4.22 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—I™. 
and fuse a liberal mental education, great practical interest, and an essential vocational 
training. 
The Birmingham Faculty of Commerce, founded in 1901 by Sir William Ashley, 
has passed beyond the experimental stage, and its experience may be of greater value 
to more recently founded English schools of business than the usual references to 
American and German institutions. 
Characteristic features are: (1) a standard three-year undergraduate course for 
full-time students, as against cramming information in the last year, or in ‘ over- 
time’ ; (2) graduate research into business practice and a linking up with the problems 
of local firms through the Management Research Groups ; (3) individual tuition and 
freedom of choice of certain subjects, with the training of judgment and encouragement 
of active enquiry by preparation and discussion of reports, visits to works, and, if 
possible, vacation employment; (4) a curriculum which integrates economic theory with 
questions of industrial organisation and management, and emphasises the need for 
statistical control and scientific method generally. A Readership in ‘ Accounting 
and Administration ’ has just been founded. This new move indicates the importance 
attached to teaching modern methods of co-ordinating management with accurate 
financial tests of its efficiency in operation. 
Friday, September 25. 
_— 
AFTERNOON. 
Discussion on The Effectiveness of Labour Incentives. (Chairman: Prof. 
P. Sarcant FLrorence; M. H. Dusreurt; Mr. CoristoPHER LEE ; 
Dr. G. H. Mies ; Prof. J. H. Richarpson ; Mr. Ciirron Rossins.) 
M. H. Dusrevit.—Concerning the Best Means of Obtaining the Unreserved 
Collaboration of Workpeople in Production. 
The fact alone that methods for evoking the unreserved collaboration of labour 
with ownership are still a subject of study, is adequate proof that the problem has not 
yet been solved. Paradoxically, to find the secret of the best wage system, we must 
seek a method in which wages are abolished. 
‘Ca’ canny’ can only be overcome by one of two methods, justice and trickery. 
The latter is too often chosen. 
Comparison of risks and incentives activating respectively the workman, hired 
for wages, and the ‘ entrepreneur ’ on business on his own account. 
Optimum output is only forthcoming when the worker can identify the success 
of the business as a whole, with his own personal profit. As most men have short 
views, ordinary profit-sharing in large concerns fails to achieve this object. 
Technological progress has brought about a state of affairs where division of 
responsibility is necessary among members of the higher administrative staff in large 
concerns, the business being divided into sections having budgetary autonomy, 
despite integration within the whole framework. 
This process of devolution should not be confined to the management, but also to 
the labour force, the units of which should be broken down to such a scale as to enable 
the ordinary workman to identify the efficiency of his own department or shop, with 
his personal reward. 
The fault of ‘incentive systems’ designed to spur men on to work, including 
those very complicated methods often styled ‘ scientific,’ is that they attempt to 
imprison human personality within a mechanised structure designed to obtain labour 
by force. 
: The only effective system will appeal, on the contrary, to those natural forces 
which urge men from within to all forms of spontaneous activity. The solution can 
never be found in any system based on external pressure. 
Mr. CuristorHer A. LEE. 
The attitude of mind of the worker as a factor in production. 
Conditions that favour the successful application of incentives. 
