Yeah, I've been kicking these ideas around for a while.

There are a few directions we could take this. Some freaks (myself) find them all fascinating.

There's the development of modern business comms and procedures, notably at railroads and DuPont Chemical. Joanne Yates has written a history. These became codified in business practices training.

Standardisation itself has been a tremendous advance, much of it lead by a Republican, Herbert Hoover, as Commerce Secretary.

The establishment of common practices, methods, and skills is itself a powerful asset for companies. Armies of workers skilled in typing, filing, programming languages, operating systems, productivity software, and more, make the underlying companies' products and services more valuable.

The classification of skills on a hierarchy is its own mess --- from basic to complex. Breaking apart the Seven Liberal Arts into their sub-groupings of the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric --- think of these as input, precessing, and output), and quadrivium (maths, geometry, music, and astronomy --- quantity, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space and time), reveals some of this. I've been considering similar fundamental divisions of technical mechanisms to fundamental dynamics or elements.

Or the classical professions: medicine, law, theology, business. Later engineering and technology in its own right.

There's the durability or ephemerality of knowledge, skills, and equipment. I've been in tech long enough to have some sense of what does and does not endure, possibly even why. Future Sock spoke to this 50 years ago.

Then there is the nature, history, and function of education, as institution, as sevice, as profession, its roles in society, culture, business, industry, politics, and military. The impacts of the wars of the 19th & 20th centuries really cannot be overstated. There are many tensions, and many covert or latent functions (a wonderful concept from sociologist Robert K. Melton).