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by vgr
5302 days ago
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In political science, a fairly well-known basic idea is that the two ways to dissent are exit and voice. Exit means you leave and go somewhere else, and was common in early political eras when most civilizations were small and surrounded by plenty of nomadic/lawless regions to retreat to. As populations increased, voice (i.e. protest, class warfare etc.) became increasingly common. The classic reference on this is "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" by Albert O. Hirschman. It's been on my reading list for a while. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty For developers, it is swinging back towards exit, since the Internet can be considered a kind of virtual equivalent of the nomad regions to retreat to. "Center-periphery" dynamics is the common term in geopolitics for dissent dynamics driven by movement inside/outside a core. Class warfare is the better known kind of dissent involving unionization etc. and involves fighting up and down a class structure. Guilds, historically, were a medieval kind of institution that had characteristics of both exit and voice. The classic guild professions (weaving, masonry and in more recent times, things like typesetting in pre-lithography days) used their portable skills to leave kingdoms/cities and move elsewhere if they didn't like their current situation. This option was not really available to laborers tied to the land, and was essentially an urban phenomenon. This is the origin of the term "journeyman" for instance... apprentices who would follow master craftsmen around until they became masters in their own right. |
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No, that's not right. When an apprentice finished their apprenticeship, they would usually have to leave their master's service. The openings for masters would be fixed per town by the guild, so journeymen would work itinerantly until they found an opening to become a master. Journeymen would work for a series of masters, and their relationship to these masters was entirely different to the relationship of apprentices.
The status of journeyman became institutionalised, so that the criterion for taking up a mastership was that one had travelled widely enough as a journeyman for some length of time and had crafted a masterpiece.
I've never heard of the idea of guilds organising flights: I should think that master guildsmen had more to lose than agricultural laborers from relocation. Perhaps if several guilds coordinated, it could be less than massively destructive. Where did you get this idea?