First Edition. 8vo - over 7พ" - 9พ" tall. A good used copy with gold title and author's initials on red cloth boards. Inner flaps of Dustjacket creased with some small stains, but otherwise undamaged. 16 pages of photos . For six years, British journalist Richard Donkin made the study of work his vocation, and in Blood, Sweat & Tears he places defining moments from its historical development into a cohesive and revealing picture. Literally starting with when humans first began perfecting recognizable employment skills, Donkin examines the critical milestones that followed and the ways they fit together. Citing sources as disparate as The Dilbert Principle and Peter Drucker's The Future of Industrial Man, he addresses the impact of slavery, organized religion, the time clock, child labor, unionization, the mid-20th-century workplace appropriations of the German and Japanese governments, women on the factory floor and in the boardroom, and current management trends. While cautioning against further interweaving of work into the "texture of our domestic existence," he notes that this transformation is but the latest in an age-old process. "The concept of revolution," he concludes, "is wholly inadequate in describing the changes in the way we live and this thing we call work." --Howard Rothman From Publishers Weekly Observing the growing number of frazzled, drained and dissatisfied workers in today's workplace, Financial Times journalist Donkin recalls the wisdom of noted psychologist Abraham Maslow: "to do some idiotic job very well is certainly not real achievement." He then asks how we have arrived at the point where The Dilbert Principle is one of the world's most popular business books. In his quest to show that cubical cynicism and alienation from one's work are comparatively recent phenomena, Donkin cuts a wide swath through economic and social history. Ranging from Stone Age butchering of livestock in Germany to Abraham Darby's 1709 development of the coking forge (which Donkin believes was the inception of the job "as a constant source of employment and income packaged by the parameter of time"), he brings an engaging spirit of curiosity and an encyclopedic bent to his study. Donkin charts the age-old conflict between the employer`s need to develop a worker as a productive resource versus the urge to control and restrict the worker's contribution, arguing that the latter tendency lies at the root of the current workplace malaise. Yet he is optimistic, viewing new business models of self-management as opportunities to acknowledge workers' value, redefine attitudes toward work and to recalibrate work and leisure in a manner that makes life worth living.
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