Guilds
Guild refers to various self-determining circles of trust and merit in professional and socio-cultural domains. Membership is contingent on specific training or apprenticeship processes and testing, to ensure transmission of a body of knowledge and standards of practice. Guilds increased the reliability of fair exchange in contracts for goods or service by asserting high standards of workmanship and holding to an engrained moral "peer pressure" for integrity and honorability. As a scalable "community of practice" the guild system helped to spread, evolve, and maintain advanced productive skill-sets while upholding traditions and characteristics of localities and specialties. There was often an element of enforced "trade secrecy" within a guild membership to secure valuable know-how, and this tendency toward enclosure of knowledge commons contributed to a loss of ground and stature in the face of free-trade capitalism and intellectual property legislation.
Progression of members
- Apprentice
- Journeyman / Fellow
- Master
Discussion
from David de Ugarte:
Criticism: [guilds] were an impediment to the development of the freedom of movement and the homogenisation of the workforce required for the success of industrialisation.
Every guild was really a knowledge community. The entire structure of the community revolved around knowledge transmission. That knowledge was partly technical and specialised, but it was also linked to a particular work ethic, to the construction of a moral discourse from the symbolism of tools and daily life.
Initiation ceremonies of weavers, dyers, stonemasons and blacksmiths in British guilds...were still being performed in the 20th century. The apprentice was identified by the object and tools of his profession, which was represented in the manner of a psychodrama, e.g. by means of a piece of iron being forged, a stone being struck for the first time, or a canvas about to be painted.
Apprentices were not regarded as part of the profession. Only the passage from apprenticeship to fellowship – with the experience of fraternity evoked by the very term – allowed the neophyte to become part of the community. Whereas an apprentice was taught the use of tools and was told about the guild history and myths, a fellow was expected to contribute in a practical way. And in the case of stonemasons, for whom mathematics was a fundamental part of guild knowledge, geometrical demonstrations were also expected, such as the famous "five points of fellowship", which were used to calculate the central point in the layout of a building to be raised.
Itinerancy: When an apprentice was being trained but couldn't be guaranteed a job, instead of being incorporated as a fellow, he was invited to travel, visiting different workshops, for some time. Workshops with pending orders would temporarily accept him, and continue his training while learning new techniques from him. At the end of the itinerancy apprentices would become fellows in their original workshop or else in a workshop sprung from it. This system not only served to optimise workforce distribution, but also to spread innovations within the same guild, homogenising the "state of the art".
Likewise, limiting the maximum number of masters in a given workshop encouraged the geographic spread of the guild, in the same way as the right to segregation previously discussed nowadays encourages sectorial expansion from an economically democratic business.
The statutes and texts of the guilds were a natural mingling of practical questions, such as salaries, with specialised technical knowledge and moral metaphors constructed from daily practice.
Nowadays "professional" does not make us think of someone who has a job linked to a specific group knowledge which he or she has accessed by taking certain vows and undergoing a personal / moral transformation. But it is crucial to understand the logic of social cohesion in the Old Regime. That cohesion logic constituted a clear impediment to the development of the industrial, national world. The identities generated by the guild tradition were dense and inhabited a universe of full meanings and a real community logic which would not take easily to a flat world of abstract markets and homogenisation.
Source: the book, Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century. by David de Ugarte (http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf)
Reference: Jorge Francisco Ferro, La masonería operativa, Kier, Buenos Aires, 2008.
Should we re-invent guilds for the 21st century?
Thomas Malone:
"One particularly promising new approach has emerged from our work in MIT's initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century. This approach no longer relies exclusively on the "usual suspects of the industrial era -- employers and government -- to provide the benefits associated with a traditional job.
Instead, it relies on a rich ecology of other organizations to look after the needs of mobile workers as they move from assignment to assignment. We call these other organizations "guilds by analogy to the craft associations of the Middle Ages.
Medieval guilds grew out of tradesman's fraternities and mutual assistance clubs. Guilds trained apprentices and helped them find work. They cemented social bonds; guild members worshipped together and marched as a group in town pageants. They also offered loans and schooling, and if misfortune struck, provided an income for members' families.
Existing organizations perform some of these functions today. As much as 30 percent of the base pay of Screen Actors Guild members goes to the benefits fund; in return, members get health benefits, generous pensions and access to professional development programs.
Imagine an extended version of this where members paid a fraction of their income to the guild in the good times in return for a guaranteed minimum income in the bad times. This is a form of unemployment insurance, but with an important difference. Guild members would have an incentive to help their counterparts find work, assisting them to gain skills needed to be productive, exerting social pressure on members they felt weren't trying.
Guilds could also provide places, physical and electronic, for learning and socializing with colleagues. And membership might give people the sense of identity that many of us get today from positions in large organizations. Indeed, in many cases, guilds might replace the employer as the organization to which workers feel the strongest loyalty.
A variety of existing organizations already fill some of these roles and could form the seeds for more comprehensive guilds. For example, many professional societies already offer their members insurance plans, training and opportunities to socialize. And labor unions have long provided portable benefits for workers in industries, like construction and entertainment, where workers move frequently from one employer to the next.
Both unions and professional societies have significant opportunities to increase the range of services they provide and thus become even more important in the future than they are today. Unlike today's unions, however, the guilds of the future need not hold monopoly control over a profession or occupational group. Instead, multiple guilds may often compete to provide the best services at the best price for the same group of workers.
Another promising source for guilds of the future are temporary staffing firms, which offer benefits to temporary workers that resemble those provided by traditional employers: vacation and sick pay, health insurance and pensions, training, career assistance, even stock options.
New organizations could also grow into guilds of the future. For example, Working Today, a New York-based nonprofit, provides low-cost health insurance and a variety of other services to freelance technology workers in Manhattan's Silicon Alley. Today's flexible economy is far more productive and innovative than its plodding counterpart of a generation ago. For workers to enjoy fully the opportunities this new economy presents, they will require institutions to help blunt the greater risks they face.
Guilds represent a promising approach -- applicable today, adaptable for the future -- to meet workers' needs in an increasingly dynamic American economy." (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/oped-1004.html)
"This piece by Thomas Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems and director of the Center for Coordination Science at the Sloan School of Management, and Sloan School Research Associate Robert Laubacher originally appeared in the Boston Globe on August 24, 2000." (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2000/oped-1004.html)
From Medieval Guilds to Open Source Software: Informal Norms, Appropriability Institutions, and Innovation
Robert P. Merges University of California, Berkeley - School of Law
November 13, 2004
Abstract:
This essay draws on recent scholarship concerning the nature and function of medieval guilds. I argue that certain features of these guilds appear in modern institutions that further collective invention ("appropriability institutions"): patent pools, industry-wide standard-setting organizations, informal knowledge exchange among academic scientists, and (in a more limited way) open source software development. In particular, guilds and modern institutions share three features: (1) an "appropriability structure" that makes it profitable for individual entities to develop new technologies and sometimes share them; (2) reliance on group norms, as opposed to formal legal enactments, as an enforcement mechanism; and (3) a balance of competition and cooperation which determines what information is to be shared with the group, and what (if any) individual-proprietary information is not. The current trend toward greater dispersal and atomization of economic activity may increase the importance of such interfirm appropriability institutions.