scientific management

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

by Sebastian Mallaby;  · 30 Mar 2026  · 607pp  · 161,998 words

in logic and reason. The 1950s enshrined the rational agent at the heart of economics, the efficient-market hypothesis at the heart of finance, and “scientific” managers at the heart of corporations. In this hopeful era, it was only natural for the Dartmouth group to believe that human intelligence was rational and

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

the upheavals of industrial society, the technocrats sought “to invent industrial-strength tools of social control,” writes the historian John M. Jordan. Through concepts like scientific management, they tried to reorient the economy away from self-interest and profit by placing it in the charge of technical experts. In 1896 an American

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

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy

by Christopher Mims  · 13 Sep 2021  · 385pp  · 112,842 words

, and even many experts in the fields of manufacturing, supply chains, economics, and labor, don’t know his name, nor the name of his discipline, scientific management. Even those who do generally have only the vaguest understanding of his significance. For most pundits and historians, he is at most a caricature, a

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them in a pivotal case argued before the Interstate Commerce Commission. In 1914, Lenin wrote that scientific management was how capitalism extracted the most from its beleaguered subjects; in 1918, he reversed himself and said scientific management would be essential to building a functional Soviet state. Scholars of Taylor have argued that the French

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have held the Kaiser at bay in World War I without him. Even one of his harshest critics, management theorist Peter Drucker, credited Taylor and scientific management with winning the Second World War. His ideas were debated in the halls of Congress in 1912 and then banned from use in U.S

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up production by one-fourth. He’d do it, too.” Elsewhere, they wrote, “Our house at Montclair, New Jersey, was a sort of school for scientific management and the elimination of wasted motions—or ‘motion study,’ as Dad and Mother named it. Dad took moving pictures of us children washing dishes, so

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management consultants, and then he “retired” in 1901. He wrote two books—Shop Management, published in 1903 and intended for experts, and The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911 and aimed at a lay audience. Both were subsequently translated into every language spoken in the world’s industrializing economies, from Europe

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as a matter of course—was yet to come. Performing the kind of productivity measurements that would become the hallmark of the efficiency movement and scientific management required the appropriation of a tool previously used almost solely for a very different purpose. The first mass-produced stopwatches in America numbered only 400

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instruments into the factory. Mass production and interchangeable parts made these devices widely available and also eventually drove universal adoption of the system of scientific management. In later years, scientific management would come to be so closely identified with the stopwatch that men in suits skulking about factory floors, stopwatches and notebooks in hand

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, were treated with open hostility by some workers. In his Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor sought to turn his ideas into stories that were accessible if not strictly true, in a sort of proto–Malcolm Gladwellian effort to market

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his ideas. In what he made the founding myth of scientific management, he told a probably apocryphal tale of a laborer named Schmidt, whose job it was to load pig iron into a cart, and whom he

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supposedly convinced to work three times as hard for about 40 percent more pay. The founding myth of Taylorism and scientific management, and therefore all of management consulting, is a story of a steelworker in a race not unlike the one between John Henry and the steam

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practitioner of what would come to be known as Taylorism, a name most often used pejoratively to describe what had previously been known as scientific management. He was just scientific management’s richest and most visible hype man, and also apparently quite charming when in the company of other management consultants and the bosses

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of wasted motion on the factory floor in an apartment in New York City. It was in that apartment where they settled on the phrase “scientific management” as the name of their philosophy. Taylor died in 1915, at age fifty-nine, three years after being grilled for three days by a special

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the Watertown Arsenal. Watertown was where the U.S. government manufactured cannons and other armaments, and where Taylor’s assistant had instituted a system of scientific management that was universally loathed by workers. Molders at Watertown who were told to pour a gun carriage in less than half the time they usually

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—but incorrectly—leaped to the conclusion that Taylor’s and Ford’s ideas about management were directly linked. The most critical thing to understand about scientific management, Taylorism, the mass production system that came to be known as Fordism, and many other early efforts to measure and enhance the productivity of workers

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set of commonsense answers to a widespread question: How can the human side of mass production be made faster and more efficient? That something like scientific management proved to be the answer for many different people who might have at first been only vaguely aware of one another should hardly be a

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nor additional raw materials with which to accomplish it. The solution was efficiency. “Even before the war, French military officers had recognized the potential of scientific management for arsenal operations and had introduced Taylor’s methods in at least one plant,” wrote Nelson. “After 1914, as they struggled to increase production, they

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increasingly relied on scientific management for the manufacture of shells, arms, explosives, motor vehicles, and airplanes.” Managers in France followed the letter of Taylor’s philosophy in a way Taylor

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of Taylorism at its best—increasing efficiency and productivity without harming those subjected to it. Others in Taylor’s circle adopted similar strategies when bringing scientific management into firms. Frank Gilbreth insisted that both management and labor sign off on any changes to working conditions intended to increase efficiency. After the death

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workers and wrote a book called The Psychology of Management, subtitled The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and Installing Methods of Least Waste. “[Scientific management] has demonstrated that the emphasis in successful management lies on the man, not on the work; that efficiency is best secured by placing the emphasis

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he wrote about it in a 1915 essay in Harper’s Weekly titled “Efficiency by Consent.” He argued that under a fully developed system of scientific management, “the greater productivity of labor must not only be attainable, but attainable under conditions consistent with the conservation of health, the enjoyment of work, and

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the most time-consuming tasks of everyday life more tractable demonstrated, more than anything else up to that point in time, the broad applicability of scientific management. Frederick Taylor codified and popularized the fruits of the efficiency movement, but it was Lillian Gilbreth who taught the world that it was possible to

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: a middle class standard of health and cleanliness for herself, her spouse and her children,” wrote historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan. One of many ironies of scientific management is that by the measure of its ability to reduce the total quantity of humanity’s labors, it was a complete failure. Taylorism was in

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Jungle, wrote a letter to The American Magazine critical of how little a worker’s wage increased in Taylor’s depiction in his Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor responded that Sinclair had missed the point entirely. Throughout history, it wasn’t the worker who benefited the most from increased efficiency, or even

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thereby the prosperity, of the civilized world has been the introduction of machinery to replace hand labor . . . And this result will follow the introduction of scientific management just as surely as it has the introduction of machinery.” The privilege of productivity over all other concerns shows up again and again throughout the

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, and intensification of work that is frequently a consequence of modern information technology. The converging technologies and economic forces that inspired Frederick Taylor to invent scientific management find pure and too often sinister expression on America’s highways and in the cabs of her trucks. In industries where competition is intense and

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containing it tend to physically cluster closer to the pick stations. Having your most frequently used tools close to hand was a fundamental principle of scientific management and the foundation of the rethinking of everything from Frederick Taylor’s optimization of how machinists did their work to Lillian Gilbreth’s design for

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have come straight from the mouths of the members of Congress who grilled Frederick Taylor for three days in January 1912 about his application of scientific management to both private firms and the Watertown Arsenal, Beth found that while there is “the potential for these technologies to reduce the strain on workers

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: Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 433–34. Lenin wrote that scientific management: Zenovia A. Sochor, “Soviet Taylorism Revisited,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 2 (1981): 246–264, http://www.jstor.org/stable/151338. held the kaiser at bay

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Work,” Harvard Business Review, September 1988, https://hbr.org/1988/09/management-and-the-worlds-work. to factories overseas: Daniel Nelson, ed., A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management Since Taylor (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992). almost exclusively women: Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the

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. 433–34. fit the first one perfectly: Simon Winchester, The Perfectionists (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). psychology of skilled workers: Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911). patented in 1891: Willard Le Grand Bundy, workman’s time recorder, US Patent 452894A, patented May 26, 1891. Waltham Watch

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/12/not-so-fast. the name of their philosophy: Horace Bookwalter Drury, Scientific Management: A History and Criticism (New York: Columbia University, 1918). “This method is un-American”: Drury, Scientific Management. Daniel Nelson wrote: Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980). “multiple discovery”: William F. Ogburn

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Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck & Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). “French military officers had recognized the potential of scientific management”: Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management. wrote in 1955: Lillian M. Gilbreth, Management in the Home: Happier Living Through Saving Time and Energy (New York: Dodd, Mead

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Records Administration, September 23, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/cotton-gin-patent. Taylor made the same error: Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911). This trend was later confirmed: Will Evans, “Leaked Documents Show How Amazon Misled the Public About Warehouse Safety Issues,” PBS

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, 223; on-time delivery as main concern of, 223–24, 225–27; safety training and safety culture at, 200, 206, 208, 216, 239, 276, 279; scientific management at, 174–75, 193; sortation centers used by, 255; stack ranking of white-collar workers at, 204; stressful working conditions at, 171–76, 191; trucks

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workers as, 15, 42, 219; labor/employment and, 76, 103, 177–79, 241–50; predictability and efficiency, relationship to, 230–32; robotic delivery, 263–70; scientific management and, 101–2; at sortation centers in “middle mile,” 253–59, 261; surveillance and work intensification, combined with, 113, 157, 174–75, 203, 211–14

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, 231 Ford, Henry, Ford Motor Company, and Fordism: Amazon warehouses and robotic warehousing, 163–64, 184; Bezosism and, 198, 207, 214–16, 219, 220, 231; scientific management (Taylorism) compared, 91, 99–101; supply chain in, 2, 8, 12 Forditis, 216 Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.), 17–18, 221 freight brokers and

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, 253; Toyota Production System (“lean production”), 198–99, 207, 221–22, 224–25, 226–29; worker empowerment and, 227–28, 229, 232. See also Bezosism; scientific management Mao Zedong, 278 Marcus, Gary, 142 Marine Exchange of Southern California, 48, 50 Marketplace (Amazon business), 236 Marx, Karl, 87 Marzougui, Hedi, 28 Mason, George

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of, 52 Savannah, GA, port of, 61 Save Santa (1998 holiday season at Amazon), 224 Schneider (trucking company), 107 Schumpeter, Joseph, 242 Schwartz, Ruth, 105 scientific management (Taylorism), 87–106; at Amazon, 174–75, 193; automation and, 101–2; basic principles of, 95–96; Bezosism as modern-day version of, 198, 199

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, 268 slavery: cotton gin and African American chattel slavery, 212; crews on container ships during pandemic, 28; Nazi slave laborers, 144; robots as slaves, 219; scientific management (Taylorism) as form of, 232; wage slavery of long-haul truckers, 157 slow steaming, 35–36 slungshot, 65 “smalls,” 260 smartphones: delivery drivers, communication with

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conditions: at Amazon, 171–76, 191, 214–16, 234; automation, surveillance, and work intensification, 113, 157, 174–75, 203, 211–14, 231–32, 234–35; scientific management and, 88, 95, 97, 98, 213, 234; shipping crews affected by Covid-19 pandemic, 27–29; for truck drivers, 110–13, 117, 120–21, 125

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, invention of, 129 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 87–90, 93–98, 103, 104, 105, 113, 213; The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), 95, 97, 98; Shop Management (1903), 95 Taylor, Robert, 216 Taylorism. See scientific management Teamsters, 171, 277–78 teraflops, 154 Terminal Island, port of Los Angeles, 45, 48, 51 Tesla, 154, 155 textile

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chain, 91–92; 19th-century factories, 91, 212 Theodore, Nik, 233 Thompson, Ben, 211 tilt-tray sorters, 166, 181, 223 time and motion studies. See scientific management time-of-flight cameras, 267 time-stamping clocks, 96 Titanic, 41–42 towns, interstate highway system bypassing, 130, 133 Toyota Production System (“lean production”), 198

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

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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

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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

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics

by David A. Mindell  · 10 Oct 2002  · 759pp  · 166,687 words

new G.E. system. He had even spent time observing production at the Midvale Steel Company, where Frederick Winslow Taylor did his pioneering work in scientific management. Blandy pushed computers as replacements for manual plotting, argued for innovations in training, and won his ships numerous gunnery trophies. 31 Ironically, in 1938 Blandy

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. Nebeker, Frederik. Signal Processing: The Emergence of a Discipline, 1948–1998 . New York: IEEE Press, 1998. Nelson, Daniel. Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Noble, David F. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism . New York: Knopf, 1977. ———. Forces

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–96. Chicago: Imprint, 1996. Svoboda, Antonin. Computing Mechanisms and Linkages . Radiation Laboratory Series, 27. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management . New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911. Tellegen, B. D. H. “Inverse Feedback.” Phillips Technical Review 2 (October 1937): 289–94. Terman, Frederick Emmons. Radio Engineer’s

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

by James C. Scott  · 8 Feb 1999  · 607pp  · 185,487 words

production falling, he was calling for rigid work norms and, if necessary, the reintroduction of hated piecework. The first All-Russian Congress for Initiatives in Scientific Management was convened in 1921 and featured disputes between advocates of Taylorism and those of energetics (also called ergonomics). At least twenty institutes and as many

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journals were by then devoted to scientific management in the Soviet Union. A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an

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the first decade of the twentieth century, British officials and investors no doubt believed that rubber produced by estates, which had better planting stock, better scientific management, and more available labor, would prove more efficient and profitable than rubber produced by smallholders.',, When they discovered they were wrong, however, officials persisted in

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Taylor, saw the issue of destroying metis and turning a resistant, quasiautonomous, artisan population into more suitable units, or "factory hands," with great clarity. "Under scientific management ... the managers assume ... the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then

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control of agricultural production possible (pp. 106-7). 48. Lenin, Works (Moscow, 1972), 27:163, quoted in Ranier Traub, "Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of 'Scientific Management' in the (Early) Soviet Union;' trans. Judy Joseph, in Telos 34 (Fall 1978): 82-92 (originally published in Kursbuch 43 [1976]). The "bard" of Taylorism

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. 27. Enthusiastic visitors included the likes of John Dewey, Lincoln Steffens, Rexford Tugwell, Robert LaFollette, Morris Llewellyn Cooke (at the time the foremost exponent of scientific management in the United States), Thurman Arnold, and, of course, Thomas Campbell, who called the Soviet experiment "the biggest farming story the world has ever heard

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

by Peter D. Norton  · 15 Jan 2008  · 409pp  · 145,128 words

applied their expertise to the control of problems that, in modern times, no longer could be trusted to solve themselves. Sanitation, public utility regulation and scientific management were three such new fields for the application of engineering expertise. A fourth, and a relatively late arrival, was city traffic. To fight traffic, however

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new problems. To the new problem of dense motor traffic in cities, engineers proposed professional traffic control. In their earlier work in public health and scientific management, engineers showed what measurement and empirical study could accomplish in social fields once the province of law and custom. The example of public utility regulation

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morality. But with “social organization” many engineers hoped to get efficiency without such strictures.7 Though they did not always succeed, the difference remains crucial. Scientific management experts, for example, did not merely want control workers’ motions, they sought to organize the work environment so that the most efficient motions would follow

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bettered from fifty to one hundred per cent.”10 Engineers found regulatory means for a wider scope of social ends, and with their record in scientific management and public utilities they convinced others this modern way would work in new fields. Chambers of Commerce Cities could afford to do little about the

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David Nord’s apt term.37 Engineers proposed instead that efficiency could benefit all. Experts (many of them engineers) in sanitation, public utilities, conservation, and scientific management showed people that with the right regulation they could alleviate many problems—especially city problems—to the benefit of all interested parties. In the new

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state public service commissions turned to. Engineers, for the most part, determined the regulations and franchise agreements that would deliver efficiency.41 Scientific Management: A Model of Social Organization In scientific management, engineers attempted to solve human problems through social organization. Frederick Taylor’s methods, and gleanings from them, found wide application in business

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as Public Utilities 113 industrial peace through a restoration of the union of interests between capital and labor. Engineers found the technique useful elsewhere too. Scientific management was a technosocial technique serving technosocial ends. Its practitioners called for the substitution of “system” for “ruleof-thumb methods.”42 Business led the way in

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the systematization of social processes, and it was business that Taylor particularly addressed. Yet many reformers—Taylor among them—recognized the wider applicability of scientific management. The technique, Taylor maintained, “can be applied with equal force to all social activities,” and indeed reformers sought to replace expediency with system throughout much

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,” which was an effort to stamp out the sort of abuses that the muckrakers attacked. Scientific management evolved in the private sector, where employers enjoyed broad authority over their workers’ actions. Any who wished to apply scientific management in the public sector had to confront the limitations of American state power. The emerging administrative

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time and motion studies to the problem of city traffic, with a meticulousness entirely unknown to their predecessors in city police departments.50 To engineers, scientific management was proof that they could achieve the reputable results of the scientific laboratory even in the clinically imperfect conditions in which social problems are found

