Adam Smith  (1723-1791)       webmaster dboje@nmsu.edu (report broken links). 

What about the influence of wage rates? Smith (1976) in the  Wealth of Nations, saw the choice about paying each worker a "living wage" was clear, economic and moral:

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation (Smith, 1776, CHAPTER VIII Of the Wages of Labor). 

Adam Smith did not favor sweatshops. Adam Smith, among others, contended that interests of self-centered interests of merchants and manufacturers ran counter to the general welfare of society.  Smith advocated local accountability, moral reasoning, and a limit to bigness of business. Smith did favor the landowners over the merchants and manufacturers.

The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies.  The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country (WN, 2: 848).

Smith argued for the primacy of agrarian capitalism over industrial capitalism.

Spectators and Ethics - Adam Smith provides a clue as to how to transform spectacle into festival. He wrote about spectators to the spectacle that could look upon the moral sentiments of their own agency. He proposed a distinction between “partial spectator” who sees with self-seeking interest and the “impartial spectator” who is able look upon their behavior with moral sentiments. Smith’s approach had its flaws. It would limit representation to land-owning gentry (elites) who would control as “impartial spectators” the greedy and monopolistic interests of “partial” manufacturers and merchants and provide living wages to workers. Smith redefined wealth as the living standard of the laboring, landless and vote-less peasant in each nation.  For Adam Smith, the partial spectator was only able to think of their own utilities, and disregarded viewing the spectacle from any other viewpoint.  Smith proposed that the impartial spectator, like the agency-managerialist, could internalize the vantage point of other spectators and reach impartial judgments.

For more on spectacle and Smith, see (Boje, 2001, Spectacles and Festivals of Organization: Managing Ahimsa Production and Consumption [please use Use ID=Guest PASS=Guest ). To move away from spectacle, we reinvite Adam Smith’s (partial, impartial, and ideal) moral spectators to witness and gaze our economic choices. Festive narration is a critical postmodern living story of choices of animal, use, earth use, and people use and it is just picking up Adam Smith’s call for a kinder and gentler capitalism brought into being through spectator awareness. In festivalism we script the self-worth of our character, instead of passively accepting someone else’s addicted to spectacle hero for us to mimic. We see our partiality in the violence of production, distribution, and consumption of goods based upon sweatshop labor.  

 

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