scientific management

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The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

At the Bethlehem Steel Company, where a fairly full-blooded version of the Taylor system was put into effect between 1899 and 1902, even Taylor's close collaborator Henry Gantt described its operation as overly "elaborate and autocratic."19 From 1910 onward resistance to scientific management increasingly took the form of strikes. David Montgomery has written of a "Great Fear" of scientific management that seized the metal crafts from 1910 onward, comparable to the mass anxiety of the French peasants at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.20 While the resistance of the metal crafts to scientific management grew from 1910, the ensuing years, paradoxically, were also the years of scientific management's greatest success. In these years craft workers were not so much defeated by scientific management as bypassed by it. In the century's second decade the practice of scientific management n 28 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY broke out of the confines of Taylor's machining world so that by the early 1920s, in Alfred Chandler's words, "the practice of systematic and scientific management had become standard for the management of the 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 that Taylor had developed specifically to ensnare the machinist.

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Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison, Wise., 1980), p. 174. 12. Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911; paperback ed. 1967), pp. 48-19. 13. Frederick Winslow Taylor, "The Art of Cutting Metals," in Scientific Management, A Collection of the More Significant Articles Describing the Taylor System of Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1914), p. 245. 14. Ibid., p. 252. 15. Ibid., p. 262. 16. Ibid., p. 263. 17. Taylor, Shop Management, p. 113. 18. Ibid., p. 102. 19. Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management^ p. 85. 20. David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987), p. 247. 21.

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We will therefore begin by looking at the rise of mass production and scientific management during their formative century, a period that began as long ago as the 1820s and ended in the 1920s, with the early use of "flexible mass production" by General Motors. This is overwhelmingly a history of U.S. manufacturing, since the origins of mass production and scientific management are to be found in the machine shops and along the assembly lines of American manufacturing. We will then move forward and trace the influence of mass production and scientific management in our own times. Since both practices have their origins in manufacturing, one of 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.

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

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

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, 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 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 supposedly convinced to work three times as hard for about 40 percent more pay.

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No less a personage than future supreme court justice Louis Brandeis made Taylor’s ideas famous in 1910 by employing 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, who adopted his ideas even faster than industrialists in his home country, could not 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. government armories.

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“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 and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1922): 83–98. facilities in Chicago: Boris Emmet and John E. Jeuck, Catalogues and 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.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

His wages thus went up by roughly 60 percent, while output nearly quadrupled, a good deal for the company though also a gain, if much more modest, for the worker. At least in theory, scientific management, or Taylorism as it was sometimes called, made the struggle between workers and owners over wages no longer a zero-sum game. For this reason, in the eyes of many Progressive Era reformers, scientific management held the promise of eliminating or at least ameliorating the class conflict that had come with industrialization and the giant factory, without fundamentally restructuring society.52 The Road to 1919 In practice, at least in the short run, scientific management failed to have much effect on the growing class tensions in the steel industry and the nation.

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In addition, at least a few Russian socialists, most importantly Lenin, knew about scientific management and thought about its implications. In his first comments about scientific management, while in exile in 1913, Lenin echoed critiques common among American and European unionists and leftists, seeing its “purpose . . . to squeeze out of the worker” more labor in the same amount of time. “Advances in the sphere of technology and science in capitalist society are but advances in the extortion of sweat.” Three years later, he plunged deeper into scientific management in preparation for writing Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, reading a German translation of Taylor’s book Shop Management, a book on the application of the Taylor system, and an article by Frank Gilbreth on how motion studies could increase national wealth.

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Labor compulsion, necessary during the transition to socialism, he contended, had different significance when used in the service of a workers’ state than for a capitalist enterprise (an argument that made little headway with many Soviet trade unionists).10 The dispute over scientific management was largely resolved at the Second All-Union Conference on Scientific Management, held in March 1924. The participation by top communist leaders in the extensive public debate that preceded it was a measure of the importance of the question of the use of capitalist management methods in the Soviet Union. By and large, the conference came out in support of Gastev and the wide application of scientific management, reflecting the demographic and economic circumstances of the period. The prerevolutionary and revolutionary-era skilled working class, the natural center for opposition to Taylorism, had been all but decimated by war, revolution, and civil war, with many of its survivors co-opted into leadership positions in the government and the party.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967), 19. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 45–46 Ibid., 59. Frederick Taylor Archives, Special Collections, Stevens College, Hoboken, New Jersey, Box 106B, Legislation, Scientific Management, Henry Knolle. Frederick Taylor Archives, Box 106B, Legislation, Scientific Management, Henry Knolle. Letter to Mr. Cooke, December 6, 1913, Frederick Taylor Archives, Box 106B, Legislation, Scientific Management, Henry Knolle. Letter to Mr. A. B. Wadleigh, December 22nd, 1913, Frederick Taylor Archives, Box 106B, Legislation, Scientific Management, Henry Knolle.

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Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 125. 20. Mark Bahnisch, “Embodied Work, Divided Labour: Subjectivity and the Scientific Management of the Body in Frederick W. Taylor’s 1907 ‘Lecture on Management,’” Body and Society 6, no. 1 (2000): 51–68, 62. 21. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 77. 22. Ibid., 79. 23. Ibid., 117–18. 24. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 321. 25. Bahnisch, “Embodied Work, Divided Labour: Subjectivity and the Scientific Management of the Body in Frederick W. Taylor’s 1907 ‘Lecture on Management,’” 54. 26. Ibid., 63. 27.

