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Digital Taylorism

Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, and David Ashton

in The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes

This chapter introduces Frederick Winslow Taylor's system of scientific management, which was achieved through the application of knowledge to work. It shows that there has been an information ... More

This chapter introduces Frederick Winslow Taylor's system of scientific management, which was achieved through the application of knowledge to work. It shows that there has been an information technology (IT) revolution, despite the failure of Thomas Friedman, along with many others, to understand its full significance. The chapter discusses mechanical Taylorism, which states that the application of knowledge, not muscle power, is the source of productivity. It then moves on to consider digital Taylorism, where the knowledge of technicians, managers, and professionals is translated into working knowledge by codifying, capturing, and digitalizing their work. The chapter also looks at the industrialization of knowledge work and considers the future of knowledge work.Less

Good Money in Good English

Edwin L. Battistella

in Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody's Famous Language School

This chapter covers Cody's career as a business writer and teacher, his first forays into the publishing business, and his emergence as a critic of traditional education. We follow the trajectory ... More

This chapter covers Cody's career as a business writer and teacher, his first forays into the publishing business, and his emergence as a critic of traditional education. We follow the trajectory that led him to work in school testing and to the creation of his correspondence course.Less

Building Quality in the Healthcare Environment

Donald M. Berwick

in The Trust Crisis in Healthcare: Causes, Consequences, and Cures

The quality of care issues in healthcare has long been recognized and publicized in studies done by the Institute of Medicine and other organizations. This chapter explores the relationship between ... More

The quality of care issues in healthcare has long been recognized and publicized in studies done by the Institute of Medicine and other organizations. This chapter explores the relationship between quality and trust. Quality results can build trust, and the fastest way to rebuild the trust in the healthcare system may be through healthcare quality improvement, but performance change is often blocked by systemic conditions. It explores how looking past Taylorism, accepting responsibility, and developing the skills to pursue an aim are key to generating change.Less

You Can Tell by the Way I Use My Walk: Music as Aid to Work and Critique of Taylorism

Marek Korczynski

in Songs of the Factory: Pop Music, Culture, and Resistance

This chapter focuses on how music was important for workers in terms of how they moved their bodies as they engaged in the labor process. Music afforded them the opportunity to enact the movements of ... More

This chapter focuses on how music was important for workers in terms of how they moved their bodies as they engaged in the labor process. Music afforded them the opportunity to enact the movements of workless in the structured alienated way of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) and more in the swaggering agentic way of John Travolta's walk in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever (1977). Workers at McTells use songs and jokes, both central to the “Stayin' Alive” culture, to enact production even as they expressed a critique of the way it was structured. The scenes of the two films have important connections with the two main ways in which workers comported themselves as they enacted the Taylorized labor processes of making blinds.Less

Taylorism Invades the Hen House

Kathleen C. Schwartzman

in The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations across the Americas

This chapter challenges the notions that ethnic succession was driven by “vacancy” and “shortage” and explains why both explanations are incomplete. It argues that such explanations do not address ... More

This chapter challenges the notions that ethnic succession was driven by “vacancy” and “shortage” and explains why both explanations are incomplete. It argues that such explanations do not address those nonmarket agents and elements that also led to perceived job vacancies or labor shortages. The chapter begins with an overview of the restructuring of the meat and poultry industries and the onset of mass production and goes on to discuss government support for the industry, including tax exemptions. It then examines Taylorism involving the reorganization of both production and labor in poultry factories, along with the emergence of a new labor-management conflict in the 1980s and early 1990s due in part to the rise of labor activity in the South. This conflict, it asserts, was the main reason for the ethnic succession in the poultry industry. It also considers the rise of new unions and social movements in the poultry industry.Less

Sex in the Age of Fordism: The Standardization of Sexual Objects

Benjamin Kahan

in The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality

This chapter explores industrialization as an etiology of sexuality, charting how the compartmentalization of sexuality develops around sexual object choice. Taking a hint from scholars like John ... More

This chapter explores industrialization as an etiology of sexuality, charting how the compartmentalization of sexuality develops around sexual object choice. Taking a hint from scholars like John D’Emilio and Henry Abelove who understand economic forces to have an enormous impact on sexual life, this chapter examines industrialization’s transformation not just of the ways that we produce objects, but also how industrialization is imagined to invent sexual objects. More specifically, this chapter considers how Fordism was understood by Antonio Gramsci and Sherwood Anderson to standardize sexual object choice in order to create the hegemonic system of sexual orientation dominant in America and much of Europe. This chapter attends to the ways in which Anderson’s text Winesburg, Ohio (1919) both locates consumer and sexual objects at the center of modern fields of desire and imagines the inhabitants of the small Ohio town to enact nonindustrialized and nonstandardized sexual pleasures.Less

The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema

Ryan Bishop

in Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film

This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using ... More

This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using Chaplin and Keaton as complementary directors who engaged with mechanization. Cinema’s capacity to engage the increasingly thin line between animate and inanimate entities, between the organic and the mechanical / electric, was rendered even thinner by the technologies that altered labour and vision. The numerous connections between the machine of the factory and the vision machine of the cinema factory/industry system reveal the many roles of visual technology within the cultural politics of the first few decades of cinema, leading to a self-reflexive examination of the status of the image, and cinema’s engagement and thematising of its own power.Less

Scientific Management, Racist Science, and Race Management

Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger

in Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism

Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger highlight the ways employers and their allies used racism to divide the working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such racist practices ... More

Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger highlight the ways employers and their allies used racism to divide the working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such racist practices began under slavery, and continued well into the early twentieth century as they constructed hierarchical workplaces which they deemed as natural; unions and solidarity in their estimation subverted the natural order. They call this practice “race management.” Employers seeking control over the workforce benefited from racism.Less

Biotechnical Agnosticism: Fragmented Life and Labor among the Machines

Sophia Roosth

in Synthetic: How Life Got Made

Chapter 4, “Biotechnical Agnosticism,” enters the lab of a Boston start-up company that built what members term a biological “assembly line” following the principles of Taylorism, the ... More

Chapter 4, “Biotechnical Agnosticism,” enters the lab of a Boston start-up company that built what members term a biological “assembly line” following the principles of Taylorism, the late-nineteenth-century management theory that tried to maximize labor efficiency. This company is compared to a larger, for-profit synthetic biology company in the Bay Area, in which the corporate ethos is also suffused by management theories emphasizing efficiency. Both companies subscribe to the “Toyota Way” production cycle forged in Japanese factories and popularized in American manufacturing philosophies such as General Electric’s “Six Sigma.” This chapter observes the deskilling of PhD benchwork in favor of undergraduate labor in one company and short-term manual laborers operating robots in the other. Juxtaposing these two companies shows how engineers have imported not only technical principles of manufacture (such as standardization, decoupling, and abstraction) into biology but also the labor relations and forms of alienation that underwrite mass production in late capitalism. As a result, synthetic biological work is fragmented, divided between the high-prestige work of biological design and the automation of biological manufacture. In some cases biological design is evacuated from industrial synthetic biology, which instead is feverishly spurred on by ever-increasing speeds and scales of production.Less

Conformity and Idiosyncrasy: Jean Rhys

Vike Martina Plock

in Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as ... More

By looking at Jean Rhys’s ‘Left Bank’ fiction (Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, ‘Illusion’, ‘Mannequin’), this chapter investigates how new operational procedures such as Fordism and Taylorism, which were introduced into the French couture industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, affected constructions of modern femininity. Increasingly standardized images of feminine types were produced by Paris couturiers while the new look of the Flapper seemingly advertised women’s expanding social, political and professional mobility. Rhys, this chapter argues, noted fashion’s ability to provide resources for creative image construction but she simultaneously expressed criticism of its tendency to standardize female costumes and behaviour. Ultimately, Rhys demonstrates in her fiction that the radically modern couture of the early twentieth century was by no means the maker of social change and women’s political modernity. To offset the increased standardization of female images that she witnessed around her, Rhys created heroines and texts that relied on an overt display on difference.  Less

The pragmatist influence on managerial ideas and practices: The strange history of lean management

Philippe Lorino

in Pragmatism and Organization Studies

A key idea of pragmatism is the inseparability of theory and practice, thought and action. Pragmatism is said to have had few contacts with the organizational world, and few direct practical ... More

A key idea of pragmatism is the inseparability of theory and practice, thought and action. Pragmatism is said to have had few contacts with the organizational world, and few direct practical applications, except in the domain of education. In particular, the pragmatist direct influence on the managerial world is often undervalued. However, pragmatist ideas have had a significant impact on managerial doctrines and can be traced in today’s debates amongst organization practitioners. This chapter studies three of those channels: Follett’s direct or indirect (for example through Chester Barnard’s work) influence on the corporate world as well as the management of public institutions; the stream of action research and reflection-in-action, in particular Donald Schön’s work; and the development of the quality movement as an anti-Taylorian revolution, deeply influenced by pragmatist thinkers (exploratory inquiry, community of inquiry, instrumental mediations, process perspective), more recently distorted into a Taylorian revival under the “lean management” label.Less

Work Study and the Industrial Worker in Post-war Britain and the West

J.P.S. Uberoi

Khalid Tyabji (ed.)

in Mind and Society: From Indian Studies to General Sociology

This is an introduction to the sociology of work, to human work, worship and play viewed as separate and autonomous spheres of life; the scientific or experimental study of work in the factory; ... More

This is an introduction to the sociology of work, to human work, worship and play viewed as separate and autonomous spheres of life; the scientific or experimental study of work in the factory; industrial sociology, sociologie du travail, scientific management and the human relations school; newer and more comprehensive approaches to the study of work; the history of work study in British industry; the components of industrial engineering; the managerial and working classes; and work study as a short-term approach to production The final section is on the attitudes of the manager, the supervisor and the trade union official; on work study and the worker, innovation and social structure and the nature of the industrial system.Less

Technoculture and the Future of Work

Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio

in The Jobless Future: Second Edition

This chapter begins by describing the intense competition between the United States and Germany for the development of radar and atomic weapon. German and Austrian refugee scientists, such as Albert ... More

This chapter begins by describing the intense competition between the United States and Germany for the development of radar and atomic weapon. German and Austrian refugee scientists, such as Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, and their American counterparts persuaded President Roosevelt to undertake the atomic bomb project in 1940, which became known as “big science.” Big science connotes the industrialization of knowledge and the transformation of the university into a knowledge factory. Having permeated everyday life, technology has become a culture; hence the conflation technoculture. Technoculture plays with the distinction between work and labor. Some have argued that, in contrast to work in the era of mechanical reproduction, computer-mediated work eliminates most of the repetitive tasks associated with Taylorism and Fordism: a “smart machine” can interact with human intelligence.Less

Rationalizing Healthcare: Scientific-Bureaucratic Medicine

Robert L. Wears and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

in Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine

Healthcare changed dramatically during the 20th century; industrialization lead to contention for control over medical work and there was a shift from autonomous, professional control to managerial, ... More

Healthcare changed dramatically during the 20th century; industrialization lead to contention for control over medical work and there was a shift from autonomous, professional control to managerial, hierarchical control, which included a strong belief in technical rationality. The rise of scientific-bureaucratic medicine combined ideas from Taylorism (i.e., the “one best way.” separation of planning from activity, and the rise of a managerial class) and a rationalizing turn in medicine (e.g., evidence-based medicine) to produce a hybrid group of clinician-managers, who can retain control of healthcare in health professionals’ hands. The quality improvement effort preceded the safety movement in health care by about a decade.Less

The Usability Challenge

Paul S. Adler and Terry Winograd

in Title Pages

All too often, new technologies are introduced into the workplace without sufficient planning for their implications for the workforce. To the extent that businesses do plan for these implications, ... More

All too often, new technologies are introduced into the workplace without sufficient planning for their implications for the workforce. To the extent that businesses do plan for these implications, their approach is often governed by two related myths—the idiot-proofing myth and the deskilling myth. In each, technology plays a heroic role, rescuing efficiency from a workforce presumed to be unreliable. In the idiot-proofing myth, the hero is a machine so perfect that it is immune from the limitations of its users. System design based on this perspective is more concerned with how to keep operators from creating errors than with enabling operators to deal with the inevitable contingencies of the work process. The deskilling myth extends the idiot-proofing myth, offering a system so idiot-proof that the business can presumably get along not only with proportionately fewer workers, but also with workers who are on average less skilled and less expensive. Contradicting these myths, an emerging body of research suggests that in the vast majority of cases, new technologies will be more effective when designed to augment rather than replace the skills of users. The key challenge in designing new technologies is how best to take advantage of users’ skills in creating the most effective and productive working environment. We call this the usability challenge. To meet the usability challenge, industry needs to develop more appropriate usability criteria and to implement more effective processes to assure usability. This book provides a background of concepts and experiences that can offer insight into defining these criteria and processes. This introductory chapter situates the usability challenge in its organizational context, develops some core concepts of usability, and outlines the subsequent chapters’ contributions. Our first task is to articulate more clearly what we mean by usability. The design of systems for human use has long been associated with the discipline of “human factors,” in which the operator is seen as a component of a larger system, and the job of the designer is to produce an “interface” that ensures the most efficient fit of this component into the system. Less

“The Ugly Duckling”: The Refinement of Ragtime Dancing and the Mass Marketing of Modern Social Dance

Danielle Robinson

in Modern Moves: Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras

The focus of chapter three is the transformation of ragtime dancing into modern dance by social dance professionals, some of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Dance teachers, ... More

The focus of chapter three is the transformation of ragtime dancing into modern dance by social dance professionals, some of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Dance teachers, writers, and performers collectively created new products (i.e., dances) that could be more easily mass-produced and marketed through processes that replicated many of the cutting-edge mass-production techniques of the time, such as those developed by Frederick Taylor. Period social dance professionals called their transformation of ragtime “refinement;” the changes they made to the dances, however, not only made them more marketable, they also shifted their racial associations from black to white. This illustrates how the mass production and marketing of modern social dance was deeply entangled with powerful period racial discourses.Less

Scores of Movement: Lev Kuleshov’s Approach to Film Acting

Ana Hedberg Olenina

in Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film

Chapter 3 examines the approaches to film actor training developed by the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 1920s. Inspired by the radical innovations of contemporary theater, ... More

Chapter 3 examines the approaches to film actor training developed by the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 1920s. Inspired by the radical innovations of contemporary theater, Kuleshov’s perspective on film acting relied on Ivan Pavlov’s and Vladimir Bekhterev’s reflexology, as well as psychotechnics and Taylorist labor efficiency training. Based on archival materials, this chapter establishes Kuleshov’s connection to the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral’nyi Institut Truda) in Moscow, which promoted a utopian program of ingraining effective working skills in the nervous systems of factory workers by optimizing their trajectories of movement. Kuleshov embraced the concepts and techniques popularized by this Institute. He theorized his actors’ ideal performance in terms of energy expenditure and maximal use of the audiences’ attention span. My analysis of Kuleshov’s program for actors’ bodily discipline scrutinizes the training apparatuses he relied on in the hopes of achieving geometrically precise, rhythmical gestures, which he believed could form a legible “ornament” in rapid montage.Less

The Persistence of [a] Vision: The Electronically Mediated Corporation: Prehistory

Kit Hughes

in Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor

Forgoing an examination of the media industries, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the rise of what one might call the mediated industries. A prehistory of television at work, this chapter traces an ... More

Forgoing an examination of the media industries, Chapter 1 focuses instead on the rise of what one might call the mediated industries. A prehistory of television at work, this chapter traces an intensifying relationship between electronic media and the workplace that follows the development and industrial application of telegraphy, telephony, recorded sound, wireless, applied radio, Muzak, faxing, and nontheatrical film. Situating this discussion in the context of scholars’ treatment of communication and empire, it argues that television occupies a key transitional position for the mediated corporation in which electronic communication’s dual uses as a logistical tool and as a conduit for cultural production converge. These processes illustrate the development of an alternative media sector and the symbiotic relationship between the “knowledge industries” and corporate expansion, as well as the specificities of how media infrastructures are created at scale.Less

Gilbreth, Inc.: Selling Film to Corporations

Florian Hoof

in Angels of Efficiency: A Media History of Consulting

Chapter 3 focuses on the emergence of the consulting industry and discusses early visual consulting models. It describes them as intrinsic parts of marketing efforts undertaken by consulting ... More

Chapter 3 focuses on the emergence of the consulting industry and discusses early visual consulting models. It describes them as intrinsic parts of marketing efforts undertaken by consulting companies to boost their business model. It specifically focuses on the case of the early corporate consulting firm Gilbreth, Inc., which developed its “lab-based consulting” approach, with a significant use of film and media, as the firm’s main unique selling proposition. Gilbreth, Inc. strategically used a broad range of different visualization techniques—including motion studies conducted in a laboratory setting—in order to separate themselves from other corporate consultants, such as Harrington Emerson and Frederick Taylor. They communicated this in a broadly conceived marketing campaign, which in turn has relevance for the development of management theory and practice, since it popularized a specific model of business leadership among a wider expert audience.Less

The Allure of Order: Rationalizing Schools from the Progressives to the Present

Jal Mehta

in The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling

In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed by a Republican ... More

In late 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed both House and Senate with strong bipartisan majorities and was signed by a Republican president. Promising to use the power of the state to ensure that all children were proficient in reading and math by 2014, proponents heralded the act as the greatest piece of federal education legislation since the creation of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. By requiring the states to set high standards, pairing them with assessments that measured whether students were achieving those standards, and holding schools accountable if students failed to do so, NCLB, in the eyes of its sponsors, would close achievement gaps and make America’s schools the envy of the world. A decade later, the bloom is off the rose. While almost everyone today continues to share the aim of leaving no child behind, the act itself has come in for criticism from many quarters, to the point that Bush’s former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings declared that NCLB is now a “toxic brand” in American politics. Careful studies of the implementation of NCLB have shown that it has done what less bullish observers might have predicted from the outset. It has increased the focus on the education of poor and minority students, but it has not provided schools with needed tools to create higher quality schooling for these students. There has been improvement in some national test scores (e.g., 4th and 8th grade math), while others have remained largely unchanged (e.g., 4th and 8th grade reading). Even accounting for the progress in math, there is no sign that the reforms have had a significant impact in closing achievement gaps or in improving America’s mediocre international educational standing. Particularly in the most troubled schools, there has been rampant teaching to the test and some outright cheating. In-depth studies have shown that some schools now devote a large part of their year to test prep; Atlanta and DC public schools have both contended with widespread cheating scandals. Less