Manufacturing quality in the pre-industrial age

Finding Value in Diversity

Bibliographic Data

ID3346739
AuthorsPierre Claude Reynard, Pierre Reynard (0000-0001-5901-4392, Western University, corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume53
Issue3
Pages493-516
Publication date2000-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Economic History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1468-0289.00168
OpenAlexW1966551893
LanguageEN
Citations received10

When deployed on a large and rational scale and committed to high throughput levels, early modern manufacturing methods inevitably yielded a substantial proportion of non-standard and defective items. This proportion could only increase as the pace of work accelerated in the eighteenth century. Manufacturers regained a degree of control over their marketing strategies through the more or less rigorous sorting of this output, in a pattern suited to their markets. In so doing, they forged a transitional definition of quality that moved away from the linear pursuit of excellence that motivated their predecessors towards a relative understanding of the needs of diverse groups of buyers

Business · Diversity (politics) · Economics · Excellence · Geography · Industrial organization · Operations management · Pace · Political science · Quality (philosophy) · Scale (ratio) · Sorting · Value (mathematics) · Work (physics) · Computer Science · Engineering · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Law · Marketing · Mechanical Engineering

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub