- Hardcover: 223 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins (July 1979)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060138572
- ISBN-13: 978-0060138578
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14.2 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,366,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Synopsis
Indicates directions individuals can take to make a workable future for themselves, stressing that man can control and redirect technology and large institutions by recognizing the importance of the human being.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Dr. Schumacher, author of "Small is Beautiful" and "A Guide for the Perplexed", was one of the wise men of the last fifty years. In this collection of six talks given in America during the mid-1970s one of his themes is that the purpose of work is threefold: to produce necessary and useful goods and services; to enable us to use and perfect our gifts and skills; and to collaborate with other people so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity. A job in which there is no personal satisfaction destroys the soul. He maintained that we need a new worldview - a new paradigm - and his 1962 report for the government of India proposed using small, simple tools and equipment with low capital cost and low impact on the environment was the start of the new paradigm. Considering the centrality of work in human life, the choice of technology is critical. Poor countries need intermediate technologies to ensure that the rural masses can work themselves out of poverty and thus raise their standard of living.
While Chief Economist at the National Coal Board, Schumacher devoted time to three projects which became his great passion. The first was the Soil Association to develop organic farming. The second was the Scott Bader company which had no owners or employees - only co-owners and co-employees. The third was his new paradigm - intermediate technology. In one of his essays the author provides helpful insights: "The third organization I am concerned with is one that I started with a handful of friends in 1965: the Intermediate Technology Development Group. Now you have the company, charity status, no money, maybe somebody has let you share an office, but what do you want to do? You want to create and systematize this intermediate technology, but how do you set about doing this? All I can say at this early stage is, beware of the planners. There are all sorts of impatient people who will say, you must have a five-year plan and a ten-year plan. Quite useless. You must realize your nonknowledge, what you don't know. The inner attitude if you think you know is quite different from the attitude when you know you don't know. You're much more observant, more alert. And it happened that we heard that a British trade mission was going to Nigeria, and we thought, my goodness, what are they going to flog in Nigeria? Certainly not the stuff the Nigerians really need. What if we made, very rapidly, a catalogue of hand- and animal-propelled agricultural equipment obtainable in Britain? We had only a few weeks to do it, and under this pressure we found that our society is very highly organized. You have only to find out how to touch the network; the network already exists. When the mission went to Nigeria, they were most astonished. This thing was torn out of their hands by people who said, 'For the first time you bring us something that is of interest.'"
Most of what Schumacher had to say thirty years ago is just as valid today. He had a very perceptive mind and a lifetime of experience in a big industry. That is what turned him off the western style of development and doing business. With this book you can have the ideas of a very wise, practical and foresighted person who spent his later years thinking out of the box and fighting the system that he had grown to abhor. Many of his ideas were before their time and only in recent years has the world caught up. This is an author whose books are certainly worth reading.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
a great book full of such profound common sense. essays entitled
the end of an era
towards a human scale technology
a viable future visable in the present
on appropriate forms of ownership and action
education for good work
the party's over
already read it twice most of it underlined.making changes in my life.
also worth looking at william morris useful work verses useless toil
the end of an era
towards a human scale technology
a viable future visable in the present
on appropriate forms of ownership and action
education for good work
the party's over
already read it twice most of it underlined.making changes in my life.
also worth looking at william morris useful work verses useless toil
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Schumacher's Writing is Fantastic, Gillingham's Inappropriately Included
11 July 2005
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Schumacher's writings in 'Good Work' clarified for me more than ever the important things in human life and society, what we need to do to sustain meaningful lives, as well putting on paper many things I had "already thought", as is so often the case with real truths and which he put into plain meaningful text thus really crystallizing them. The first 6 Chapters / 145 pages of the book are Schumacher's and are timelessly brilliant.
The 7th long chapter (71 pages) was written by Peter Gillingham. While Gillingham's writing may be fine in a stand-alone book covering his own ideas, I felt it to have been inappropriately "tacked on" to Schumacher's priceless work. By doing so I it feel watered down or diverted the reader away from Schumacher's genius, with the book drifting off into other domains.
This book "Good Work" is 100% worth getting and reading, and is especially relevant to life today (2005) . Although written 30 years ago, it was way ahead of its time, and the points it makes about society, its obsessive addiction to oil and unnatural systems of living are very relevant to what's happening today - in effect, the chickens it writes about in the mid-1970's are now coming home to roost.
The 7th long chapter (71 pages) was written by Peter Gillingham. While Gillingham's writing may be fine in a stand-alone book covering his own ideas, I felt it to have been inappropriately "tacked on" to Schumacher's priceless work. By doing so I it feel watered down or diverted the reader away from Schumacher's genius, with the book drifting off into other domains.
This book "Good Work" is 100% worth getting and reading, and is especially relevant to life today (2005) . Although written 30 years ago, it was way ahead of its time, and the points it makes about society, its obsessive addiction to oil and unnatural systems of living are very relevant to what's happening today - in effect, the chickens it writes about in the mid-1970's are now coming home to roost.
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
