part of the disciplinary process.....................

      The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. . . . One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants become not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process.  That is, part of the disciplinary process.  As Lears writes, "Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them a routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."

-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work