Industrial work at the anthropological crossroads

• Author: Fabrizio D'Aniello
• Position: Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata, Italy
• Pages: 21-30

Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Braşov

Series VII: Social Sciences • Law • Vol. 7(56) No. 2 - 2014

INDUSTRIAL WORK AT THE

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CROSSROADS

Fabrizio D’ANIELLO 1

Abstract: This paper, written by following a methodological approach of a

critical-historiographical kind, faces, on a pedagogical basis, the post-

Taylor-Fordist evolution of the organizational, productive and training

modalities of the waged industrial work, paying close attention to those

dynamics (not only the ones within the companies) that could outline, both in

a positive or negative way, the representation of the person who works and

the conditions of his/her educability. The argumentations below firstly give

prominence to the educational potentialities connected with the new

configuration of the working activity, then highlight their main criticalities

and, in closing, leave room for an educational proposal which tends to

promote a person-centred culture of the economic action and the work.

Key words: industrial work, educability, motivations, consumption,

economic education.

1 Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism, University of Macerata, Italy.

1. Introduction

The several, deep and incessant changes

that give substance to the contemporary

age going through it and, as a

consequence, the impossibility of

understanding the complexity of its

changeable identity profile in its entirely,

make both an univocal definition or a

vision of definitive synthesis

impracticable. Also the prefix post, used in

many attempts of qualifying a topicality

that is by now bereft of strong models of

thinking and “great narrations”, is not

helpful. In fact, referring to an amply

experimented before and to the passing of

some of its aspects, it denotes the difficulty

in outlining the characteristic features of

our age in absolute terms. Surely, the

above-mentioned complexity corresponds

to the concept that best frames a picture

still in becoming, however it is undeniable

that the historical season we are living in,

starting from the late Nineteenth century,

first of all stands out because of its

ambivalence. In effect, Western post-

modern, post-industrial, post-ideological,

etc. man and society fluid float on the

asphalt of everyday life, tossed about by

the foamy waves of a contradictory reality,

in which coexist, on an anthropological

level, contrasting evidences and incentives

that nourish the fermentation of a fragile

and disoriented humanity, leading the

person’s representation, the conception of

his/her way of being, act ing, doing and the

reasons of his/her educability in the face of

an uncertain destiny.

In order to illuminate the nature of such

ambivalence, contradictoriness and all the

criticalities that accompany them, I could

rely on the antinomies which permeate