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Show Forum Offers Critique On Modern 'Bigness5 By SANDRA TELFORD Chronicle Staff Writer "Bigness is here to stay," said Dr. Bertram Morris of the University of Colorado Wednesday night in the fifth of the Great Issues in Amen-, can Individualism. "Therefore we must see what we can do with it, i he said. j In his topic 'Has 'Bigness' Outmoded Individualism?" Dr. . Morris defined "bigness" as a character of the industrial system, made Dossible bv the new science. The whole complex, he said, is one we are all familiar with as one which combines science, technology, tech-nology, and industry. "INDUSTRY," said Dr. Morris, "is not just a job shop it a highly high-ly organized and rationalized form of bureaucracy." "A bureaucracy," he said quoting sociologist Rheinhart Bendix, "is the universal tendency of men who are employed in hierarchial organizations organi-zations to obey directives and to identify their own interests and ideas with the organization, and with all those persons in it who share this identification." THEREFORE, to Dr. Morris, a question crucial to this topic is whether there is any identification of those that are employed in the organization with the interests and ideas that it presents, or is there just a tendency for the employers to identify themselves with the organization? or-ganization? In connection with this, he raised rais-ed some "queries first with the worker and then with the middle manager, who are directly engaged in the industrialization process, and then with those that try and avoid the system, and finally with the entrepreneur in modern business. "The identification of the worker," work-er," Dr. Morris said, "is very incomplete. The more boring, limited, and unchallenging the operation that the workers are to perform, the less their identify cation with the organization. "Work," he said, "can be menial, a drudge, repetative and fatiguing to such an extent that it defests individualism instead of supporting it" BUT DR. Morris came to the conclusion con-clusion that there are many more compensations than there are maladies. mala-dies. "Bigness," he continued, "is an individualistic system that produces leisure, education, and lets one meet people of one's taste. It binds poverty that was once known to man and calls up the imagination that has been unknown to men. In his concluding remarks. Dr. Morris said, "The shift in emphasis is acknowledged in our language. Whereas formerly, certain major issues were spoken of as the conflict con-flict between capital and labor, they are now generally spoken of as between be-tween management and labor. |
