The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
by John Fabian Witt · 14 Oct 2025 · 735pp · 279,360 words
levels not seen since the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Huge new industrial firms, making everything from home appliances to automobiles, adopted novel systems of scientific management that exerted tyrannical control over workers’ lives. Congress shut down the borders to most immigrants. Meanwhile, lynch mobs murdered hundreds each year, three-quarters of
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enthusiasm about the possibilities for a new kind of direct action. But the turn to sabotage also came out of a distinctly American resistance to scientific management in increasingly large industrial firms. Sabotage, wrote Wobbly editor Walker Smith, was “the best method to combat the evil” of modern managerial strategies for increasing
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had relocated the active intelligence of the industrial firm, firms would be able to replace scarce craftsmen with far less expensive semiskilled machine operators.38 Scientific management, as Taylor called his reforms, had been a scourge of American labor since its early articulation in the first decade of the century. With the
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of Industrial Relations heard from workers that they objected to “being reduced to a scientific formula.”39 The new unionists adopted a different posture. In scientific management, they saw a tool labor might use to exercise power in the modern economy. Rationalization would smash the arbitrary autocracy of the foreman at the
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rationalization of the mass-production firm would mean simultaneous opportunities for democratic control and for material gain.41 Otto S. Beyer, a member of the scientific management–focused Taylor Society and a regular participant in the new unionist world of the American Fund, captured one version of the new unionist vision in
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being represented would assure workers that sharing labor-saving knowledge would not cost them their jobs.42 Organizers at Hillman’s ACW similarly proposed that scientific management could bring “increased wages” and “shorter hours” while giving workers a “voice and vote in the shop.” The American Fund’s Clinton Golden endorsed the
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for proposals to nationalize industry.43 * * * Hillman’s new unionism presented what historian David Montgomery would later call the “paradoxical marriage of progressive unionism and scientific management.” Skeptics have long charged that the managerial revolution of a Taylor or a Beyer was a poisoned chalice for labor—that it displaced workers from
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when the Communists’ new textile union commenced a clumsy organizing effort in Gastonia, North Carolina. At the giant Loray Mill, which employed 3,500 workers, scientific management techniques had combined with grueling hours, bad conditions, and low wages to set the textile workforce on edge. After management fired one-third of its
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and Flow in Trade Unionism, ed. Wolman (NBER, 1936); Leo Troy, “Trade Union Membership, 1897–1962,” Review of Economics and Statistics 47 (1965): 93–113. scientific management: David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), at 218
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: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s, ed. Salvatore Salerno (Charles H. Kerr, 2014), at 57, 60, 64. resistance to scientific management: Mike Davis, “The Stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World,” in Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader, ed. James Green (Temple
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Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (MIT Press, 1997); Mike Davis, “The Stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World,” in Workers’ Struggles, Past and Present: A “Radical America” Reader, ed. James Green (Temple University Press, 1983), 83
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. “deliberate gathering… workman”: David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 115. 39. Scientific management… scourge: Davis, “Stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe,” 86–95. brains: David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and
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, 372 mass production in, 3, 118, 174, 292, 306–10, 322, 362, 369, 373, 468, 469, 472, 486, 487, 496, 537 nationalization of, 307, 309 scientific management in, 278, 307–9, 322, 367 inherited wealth, 102–4, 242 of Garland, 1–2, 5, 8, 101, 103–8, 117, 122, 151, 161, 245
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, 322, 324, 337, 339, 342, 344–45, 348, 351, 362, 369, 401, 477, 483, 486, 487, 489, 504, 515, 536, 671n15 racism in, see racism scientific management and, 307–9, 322 Soviet Russia and, 238 steel mills and, 68–69 yellow dog contracts and, 480, 482, 499 La Follette, Robert, Jr., 431
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Mellon, 539 Schechter Poultry v. United States, 485 Schlossberg, Joseph, xviii, 307, 317, 483, 484, 486, 642n34 schools, see education Schuyler, George, 431, 446, 449 scientific management, 278, 307–9, 322, 367 Scopes, John, xviii, 7, 190, 202–7, 205, 210, 217, 218, 297, 406, 478, 515 Scottsboro Boys, 7, 435–36
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, 503 immigration and, 266–68 mass production and, 3, 118, 174, 292, 306–10, 322, 362, 369, 373, 468, 469, 472, 486, 487, 496, 537 scientific management of, 278, 307–9, 322, 367 wages of, see wages women, 246, 256, 499 see also Black workers Workers Defense Union (WDU), 293–98, 300
The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age
by Simon Head · 14 Aug 2003 · 242pp · 245 words
the formative decades of American industrial history. There I found a clear line of descent linking our contemporary practices with those of mass production and scientific management—the twin foundations of modern American industrialism pioneered a century ago by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. To demonstrate this continuity I have
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the best ways to trace their contemporary influence is to look at a leading manufacturing industry whose history has been entwined with the histories of scientific management and mass production. In manufacturing, the automobile IS 16 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY industry perhaps satisfies this criterion better than any other. For almost
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RUTHLESS ECONOMY American industry until the first two decades of the twentieth. This chronology largely coincides with the rise of Taylor and his doctrine of scientific management. Taylor was, by profession, an engineer, and the experiments and inventions that formed the basis of his theories were mostly carried out in the
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the machine and its method of operation provided a model of efficiency for the operations of the entire plant and its workforce. The ideal of scientific management was to achieve machine-like standards of speed and reliability with the routines of the workforce, whether of laborers, machinists, inventory clerks, purchasing agents,
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processes of mass production in industries using increasingly complex technologies."21 The operative words here are "mass production," because it was the application of scientific management to these fast-expanding industries that freed them from Taylor's obsession with the craft machinist, also making obsolete the over-elaborate structures of control
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production, and, for the workforce directly engaged in production, the skilled machinist was being replaced by the machine operator. This new and wider constituency of scientific management included the Royal and the Remington Typewriter Companies, the Winchester Arms Company, and multiplant companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and International Harvester. In the
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28 THE ROOTS OF MASS PRODUCTION At the Highland Park machine shops, Ford brought together the technology of the American System and the discipline of scientific management. With the assembly of the Model T, Ford went beyond the technology of the nineteenth century and introduced methods still used throughout American industry
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end, Knudsen pioneered methods of flexible mass production that both accommodated the consumer, and also kept the workforce still largely subjected to the rule of scientific management. This principle of industrial organization dominates U.S. manufacturing to this day, and as its originator, Knudsen must rank with John Hall, Frederick Winslow
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out. Thenceforth, this "one best way" would be followed by frontline workers. In words that could have been take directly from Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, Shingo explained: To implement function standardization, individual functions are analyzed and then considered one by one. That is, general operations are broken down into
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with a single turn.27 In its exhaustive 1993 study Manufacturing Productivity, the McKinsey Global Institute gives a contemporary U.S. account of this renewed scientific management, tailored to the needs of McKinsey's U.S. corporate clients struggling to match the superior productivity of their Japanese counterparts.28 The McKinsey
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I saw hi operation at Nissan's Sunderland plant. The production system that McKinsey describes and commends hi Manufacturing Productivity is an advanced system of scientific management, firmly based on Taylor's original theories and practices, as refined by Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno. McKinsey, however, is not notably sympathetic to
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a pervasive regime of monitoring and control, and encourages an all-powerful management to treat its workforce as a commodity. These enduring characteristics of scientific management diminish the quality of working life, and historically it has been the role of labor unions to shield the industrial workforce from the more egregious
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to Taylor in the opening paragraph of Office Management: Many businessmen, after analyzing the remarkable results secured by applying Frederick W. Taylor's system of scientific management in factories, have asked whether or not similar betterments could not be obtained in offices with the system. Their question can now be answered,
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, or if not, minimized to the smallest possible degree."18 Leffingwell's reputation may have faded, but Leffingwell's project of applying the methods of scientific management to the service industries endured. By mid-century, numerous periodicals were devoted to the subject, among them The Office, Office Management, Office Control and
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operating machines."21 But a more basic problem with white-collar Taylorism was that much white-collar work resisted the rigorous standardization and measurement of scientific management. Despite Leffingwell's assurance to his clients that a clerk's decisions would "always be upon principles determined by managers" and "would not demand
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their employees' telephone conversations, but calculating the average length of calls was laborious and time consuming. The trade press carried stories about the limitations of scientific management in the office. In 1969 The Office told of a New Jersey company that, despite its use of "work management controls," had found that
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reengineering movement of the 1990s took its cue less from Leffingwell's American heirs and more from the Japanese automakers, with their success in renewing scientific management's industrial model. But with the coming of the networked computer and its workflow software, Leffingwell's vision of a whitecollar assembly line subject
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mass production plant, it is the modern-day reengineer who has come much closer to reproducing in an office setting the rigor and disciplines of scientific management. The reengineer owes this to information technology's prodigious powers of measurement, 69 70 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONONY monitoring, and control, unavailable not only
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the production, use, functionality and replacement of the products being supported."23 Along with this esteem for the "input of experts," Kessler also has the scientific manager's characteristic lack of esteem for the knowledge and expertise of frontline workers. In a "typical pre-KM [knowledge management] technical service call center,"
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captures the life of the call."51 The call center industry fulfills Leffingwell's vision of a white-collar workforce marching to the drumbeat of scientific management. The massed cubicles of the call center are digital assembly lines on which standardization, measurement, and control come together to create a workplace of
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of calls, time unplugged, time spent going to the bathroom. The unwillingness of managers to dismantle this apparatus testifies to the still-dominant influence of scientific management and its industrial 115 116 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY model. Moreover, the constant flow of new and upgraded software products encourages managers to believe
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within the processes of managerial medicine. Thirty years ago Minnesota neurologist Paul Ellwood coined the term "health maintenance organization" and persuaded President Richard THE SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF LIFE—AND DEATH: PART I Nixon to promote HMOs as part of his administration's health care policy. Ellwood saw the HMO as a
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that can accompany this decision making and that helps define the concept of "good clinical judgment." Ironically, it is that ubiquitous conceptual workhorse of contemporary scientific management, "process," that gets to play a leading role in Cassell's account of clinical reasoning. But the processes in question are unique to the
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of particular patients and cannot be objects of the automated, preplanned treatments of managerial medicine. Cassell's "processes" are artifacts of pathophysiological reasoning THE SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF LIFE—AND DEATH: PART II and19 they are the physician's best defense against t anarchy of disease. Just as physiology maps the processes
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should not reassure the U.S. patient population: "interpreting these articles takes time and experience and also may explain why they were not the THE SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF LIFE—AND DEATH: PART II principal source of information." Some of the other sources listed by the medical directors also looked decidedly shaky: "
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"deeper journey" passes through some of the flattest topography of the business landscape—customer relations management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM). In both spheres, scientific management is firmly established as the controlling philosophy of management, so the closer integration of these two processes with the existing processes of ERP simply reinforces
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that CRM software can bring to bear when an agent deals with the customer. But this opportunity is being pushed aside by the juggernaut of scientific management, with its digital scripts, multiple techniques of monitoring and control, and micromanagement of the employees' working life. Supply chain management is perhaps the most
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their "disease management" satellites, to the digital scripts which govern every utterance of the call center agent. The chief casualty of all these forms of scientific management is what John Seely Brown calls "practice": the employee's accumulated skill, knowledge and experience which, applied to the daily problems of the workplace,
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The differing histories of manufacturing and services in the contemporary American economy bear upon the reforms appropriate to each of the two sectors. In manufacturing, scientific management and mass production are so deeply rooted that it is probably Utopian to believe that an alternative industrial culture, such as the skill-based culture
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element that cannot be displaced by automated or expert systems. Here the productivity record is poor and testifies to the reengineer's failure to make scientific management work in contexts where human agents must talk, listen, and bargain. In health care the bureaucratic bloat chronicled by Drs. Himmelstein and Woolhandler points
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occurred.28 Similarly Frederick Reichheld's detailed, statistical analysis of the customer service side of business provides powerful evidence of how the "disloyalty effect" of scientific management cripples the productivity of customer-facing employees. The poor productivity of core service industries suggests that the improved productivity record of the late 1990s will
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, "The Corporate Compromise: A Marxist View of Health Maintenance Organizations and Prospective Payment," Annals of 'Internal Medicine (15): 498 (September 1988). CHAPTER 8. THE SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT OF LIFE—AND DEATH: PART 1 1. Dr. Jerome Kassirer, "Clinical Problem Solving, a New Feature in the Journal," NEJM 326 (1):60 (January 2
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management, 74-75, 76; micromanagement and punitive approaches, 104-08; reengineering view of, 70-71; in relationship between manager and employee, 74-75, 84; in scientific management, 26, 27,46, 52; and supply chain management, 163-64; unwillingness to change, 115-16. See also Real-time monitoring "Managing by Wire" (Haeckel &
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96-97 McCormick reapers, 22 McGrath, Mike, 108 McKinsey Global Institute, 54-57 MCOs. See Managed care organizations Measurement of work, 66-67. See also Scientific management; Tac (time allowed for completion of job); Time-and-motion studies 219 INDEX Medical malpractice, 141 Medical reengineering, 5,13, 117-52; effect on medical
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, 126; usual vs. planned medicine, 131,142. See also Managed care organizations (MCOs) Medicare, 177-78 Metal-working industries: and mass production, 19; and scientific management, 23, 25-27 Metzger, Jane, 126 Meyer, Stephen, 29 MicroAge Teleservices, 95 Middle class insecurity, 14,181-83 Midvale Steel Company, 23,25 Military armories
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and scientific management, 20-21 Mission Critical (Davenport), 157, 164 MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity, 12, 39,40, 55, 58 Mitford, Jessica, 11 Model T production. See
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Piore, Michael, 37 Populism as Democratic message, 180,181 Poverty and lower-income families, 2-3,182 Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), 118 The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 24, 45, 46, 51, 76 Privacy issues, 100, 185 Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology (Davenport), 68, 81 Procops, Tony, 96, 97
Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman · 31 Oct 2013 · 1,073pp · 314,528 words
intend, he with his hands will accomplish what our brains have devised.”17 In this he was probably influenced by Frederick Taylor, whose system of scientific management is discussed in Chapter 32. Fuller described a “military crowd” by reference to Le Bon’s “mass of men dominated by a spirit which is
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Taylorism as the “only system of management which was coherent and logical, and therefore was teachable.” In 1911, Person organized the first international conference on scientific management.2 For the new managers this was an important development: their expertise and professionalism could now be recognized with proper qualifications and cloaked in academic
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first management “guru” providing seminars to business leaders and with a bestselling and influential book, The Principles of Scientific Management. After he died in 1915, described on his gravestone as “The Father of Scientific Management,” his followers—such as Henry Gantt and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth—continued to develop and spread his ideas.6
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possible by a new caste of “efficiency engineers.” Peter Drucker, who three decades later saw himself picking up where Taylor had left off, suggested that scientific management may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers. As long
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the railroads and sought to show how the railroads could save money by introducing new techniques (described as “scientific management”) rather than by charging more. Brandeis’s advocacy went well beyond the courtroom. He linked scientific management with a wider social goal of “universal preparedness.” Planning in the form of a predetermined schedule, clear
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but challenged both liberal economic and democratic theory. Thus far they had gone for legal solutions, trying to cut the large corporations down to size. Scientific management suggested a possible administrative solution. “Efficiency” fit in with the progressive conviction that science rather than intuition could provide a neutral and objective basis for
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, of the progressives, the unions bitterly resisted Taylorism. They had no interest in blurring the line between capital and labor and understood that at root scientific management was not about partnership but centralized control based on strict hierarchy. Providing management with insights into core tasks undermined workers’ control over the shop floor
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authoritarian leadership. Nor were they applying Taylor as his followers, who tended to be less bombastic in their claims, intended. But the grotesque version of scientific management that emerged in the Soviet Union, disconnecting planning from doing, relying on instructions from the center to a disciplined workforce, and persistent insistence on “one
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linked management specifically to business enterprises, which meant that it would be judged by economic performance—outputs rather than professional inputs. He was skeptical of scientific management, for good results might be achieved by intuition and hunch. Moreover, while he acknowledged Taylor’s contribution, Drucker blamed Taylor for separating planning from doing
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Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 41. See also Jill Lepore, “Not So Fast: Scientific Management Started as a Way to Work. How Did It Become a Way of Life?” The New Yorker, October 12, 2009. 3. Frederick W Taylor, Principles
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of Scientific Management (Digireads.com: 2008), 14. First published 1911. 4. Charles D. Wrege and Amadeo G. Perroni, “Taylor’s Pig-Tale: A Historical Analysis of Frederick W
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(2001): 585–601. 6. Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999); Daniel Nelson, “Scientific Management, Systematic Management, and Labor, 1880–1915,” The Business History Review 48, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 479–500. See chapter on Taylor in A. Tillett, T
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, 1980), 44–45. 8. Peter Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation, 3rd edn. (New York: Transaction Books, 1993), 242. 9. Oscar Kraines, “Brandeis’ Philosophy of Scientific Management,” The Western Political Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March 1960): 201. 10. Kanigel, The One Best Way, 505. 11. V. I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of
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planning and, 493, 500, 502–505, 518, 550, 559, 570 postmodernism and, 557–558 proliferation of strategies in, 561–563 psychological aspects of, 470, 472 “scientific management” and, 464–465 stockholders and, 492, 530 Taylorism and, 462–466, 468 theories of power and, 557–559 business process reengineering (BPR), 532–536, 561
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and, 493–495 on “gurus,” 548 on the management class, 493 management theories of, 491, 493–496, 498, 546, 608 on planning, 493–494 on scientific management, 464, 493 on workers, 495 Du Bois, W.E.B., 350–352 Du Picq, Ardant, 112 Dühring, Eugen, 284 Dukakis, Michael, 445–446, 448–451
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, 218–219. See also revolution in military affairs (RMA) primitive warfare among humans, 8–9 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 50, 52–53, 509, 614 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 463 prisoner’s dilemma, 154–155, 585–586, 590, 596 Proctor & Gamble, 570 Progressives (United States), 311, 313, 369, 437, 465, 480 Prohibition Era
In the Age of the Smart Machine
by Shoshana Zuboff · 14 Apr 1988
the chief symbol of the rational approach to management was Frederick Taylor. Though much has been written on Taylor and the philosophy and methods of scientific management, it is worth highlighting a few central themes for three reasons. 60 First, Taylorism explicitly treats the worker's body in its two dimensions- 42
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, as it did among the bleach plant operators or the nineteenth- century glassmakers. Third, the logic that motivated the early purvey- ors and adapters of scientific management has continued to dominate the course of automation in the twentieth-century workplace. As will be argued later, it is a logic that must undergo
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a fundamental reevalua- tion as information technology is widely adapted to productive activity. THE PURIFICATION OF EFFORT The agenda for scientific management was to increase productivity by streamlining and rationalizing factory operation from cost accounting and supervision to the dullest job on the shop floor. Efficiency was
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easily yield themselves to explication; they were embedded in the ways of the body, in the knacks and know-how of the craftsworker. Proponents of scientific management believed that observing and ex- plicating workers' activity was nothing less than scientific research. Their goal was to slice to the core of an action
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. 63 In 1 91 2 a prominent naval engineer writing in the Journal of the American Society of Naval En8ineers listed the seven laws of scientific management. His first law, from which all the others followed, stated that "it is necessary in any activity to have a complete knowledge of 44 KNOWLEDGE
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to think what his past experience in similar cases has been. ,,64 Another contemporary interpreter of scientific management took pains to outline the quality of knowledge upon which this approach was based: Instead of depending upon judgment, scientific management depends upon knowledge in its task of administration. Judgment is the instinc- tive and subconscious
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industrial engineer addressing a conference at Dartmouth University's Amos Tuck School of Management in 1912 stressed the difference between scientific management and the more general move- ment known as systematic management. The scientific management ap- proach rested on complete knowledge of materials, equipment, rout- ing, job assignments, tools, task organizations, time standards, and
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) responsibility in coordinating and controlling the complexi- ties of the factory as it entered the era of mass production. The complexity of workers' responses to scientific management has much to do with the dilemmas created by the body's dual role in pro- The Laboring Body: Suffering and Skill in Production Work
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Taylor believed it was necessary to share the fruits of such productiv- ity increases and saw the differential piece-rate system, a central tenet of scientific management, as a method of uniting workers and managers in a bond of common interest. But incentive wages are devilishly hard to administer, and all too
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change piece rates as workers learned to meet the standards. This lead to the complaints of overwork with which unions relentlessly dogged proponents of Taylorism. Scientific management frequently meant not only that individual effort was simplified (either because of labor-saving equipment or new organizational methods that fragmented tasks into their simplest
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effort was intensified, thus raising the level of fatigue and stress. Effort was purified-stripped of waste-but not yet eased, and resis- tance to scientific management harkened back to the age-old issue of the intensity and degree of physical exertion to which the body should be subject. As long as
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worker into the organization and inspire a zest for production. Instead, the forms of work organization that emerged with scientific management tended to amplify the divergence of interests between management and workers. Scientific management revised many of the assumptions that had guided the traditional employer-employee rela- tionship in that it allowed a minimal
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in the service of actino-with, for interpersonal communication and coor- dination. It was not until the intensive introduction of office machinery, and with it scientific management, that this distinct orientation was challenged. During this period, an effort was made to invent a new kind of clerical work-work that more closely
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func- tional management based upon expert knowledge. Ten years later a prominent management consultant, Harry Hopf, presented a paper to the Sixth International Congress for Scientific Management, in which he proposed that the next great step in developing a science of manage- ment was the practice of "optimology"-the science of the
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one of the most influential. 56 In an earlier work, published in 1 91 7, Leffingwell had discussed "mechanical applications of the princi- ples of scientific management to the office." His new text was written to address the need for "original thought" concerning the fundamental principles of his discipline and their relationship
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, and horns-these were just some of the means Leffingwell advocated in order to insulate the clerk from extensive communicative demands. These efforts illustrate how scientific management in the office tried to provoke a discontinuity between the new clerical activity and the tra- ditional clerical work that had preceded it
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. Scientific management sought to reorient the office on a new axis, so that clerical jobs would no longer be able to absorb even vestigial elements of the
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and their clerks had been ambiguously defined. Procedures were determined loosely enough that coordinative responsibility had to be shared, if only informally. The application of scientific management to the office sought to redefine clerical work and to set clear boundaries on the downward diffusion of coordinative responsibility. The new concept of clerical
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into the sphere of coordinative responsibility, with all of its implications for skilled actino-with.59 120 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK The application of scientific management to the office, particularly as it combined with mechanization, had a far-reaching impact on cleri- cal work in the industrial enterprise as well as
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disturbances-headaches, digestive and heart troubles; state of depression, etc. ,,61 As widespread as these new forms of clerical work had become, the reach of scientific management and mechanization was still far from complete. Throughout the late 1 960s and the 1 970s, management peri- odicals continued to devote considerable attention to
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related to actino-with-sharing the communicative and problem-solving burden of "facilitating business functions" with their supervisors and managers. However, the combi- nation of scientific management and mechanization did succeed in cre- ating a new sphere of clerical work discontinuous with this historical trajectory. These jobs reflect those aspects of middle
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way; because, in a word, this technology infor- mates as well as automates, its consequences for the office are more complex than the principles of scientific management can account for. The second half of this chapter will explore how the informating power of the technology may increase the intellective demands of work
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labor- continual production uninterrupted by the coordinative and communi- cative demands of administration. The new forms of clerical work that he and other practitioners of scientific management created shared an emphasis on the bodily effort of the office worker. For the first time, the "desk" job began to closely parallel the logic
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practices is also related to the degree of power and autonomy that can be enjoyed by its practitioners. The explication of skilled practice characteristic of scientific management is an exam- ple of how codification erodes a group's power as it increases the trans- parency of their know-how and detaches that
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of a new stratum of routine clerical tasks. Office work, at least at its lowest level, finally could be subjected to the explicating rigors of scientific management. Again, the clerk's work became avail- able for rational control and analysis but not in a way that enriched the clerk. The computerization of
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for coor- dination and efficiency in increasingly complex and large-scale organi- zations, and a growing professionalization of the managerial class, that Frederick Taylor's scientific management approach was born. Though firms varied widely in the degree to which they adapted to Taylor's complete program of change, the essence of his
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numbers of middle managers and the scope of their functions. Managing this explicit knowledge base became an important part of the middle manager's role. Scientific management argued that rigorous understanding, the stuff of formal education and specialized training, had to be applied to the action-centered know-how of the worker
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that resulted from this conjunction of science and skill and to turn it into the basis from which rational planning, organization, and coordination could proceed. Scientific management appeared to provide the ultimate rationale for managerial authority. Taylor believed that scientific truth would replace divinity, "character," or biology as the arbiter of commands
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growing conviction, informed by social Darwinism, that managers and workers were intrinsically different-each with their own psychol- ogy and social orientation. One historian of scientific management, Samuel Haber, observed that in the early years of the movement, Taylor saw middle-class values among the workers whose effort he sought to rationalize
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way by the turn of the century (as evidenced by the establishment of profes- sional societies, journals, and graduate schools of business administra- tion), and scientific management lent a new vibrancy and purpose to these efforts. Colleges and professional schools were to be the new crucibles from which the talent to manage
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- other recent study of computer technology in the workplace by Robert Howard concludes that information systems are indeed being used to reproduce the logic of scientific management-top-down control, cen- tralization of knowledge, deskilling-more comprehensively than ever before. 10 284 AUTHORITY: THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF POWER Earlier in this chapter
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insights into process or product improvements. The significance of the new opportunity open to operators can be appraised only in light of the legacy of scientific management, which dramatically limited the worker's legitimate contribution to the pro- duction process. Consider again the logic of Taylorism: (1) the worker's implicit know
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that serves as the basis for a division of labor that is minimally dependent upon the skills or disposition of a (shrinking) work force. Like scientific management, computer-based automation provides a means for the managerial hierarchy to reproduce itself, because it can concentrate knowledge in the managerial domain and so be
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, Genesis of Modern Management, 125. 59. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 42; see discussion. 60. For an early collection of essays, see Clarence Bertrand Thompson, ed., Scientific Management (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1922). A good analytical discussion can be found in Craig R. Littler, IIUnderstanding Taylor- ism," British Journal of Sociology 29 (1978
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Kakar's Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Inno- vation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970). 61. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madi- son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 96. 62. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 72; Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
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. G. J. Meyers, liThe Science of Management," in Clarence Bertrand Thompson, ed., Scientific Management (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1914),134. Notes 433 65. Forrest Cardullo, "Industrial Administration and Scientific Management," in Thompson, Scientific Management, 62. 66. Henry P. Kendall, "Unsystematized, Systematized, and Scientific Manage- ment," in Thompson, Scientific Management, 121. 67. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 74; Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor
