Laying the Cultural Foundation of Reindustrialization
America must reimagine the builder identity for a new generation.
Ethan Copple, Ph.D. is a systems engineer and applied anthropologist focused on solving coordination problems in complex operational systems. Copple is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Principal at Systems Intelligence Consulting.
Efforts to rebuild the American industrial base are gaining real momentum. Public and private investment, renewed interest in manufacturing, and a wave of defense-focused entrepreneurs are helping advance a long overdue shift. Yet despite this progress, there is an underlying issue that is often missed. Reindustrialization is not only a technology, finance, and policy problem; it is also a cultural problem.
For decades, the United States moved away from a culture of building. We outsourced manufacturing and changed the story we told ourselves about what kind of work is worthwhile. Over time, the story was replaced by a narrative that success meant distance from physical production. As a result, the foundation that allows an industrial ecosystem to function eroded.
This foundation is a form of ‘soft infrastructure.’ It includes the shared beliefs, informal incentives, and identity systems that shape how people behave within society and understand their place inside it. It shapes who is encouraged to build, who is rewarded for it, and how that work is understood.
During my own training as an industrial engineer, I spent only one required credit hour inside a machine shop lab. Most of my education centered on spreadsheets, statistical models, and optimization problems. We learned to represent factories through simulation software, but not to understand how they actually run. The workforce pipeline that produces engineers is much too far from the systems we are meant to improve. The older image of the engineer as a builder had faded, replaced by the expectation that engineers will manage and optimize from afar. Beneath it was a broader story that equated distance with status, that treated thinking and making as separate domains rather than parts of the same craft.
If the United States is going to rebuild the American industrial base, we must first restore meaning to the act of building. Fixing the problem requires rebuilding the cultural foundations that connect thinking and making so that manufacturing and the talent it draws are seen as central to the nation’s future.
Cultural Narratives Shaping Industrial Decline
There have been periods in American history when the cultural foundation for building was strong. The rapid mobilization of the industrial base during the Second World War depended not only on factories and logistics, but on cultural alignment around a shared effort. Industrial work was framed as a contribution to the nation, and builders understood how their work fit into a larger system. That shared understanding sustained coordination, learning, and commitment at scale.
The lesson is that mobilization requires more than technical capacity; it requires systems that connect thinking and making. Those systems have been eroded by decades of underinvestment and harmful ideas.
I once spoke with an industrialist who tried to fund a new machine shop lab at a well-known engineering school. His aim was simple: give students a chance to learn how things are made by actually making them. The university dismissed the idea: “We don’t do that type of engineering here. Maybe the tech school would be interested.” That dismissal revealed an unspoken hierarchy about whose work matters. This school trained engineers for polished offices and clean environments, not machine shops, assembly lines, or oil rigs. The image of the engineer as a builder had been replaced with the image of the engineer as a spreadsheet manager. And when engineers are disconnected—physically, mentally, and culturally—from the places and people that build things, their understanding of how to design and manufacture goods suffers.
While many damaging narratives exist, three have been particularly damaging to American manufacturing, shaping how status is assigned, how institutions behave, and how young people imagine their futures.
1. Industrial Work as a Step Down Rather Than a Path to Success
For generations, American families have been taught that success requires leaving hands-on work behind. Industrial roles came to be associated with low status, limited autonomy, and constrained futures, while manufacturing, operations, and skilled trades were framed as fallback options rather than callings. This narrative redirected talent away from factories and shop floors, pulling capable builders into careers disconnected from making.
2. The United States Should Design and Others Should Build
Globalization normalized the idea that the United States should focus on design and innovation while outsourcing production to others. While attractive in the short term, this separation eroded the feedback loops that link invention to execution. Innovation became more conceptual, supply chains more fragile, and industrial capability less grounded in practice. By drawing a boundary between thinking and building, the narrative reduced the value placed on those who turn ideas into reality and undermined the foundations of long-term resilience.
3. Efficiency as Superior to Resilience
As production moved out of view, efficiency became the dominant measure of success. Lean operations, outsourcing, and asset-light strategies were rewarded, while slack and redundancy were treated as waste. This approach performs well in stable environments but fails under stress. Resilience depends on flexible capacity, diverse supply chains, and people trained to solve problems in real time. These are cultural as much as technical qualities, and a culture that prizes efficiency alone steadily erodes the conditions required for learning, adaptation, and durable industrial strength.
Rewriting the Narrative
Every year around Christmas, the street outside the Peterbilt factory in Denton, Texas fills with trucks from across the company’s history. Restored rigs from the forties and fifties idle beside the newest freightliners, chrome reflecting winter light. As they pass, you hear the same murmurs from the crowd: “I worked on that one in ’84.” “That model was the first with the long nose.” Families point toward small features only someone who built them would notice. The parade becomes a lineage of workmanship, a way for workers to see their labor carried forward into the world.
Scenes like this reveal the pride that workers and communities still get from manufacturing—and they reveal what is at stake in reindustrialization. The cultural meaning of building has thinned, even as the need for builders has grown. Reindustrialization depends on restoring identity, status, and purpose to industrial work, reinforced through the signals institutions send about what they value and reward. That means reversing the cultural narratives that have devalued American manufacturing.
1. From Factory Jobs to Careers as Builders
Industrial work must be understood as a path of agency, creativity, and long-term contribution, where builders shape the future through tangible problem-solving rather than occupying fallback roles.
2. From Separation to Integration of Design and Production
Innovation and production should be treated as a single learning cycle, with engineers, technicians, and operators working together to restore the feedback, judgment, and tacit knowledge that complex manufacturing requires.
3. From Efficiency Culture to Learning and Resilience Culture
Industrial excellence should be defined not only by efficiency but by the capacity to learn and adapt, replacing narrow optimization with systems that build resilience, depth, and durable capability.
What We Can Do Now
There are practical steps we all can take to change societal narratives. Our roles will be different, but our goal must be the same: strengthening the soft infrastructure of American industry so that more talent, more capital, and more attention flow to the sector upon which our prosperity and security depend. Across these roles, the common task is restoring proximity between design and production, software and hardware, and institutions and shop floors.
Technologists
Technology companies are now industrial actors, whether they acknowledge it or not. Their design choices shape how industrial work is experienced and valued, not just how efficiently it is managed. They help determine whether work feels like craftsmanship grounded in physical reality or abstraction managed from a distance. Treating operators and technicians as core users, preserving shop-floor knowledge, and keeping engineers close to physical processes allows software to support the human foundations of industrial work.
The failure of recent decades was not due to technology itself, but to how it was deployed. Too often, digital systems managed production from a distance, reinforcing the separation between design and execution.
Used differently, technology can shorten that distance. Tools such as digital twins, real-time process data, and AI-assisted diagnostics can strengthen feedback between design and production when they are grounded in physical processes. In this role, software does not replace building. It restores proximity, learning, and shared understanding across industrial teams, carrying forward the same connective function that cultural alignment once provided.
Builders and Industrialists
Create cultures that honor the craft of building. Offer development pathways that help people grow and that highlight the meaning of the work. Provide opportunities for engineers to spend time on the shop floor, learning directly from those closest to the process. Recognize those who improve systems, not only those who design them.
Investors
Support companies that integrate production early, not as a patriotic concession but a bet on capability. In a world defined by supply chain risk, political constraint, and brittle global optimization, operational depth and domestic capacity are emerging as durable sources of competitive advantage as efficiency-only strategies lose reliability. Recent large-scale commitments by institutions such as JPMorgan Chase to domestic supply chains reflect a growing recognition that rebuilding industrial capability is not charity, but a viable long-term business strategy.
Policymakers
Pair financial incentives and regulatory reform with efforts to strengthen cultural foundations. Support apprenticeships, regional talent pipelines, and programs that rebuild identity around industrial contribution. Invest in initiatives that bring visibility to the importance of manufacturing for national resilience. Policy can help reestablish the expectation that industrial capacity is a shared public good.
Educators
Connect academic work with industrial experience. Introduce students to production environments early in their training. Help them see the intellectual challenge and societal importance of building. Normalize the idea that industrial careers are meaningful and future-shaping.
The Foundation for Reindustrialization
Factories, capital, and technology do not come together easily in the United States today, but regulatory friction, workforce shortages, and institutional misalignment did not emerge in isolation. They reflect decades of disinvestment in industrial identity, skill formation, and institutional familiarity with production. Where building has been culturally devalued, regulation accumulates, workforce pipelines atrophy, and capital loses patience. Culture does not substitute for policy, capital, or execution but sits upstream, conditioning how those systems coordinate.
Reindustrialization depends on recovering the belief that building matters and that those who build help shape the future. When industrial work regains its place as a source of identity and contribution, the rest of the system can begin to cohere around it.
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