Synthesized answer
Veblen links industrial use and wont to civilization by positing that the facts of technological use and wont are fundamental and definitive in the growth and maintenance of culture [1]. They underlie and condition the scope and method of civilization in non-technological aspects, although they are also influenced by other conventions of civilization [1].
Through habituation, the logic and apparatus of ways and means become conventional, taking on institutional character and force [3]. These accustomed ways of doing and thinking become sanctioned by social convention, leading to principles of conduct that are incorporated into the current scheme of common sense [3]. This body of habitual principles and preconceptions serves as the medium through which experience provides information and insight for workmanship [4]. Workmanship then turns this accumulated knowledge, which is a blend of matter-of-fact acquaintance with phenomena and conventional wisdom, to account in dealing with the material means of life [5].
Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.
From the book
HT, 1914, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914. [Illustration] TO B K N PREFACE The following essay attempts an analysis of such correlation as is visible between industrial use and wont and those other institutional facts that go to make up any given phase of civilisation. It is assumed that in the growth of culture, as in its current maintenance, the facts of technological use and wont are fundamental and definitive, in the…
of workmanship through habituation of the workman to that scheme and logic of things that rules this pecuniary culture. The outcome as concerns industry is somewhat equivocal; the discipline of self-seeking at some points favours workmanship and at others not. At one period or phase of the pecuniary culture, generally speaking an early or crude phase, the bent so given to workmanship and technology seems necessarily to be conducive to inefficiency; at another (later or maturer) phase the contrary is likely to be true. The pecuniary discipline of invidious emulation takes effect on…
e to expedients, adaptations, and concessive adjustment between several proclivities that are all sufficiently urgent. Under the discipline of habituation this logic and apparatus of ways and means falls into conventional lines, acquires the consistency of custom and prescription, and so takes on an institutional character and force. The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only become an habitual matter of course, easy and obvious, but they come likewise to be sanctioned by social convention, and so become right and proper and give rise to principles of conduct. By use and wont…
sities, and the more “irrelevant, incompetent and impertinent” will be the line of conduct prescribed by use and wont. Except by recourse to the sense of workmanship there is no evading this complication of ineptitudes and irrelevancies, and such recourse is not easily had. For the bias of settled habit goes to sustain the institutional fabric of received sophistications, and these sophistications are bound in such a network of give and take that a disturbance of the fabric at any point will involve more or less of a derangement throughout. This body of habitual principles and…
s of habitual conduct are carried over from one community or one culture to another, leading to further complications. Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs, conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of conduct that run back only indirectly to the native predispositions of the race, but that may affect the working-out of any given line of endeavour in much the same way as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a native bias. Along with this body of derivative standards and canons of conduct, and handed on by the same discipline of habituation, goes a…