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is the case of the Watertown Arsenal, where a strike was ignited by the imposition of Taylorism. See: Hugh Aitken, Taylorism at the Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action, 1908- 1915 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960); see also the discussion in Daniel Rodgers, Work Ethic in Industrial America, 167; Montgomery, Workers' Con
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. 19. Quoted in Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865- 1920 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975),82. 20. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964),89. 21. Ibid., 165. 22. Ibid. 23. Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy
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work, 120-22, 439-40n5; and on- line office work, 141-50; and pro- duction work, 22-57; rejection of animality of, 26-30; and scientific management of work, 41-44; as source of skill and effort, 36-42 Boulton, M., 32 Braudel, Fernand, 24-25, 388-89 Braverman, Harry, 48-49
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signifi- cance of, 195-206 Interchangeability of personnel, 46 Interchangeable parts, 47-48 Internal Revenue Bureau, 11 5 International banking, 160-71 International Congress for Scientific Management, Sixth, 109 International Labour Organization, 120 Invisible work, 290-96 Ironmaking, 38-40 Isenberg, Daniel, 103, 109, 196 Isolation, 125-26, 139, 141, 151-56
…
exchange in com- puter medium, 362-63, 372-86; workers' know-how expropriated by, 42-44; see also Executive work; Hierarchical authority; Middle man- agement; Scientific management; Worker-manager relations Man in the Moone (Godwin), 26 Manual labor, see Body Index Manufacturing, see Production Manufacturing resource planning, 412-22 March, James, 354
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, 437-38n55; mechani- zation and automation of, 115-23, 439n4, 439-40n5; on-line, 124-73; rationalization of, 113, 116-17; routinization of, 115-16; scientific management of, 117, 119-21, 123, 126, 151, 215; scope of computer applications in, 416-1 7 Oil refining, 59, 417-18 IIOld boy's network
…
Saint Monday tradition, 32 Sampling, 425-26 Samuel, Raphael, 37, 39 Schrank, Roben, 50,238 Schuck, Gloria, 410 Schutz, Alfred, 430n I Schwartz, Barry, 454nll Scientific management, 99, 178; exec- utive work as approached by, 106- 10; history of, 230-35; information systems used to reproduce logic of, 283, 303; managerial control
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald · 24 Apr 2017 · 827pp · 239,762 words
held the answers to most of society’s ills—a “man of science” was the first-responder to this crisis. Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, was all the rage at the time, and Edwin Gay was one of his biggest fans. Gay called Taylor’s work “the most important advance
…
school between 1908 and 1914. 3 The “Scientist”: Frederick W. Taylor The legacy of Frederick W. Taylor is rife with contradiction. Was the father of scientific management one of the best things to happen to American management know-how or one of the worst? Was he a friend of the workingman or
…
his enemy? Was scientific management an actual science or was it simply counting? Did he truly advance the management of business or was he simply a first mover in the
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teaching a system of management rather than merely engaging in said management ad hoc. Gay invited Taylor to lecture at HBS. Taylor declined, insisting that scientific management could only be learned on the shop floor. (In that, he was among the first of a very exclusive group of people who have ever
…
said no to Harvard Business School.) Gay then threatened to teach scientific management without him, at which point Taylor acquiesced, agreeing to lecture on the subject of “Task Management and Its Nature” at the School in the spring
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of 1909. In 1911, Taylor published the work for which he is famous, The Principles of Scientific Management. Over time, he and his disciples Carl Barth and Clarence Thompson became familiar figures at HBS and in Cambridge’s Colonial Club, the favored social
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when there were precious few names to choose from. Harlow Person, the first permanent dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School, centered his entire curriculum on scientific management, because it “was the only system of management which was coherent and logical, and therefore was teachable.”17 In short, in arguing that management was
…
greatness, by focusing it on the fact that the simple act of measurement could lead to significant improvement. Management guru Peter Drucker once suggested that scientific management “may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.” Perhaps, but
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Taylor to join the faculty of HBS in 1913, Taylor declined with characteristic grandiosity: “I am conducting in Philadelphia here an even larger school for scientific management than the one which you have in Cambridge.” Here’s what Taylor did for art: He was an inspiration to Charlie Chaplin, who parodied a
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own. The solution to workplace strife, he argued, was a kind of therapeutic human relations, a soft alternative to the “bossism” of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. Mayo considered himself a scientist, too, but his wasn’t a science of the stopwatch; rather, it was one conducted in the laboratory of the
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,” writes Thomas Frank, “managerial capitalism was . . . the zenith of American civilization. In the celebrated 1977 business history The Visible Hand . . . Chandler traced the rise of scientific management within various productive enterprises over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leading finally to the greatest accomplishments of enlightenment—the incredibly complex flow
…
,” Harvard Business Review, November 2012. 13Ibid. 14McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession, p. 59. 15Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 132. 16Kiechel, “The Management Century.” 17Hoopes, False Prophets, p. 58. 18John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company
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), 183 Prahalad, C. K., 300 Pratt, John, 216 Presidio Graduate School, 561 Preventing Regulatory Capture (Moss), 249 Price of Inequality, The (Stiglitz), 165 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 35 “Private Entity with Public Pretensions,” 125 Probability and Statistics for Business Decisions (Raiffa), 216 Problems in Industrial Accounting, 116 Procter & Gamble, 142
Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing
by Rachel Plotnick · 24 Sep 2018 · 359pp · 105,248 words
of Toronto, via the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/artistsreminisce00cranuoft Figure 8.3 Measuring humans’ abilities to react to electrical forces, physiologists, psychologists, and scientific management experts typically used electric buttons as the most common mechanism for this process. As was often typical at this time period, children served as “ideal
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button pushing as digital command—an idealized (and often resisted) way of thinking about service, labor, and human–machine relationships. Electricians, architects, manufacturers, advertisers, and scientific management enthusiasts most often espoused the benefits of digital command, which included a number of commonly referenced components. First, they circulated ideas about hand force or
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nothing but their fingers—did not qualify as legitimate workers in the eyes of others.12 Rhetoric of this kind reflected the agenda of the scientific management movement, in which workers were taught to calibrate their hands with buttons that would enable them to perform “efficiently” with machines. To this end, scientists
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rigorously documented the movements of bodies in factories and cataloged workers’ efforts in experimental laboratories to achieve optimal button pushing. Managers, too, enthusiastically invested in scientific management principles and applied electrical solutions to minimize handwork and effort, pushing buttons to enforce discipline, control, and rationalized movement of bodies. Yet beyond these idealized
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of the office has a strong demoralizing effect.”42 Complaints labeled slothful, entitled men in high-ranking positions who often rose to prominence in the scientific management era as the culprits. A common concern stemmed from the ways that push-button managers tried to limit physical contact with those of lesser station
…
, Principles of Domestic Engineering; or the What, Why and How of a Home (New York: The Trow Press, 1915); Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913). 18. John Wright, “Bell-Hanging for Inside Rooms,” Building Age 6, no. 2 (1884): 28. Homeowners with electricity and hotels
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, in part, because of heady and pervasive emphasis on grooming ideal button pushers—especially as workers operating machines in factories—in the midst of the scientific management movement’s unbridled enthusiasm for “efficiency.” Efforts to coordinate cooperation between hands and machines abounded, and those who studied button interactions in scientific and medical
…
its full potential.22 Well-known researchers such as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the latter an advocate for a brand of scientific management known as “Taylorism,” desired this optimization to make laboring bodies, especially in factories, more efficient. In his classic book, The Principles of
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Scientific Management (1911), Taylor noted that university physiological departments routinely carried out experiments with electric buttons to “determine the ‘personal coefficient’ of the man tested.”23 He
…
measuring the effectiveness of manual machine interactions (see figure 8.3). Figure 8.3 Measuring humans’ abilities to react to electrical forces, physiologists, psychologists, and scientific management experts typically used electric buttons as the most common mechanism for this process. As was often typical at this time period, children served as “ideal
…
Patient Care, ed. Elliot G. Mishler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 228–229. 23. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913). 24. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. 25. Angelo Mosso, Fatigue, trans. M. Drummond and W. B. Drummond (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904); Frances
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unassuming, magical, or polite. Slogans such as “talk, don’t walk” and “have every machine at your fingertips” related closely to movements based on efficiency, scientific management, and domestic engineering, where a person should minimize steps and maximize output. These ideas predated any formal “human factors” or “ergonomics” disciplines, but they focused
…
. C. B., Jr. “The Field of Women in Public Relations.” National Electric Light Association Bulletin 9 (1922): 249–250. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913. Thompson, Emily Ann. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris · 14 Feb 2023 · 864pp · 272,918 words
can see the steps in the proletarianization dance: the alienation of indigenous and peasant populations from the land, the formal establishment of white racial rule, scientific management continually optimizing for maximum profits, looming soldiers. It all adds up to a laboring class with no legal way to reproduce their lives except to
…
.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (City Lights, 2001), 388. v Frederick Winslow Taylor is credited with bringing scientific management to the organization of industrial production, around the turn of the twentieth century. Adler, “Time-and-Motion Regained.” vi Bob Herbert, “Workers Crushed by Toyota
Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now
by Vincent Ialenti · 22 Sep 2020 · 224pp · 69,593 words
the analogue studies we explored in chapter 1, the Safety Case’s quantitative models distilled deep time into something that felt more amenable to bureaucratic, scientific, management, and regulatory control. The Safety Case modelers used numbers and scientific methods to tame deep time’s power to confuse. Some made computer models that
McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
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, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p.114 17 https://rkpayne.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/corporatist-spirituality/ 18 Frederwick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1915. 19 American Psychological Association, 1962. 20 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Witch Doctors: What the Management Gurus are Saying, Why
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and work efficiency from an expanding range of perspectives.51 “The world’s youngest profession,” consulting had its roots in Frederick Taylor’s studies of scientific management. But during the 1980s, consulting took up more space in the business ecology—so much space, in fact, that Forbes condemned the growth of the
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