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a common interest to be achieved by positive means with the techniques that industrial development provided. Yet traffic engineers needed a justification for control that scientific management alone could not provide.51 City engineers found it in public utilities regulation. The public utility model gave engineers a path to regulatory control that

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individual street users’ travel choices with the optimum city transportation system. They were willing to go to some lengths to shape demands—just as the scientific management reformers had not trusted workers or foremen, but insisted on prescribing and enforcing “the one best way.” The Lessons of Water Supply Engineers who wanted

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the public interest (as they saw it) required positive state action; in return, engineers taught progressives the limitations of the adversary model of regulation. Both scientific management and public utility regulation stood for the universal benefits of efficiency, and engineers sought to bring these benefits to street traffic in the 1920s. 5

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Business Man,” City Manager Magazine (International City Managers Association) 8 (Sept. 1926), 22–27, 65 (26). Notes to Chapter 4 307 22. Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. x. 23. J. D. Cloud and Company, “The Stockholders of a City Are Its Citizens

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1919), 611, 613 (613). 33. Gantt quoted in Frank Crane, “The Engineer,” American City 15 (Oct. 1916), 412. 34. Morris L. Cooke, “The Influence of Scientific Management upon Government— Federal, State and Municipal” (paper presented to the Taylor Society, Jan. 26, 1924), Bulletin of the Taylor Society 9 (Feb. 1924), 31–38

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Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Harvard University Press, 1990), 9; see also Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1967), 16: “The inefficient rule-of-thumb methods . . . are still almost universal in all trades. . . .” 308 Notes to

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, 1990); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1959); Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 1964). On public utilities, see below. In conservation the regulators were not engineers, but their methods were

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Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Harvard University Press, 1990). 43. For the basic early postulations of scientific management see especially Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Harper and Row, 1947) and Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study (D. Van Nostrand, 1911). Of the very extensive historical work on

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scientific management in American industry, see especially Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 1964), Daniel Nelson, Frederick

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Winslow Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (1980), and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor

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of Efficiency (Viking, 1997). 44. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad 118 U.S. 394 (1886). 45. See especially Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era (University of Chicago Press, 1964). 46. Joel DeWitt Justin, “Selecting an Engineer,” American City 25 (Oct. 1921), 285. 47. On commission

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, used the business model of government to overcome the obstacles to efficiency they saw in a decentralized state founded upon natural rights liberalism. 48. Straetz, “Scientific Management as a Guide in Traffic Planning,” American City 32 (May 1925), 579. 49. Two of the most prominent partisans of

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scientific management made light of their own measurement-fixated domestic lives in an enormously popular book; see Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Cheaper by the Dozen (Crowell, 1948). 

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and Clay McShane have both argued for a closer connection between the management of city streets and scientific management than is accepted here. Fairfield has related Taylorism to urban transportation and street design in “The Scientific Management of Urban Space,” Journal of Urban History 20 (Feb. 1994), 179–204; see also his Mysteries of

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Politics of Urban Design, 1877– 1937 (Ohio State University Press, 1993), chapter 4 (119–157). McShane has traced the “conceptual roots” of traffic engineering to scientific management (“The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals,” Journal of Urban History 25, March 1999, 379–404 (390)). For a contemporary comparison of the common

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principles of traffic control, scientific management, and public utilities regulation, see C. A. Copper, “The Economic Life of the City in Relation to Street Traffic,” AERA 14 (Sept. 1925), 193–200

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); Fairfield, The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877–1937 (Ohio State University Press, 1993), chapter 4 (119–157); Fairfield, “The Scientific Management of Urban Space: Professional City Planning and the Legacy of Progressive Reform,” Journal of Urban History 20 (Feb. 1994), 179–204. 17. See esp. Fairfield

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. 64 Schneider, H. J., 96 Science, 51, 58, 63, 64, 103, 108, 111, 114, 126, 127, 130, 133, 152, 166, 176, 209. See also Experts Scientific management, 106–108, 112– 114, 123, 128 Scott, Charles B., 93 Seely, Bruce, 309n41, 355n151, 372n184 Semaphores. See Traffic signals Sewers. See Sanitation Sharkey, William, 121

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