and file of wage-workers. In the professions of teaching and medicine, in many branches of the public service, the necessary qualities are secured, without the intervention of the capitalist employer, partly by pecuniary incentives, partly by training and education, partly by the acceptance on the part of those entering them of the traditional obligations of their profession as part of the normal framework of their working lives. But this difference is not constant and unalterable. It springs from the manner in which different types of occupation are organized, on the training which they offer, and the morale which they cultivate among their members. The psychology of a vocation can in fact be changed; new motives can be elicited, provided steps are taken to allow them free expression. It is as feasible to turn building into an organized profession, with a relatively high code of public honor, as it was to do the same for medicine or teaching.
The truth is that we ought radically to revise the presuppositions as to human motives on which current presentations of economic theory are ordinarily founded and in terms of which the discussion of economic question is usually carried on. The assumption that the stimulus of imminent personal want is either the only spur, or a sufficient spur, to productive effort is a relic of a crude psychology which has little warrant either in past history or in present experience. It derives what plausibility it possesses from a confusion between work in the sense of the lowest quantum of activity needed to escape actual starvation, and the work which is given, irrespective of the fact that elementary wants may already have been satisfied, through the natural disposition of ordinary men to maintain, and of extraordinary men to improve upon, the level of exertion accepted as reasonable by the public opinion of the group of which they are members. It is the old difference, forgotten by society as often as it is learned, between the labor of the free man and that of the slave. Economic fear may secure the minimum effort needed to escape economic penalties. What, however, has made progress possible in the past, and what, it may be suggested, matters to the world today, is not the bare minimum which is required to avoid actual want, but the capacity of men to bring to bear upon their tasks a degree of energy, which, while it can be stimulated by economic incentives, yields results far in excess of any which are necessary merely to avoid the extremes of hunger or destitution.
That capacity is a matter of training, tradition and habit, at least as much as of pecuniary stimulus, and the ability of a professional association representing the public opinion of a group of workers to raise it is, therefore, considerable. Once industry has been liberated from its subservience to the interests of the functionless property-owner, it is in this sphere that trade unions may be expected increasingly to find their function. Its importance both
