The Artisan

[Lindsayt]

I think there's a place for huge multinationals, medium sized companies, 1 man bands and for all sizes inbetween.

Always has been, always will and certainly is now.

Multinationals for commodity items, medium sized for more specialised stuff where a certain amount of investment in manufacturing facilities is required / more specialised market than commodity items and 1 man bands where no large investment in plant is required and all that's needed is a certain skill set or specialised knowledge.

EG Intel or AMD for computer CPU chips = huge companies, Morgan cars for specialist sports cars = medium, my local plasterer for re-skimming my walls = artisan.

What you may also find is medium sized companies that get bought by larger companies till they form a huge multi-national, eg ABB.

As a consumer I'm not bothered what sized companies I buy from, I'm more interested in whether the products or services are something that I want to buy or not. I guess most people are the same - although some are more swayed by marketing than others and it's the bigger companies that tend to invest more in marketing.

[savvypaul]

What Goldman Sachs are asking is 'how do we monetise 'artisan'? The 'answer' that corporations usually employ is to buy-up and /or mimic, then put the margins up by many multiples.

1970s - "We have these great new chemicals to make crops grow better, but we have to charge more."

1990s - "We support organic crops, but we have to charge more than for the stuff with the chemicals on"

Now - "We need to do that again with other stuff...and we have to charge more."

It's just the same consumerism but with slicker branding. If we want to break the cycle we have to to do more for ourselves within our communities, and become less greedy.

Permaculture - practical solutions

[Simon Hickie]

I see the our educational system as being a significant contributor to the problem. For the last few decades schools have concentrated on teaching children WHAT to think, not HOW to think. This means that far too many people under the age of 50 are unable to discriminate between information sources or analyse what they are being told. Only my best undergraduate students seemed able to make the jump from uncritical regurgitation of what they had read to a proper critical evaluation of the literature.

We have now moved to a situation where religion being the opium of the people has been replaced at one end by cheap consumer tat designed to satisfy people's lust for consumption and oneupmanship and at the other by over-hyped and marketed 'high-end' products designed for the same purpose. This means that quality 'good value' items at whatever price point get squeezed. It's the classic 'stuck in the middle' business scenario: neither mass market cheapo nor expensive (over priced) niche.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I like being a squeezed middle

[TheMadMick]

I see the our educational system as being a significant contributor to the problem. For the last few decades schools have concentrated on teaching children WHAT to think, not HOW to think. This means that far too many people under the age of 50 are unable to discriminate between information sources or analyse what they are being told. Only my best undergraduate students seemed able to make the jump from uncritical regurgitation of what they had read to a proper critical evaluation of the literature.
SNIP

That may explain the reaction I got lecturing to a group of recent graduates. They seemed to want the answer handed to them and objected when I gave them a steer. I was really gutted as I thought I'd done a really good job. Maybe it wasn't me after all?

[SteveTheShadow]

A year 6 kid told me a few years ago that it was my job as a teacher, to tell him the answers.
When I suggested to him that it might be an idea to go away and find out for himself, his answer was,
"I'm not doing that when somebody can just tell me."

IMO, standards in Literacy and Maths are at an all time low. My methods of asking for imagination and creativity, in English, and using problem solving to work on maths, no longer work. I'm just faced with blank stares.

The learning process, particularly the grammar part of the curriculum, has been mechanised, systemised and sterilised, so that the kids are incapable of thinking for themselves, unless they want to disrupt, then their ingenuity and imagination know no bounds.

Practical, thinking, problem solving, working with your hands, design technology have all been sidelined, so they are missing a complete section of their education because of government meddling, the worst of which ( it pains me to say) came from the three Labour governments we had from 1997 to 2010. The Tories have simply carried it on.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Everything is cut and paste just to get the important certificate or extra entry on a CV, even people are becoming unreal and ripping off themselves. Stock answers = stock people.

[SteveTheShadow]

It's all about measurements, data and league tables. The measurists/ objectivists have taken over and are tightening their grip with every new initiative that lands in the head teacher's inbox.
If we want any future artisans, us oldies need to take some of these youngsters under our wings and show them a different way of working.

[Simon Hickie]

Maybe it wasn't me after all?

Indeed.

IMO, standards in Literacy and Maths are at an all time low

Also true. Until recently my daughter taught pharmacy students at a highly respected Russell Group university. Too many of them were incapable of doing the simple arithmetic needed to calculate how much of a concentrated stock solution was needed for a particular quantity and dilution. Many of my business undergraduates did not know how to work out percentages.

So there's part of the answer as to why carefully crafted artisan products suffer: "I don't want to have to think things through for myself or analyse alternatives: tell me what's best and what the answer is and do it now so I can get back to the Playstation/X Factor (delete as appropriate)".