Progrès technique et progrès social Technical Development and Social Progress

Sommaire

Après avoir défini la nature et les problèmes du progrès, et plus précisément du progrès technique, l'auteur souligne les rapports qui existent entre le technique, l'économique, le moral et le social. Il donne enfin les conditions auxquelles les développements technologiques seront socialement rentables, indiquant, dans l'optique du chef d'entreprise, les difficultés et les modalités de l'adaptation du technique à l'humain.

Summary

Technical progress is a prerequisite of economic and social improvement. The relationship between the three fields, however, is neither automatic nor sponteneous. The ability to produce and to serve relies on techniques. Unfortunately, however, the will to produce for purposes desirable to men, and therefore the will to serve, does not rely upon technique. Production indeed derives its meaning from consumption to which it is related, and finds its rationale in the ability to satisfy an ever-increasing number of human needs.

The problem of technical and social development contains many hopes and many anxieties. Hopes to achieve an harmonious synthesis of both aspects, and anxieties over their being dangerously dissociated.

Development, in order to become an object of estimation and measure, must have a starting point and a goal. Developing means to depart from a negative point of one's being. Developing is, as well, to approximate an ideal pattern of fullness and perfection.

The intelligence of our times has parted with the universal idea of progress. The theoretical evidence of the convenience of some technical and organizational development has been met with resistances and delays in turning these innovations into industrial productive technique and social organization.

Production has its justification in the capacity to satisfy a growing number of human needs. The criterium of priority in the fulfilment of needs must be, in a larlge measure, in accordance with the natural and rational order. Production has often been unable to serve because it has not succeeded in reaching needs and following the criterium of priority. Hence a paradox: while technical development increases human ability to solve problems, it often multiplies and complicates the latter to the extent that economic and social "progress" has hardly any meaning at all.

Technical development, which in the long run determines the rate of economic progress and permits the improvement of standards of living in relation to population increases, may in the short run create serious human problems, disturbing social equilibrium. This can be evidenced particularly in underdeveloped areas of the world. Hence, the "jumping over centuries" is a perilous adventure in the field of technology, and must be checked by some form of social pressure, in order to allow mankind to reap all the fruits of the new technology without falling a prey to social disruptions of a violent nature.

In the industrial concern, the technical, the economic and the social are closely related. Technical development strongly influences industry, although it does not all and necessarily originate from it; on the other hand, industry contributes, indirectly or directly, to technological discoveries and progress. The same applies in the economic field.

Socially speaking, the business concern contributes to progress. Modern industrialized countries propose the following important criteria of "social validation": (a) a definite action on the market to favor the consumers; (b) the ability, within industry, to give all participants in the productive process a socially desirable standard of living; and (c) the ability for industry to set a system of interrelations fully respectful of human nature and needs.

For this purpose, a new, insightful, socially-minded leadership is needed.