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In a letter of January 5, Taylor thanks Wadleigh for his work but remarks, “There is only one sentence which I would modify, if I were you, in your report, namely: at the end of page 2 you state, ‘most men of his class are old men at his age.’ I am very sure that the Socialists and the Member RT52565_C004.indd 90 4/13/06 7:33:37 AM The Production of Mobility in the Workplace and the Home • 91 of Congress and the Trade Unionists would use this sentence to the detriment of Scientific Management. They would distort it to mean that Scientific Management made men old at 44.” Taylor suggests that he omit this sentence and obligingly has the report rewritten and sent back to Wadleigh for his signature along with fi ft y dollars for his troubles. Clearly the mobility (or immobility) of Knolle’s body had quite an impact on the history of mobilities in the workplace.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

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, ] 47. 68. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Norton, 1969), 101. 69. One of the best examples of this dynamic 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- trol in America, 115. 70.

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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 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK as a source of effort and as a source of skill. Second, workers' responses to Taylorism reveal the ambivalence that this dual role of the body can create, 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.

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The growth of the management hierarchy depended in part upon this transfer of knowledge from the private sentience of the worker's active body to the systematic lists, flowcharts, and measurements of the planner's office. 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 AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK what is to be done and to prepare instructions as to what is to be done before the work is started. . . the laborer has only to follow direction. He need not stop 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.

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton

clean water, Frederick Winslow Taylor, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, General Motors Futurama, invisible hand, jitney, new economy, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal

Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Belknap, 1977), 377–500; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Morton Keller, Regulating a New 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 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 Winslow Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (1980), and Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Viking, 1997). 44.

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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, where they promised Streets 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 the systematization of social processes, and it was business that Taylor particularly addressed.

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Many reformers, however, 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 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). 310 Notes to Chapter 4 50. See chapter 3. 51. John Fairfield 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 the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877– 1937 (Ohio State University Press, 1993), chapter 4 (119–157).

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Henry Ford’s great rival, Alfred Sloan, applied them to General Motors (rather more successfully than Ford, it turned out: Sloan was a professional manager, detached from the hurly-burly of the shop floor, whereas Ford was an inveterate meddler). Many of Taylor’s disciples found their way into state and local government and tried to apply scientific management to places like the schoolroom and the operating theater.4 Congress held hearings on the subject as early as 1912, giving publicity to the new idea. Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, tried to use scientific management to make government more efficient. Still, the apostles of scientific management did not have it all their own way. A rival group of theorists, who became known as the human-relations school, wanted to see workers involved in managerial decisions.

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“All the companies we interviewed,” the authors note, “from Boeing to McDonald’s, were quite simply rich tapestries of anecdote, myth, and fairy tale.”17 Peters and Waterman were hardly the first people (and certainly not the last) to draw attention to the limitations of the rationalist model of management. There is a long tradition of bashing scientific management stretching back to the human-relations school of management; indeed, it is reasonable to argue that the critique of scientific management is as old as scientific management itself. In The Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960, Douglas McGregor argued that management theory paid too much attention to “theory X,” which holds that workers are lazy and need to be driven by financial incentives, and not enough to “theory Y,” which holds that, on the contrary, workers are creative and need to be given responsibility.

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William Richard Morris, the father of Britain’s automobile industry, was so dismayed by the difficulties of introducing the new system that he christened it “mess production.”6 C. S. Myers, a psychologist, criticized scientific management for taking a simplistic view of human motives. Elliott Jaques, another psychologist, focused on the social dynamics of group behavior and, after the Second World War, turned Tavistock Institute in London into the headquarters of humanistic management. A fair number of Europe’s leading intellectuals were caught up in the struggle between scientific and humanistic management. In Germany, avant-garde thinkers were mesmerized by the cult of scientific management. Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius and Ludwig Hilberseimer tried to marry design with scientific management.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

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In 1910, when a group of powerful railroads petitioned the government for a rate hike, the Supreme Court determined that they did not need it: if the railroads just adopted Taylor’s scientific management, they could save up to one million dollars a day—more than they would have gained with the rate hike. The lawyer who represented “the consumer” in the case, Louis Brandeis (who would later be appointed to the Supreme Court), wrote, “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected, none seems to me to be equal to [scientific management] in its importance and hopefulness.” Historian Glenn Porter explains, “Scientific management took on some of the trappings of a kind of secular religion; Taylor was the messiah, and his followers, who spread the word, were (and still are) commonly referred to as ‘disciples.’”

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A Taylor disciple writing in the 1940s acknowledged that despite all the effort they poured into their crusade, he and his peers never would have “dreamed that in less than a quarter of a century the principles of scientific management would be so woven into the fabric of our industrial life that they would be accepted as a commonplace, that plants would be operating under the principles of scientific management without knowing it, plants perhaps that had never heard of Taylor.” Peter Drucker argued that Taylor, more than Karl Marx, deserves a place in the pantheon of modern intellectual thought alongside Darwin and Freud.

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The stakes for military organizations are particularly visible and dramatic—wars are won or lost, people live or die—but civilian organizations also wrestle with the basic questions of individuality, standardization, and predictability of outcome. Individual companies and entire economies depend on business leaders’ knowing how best to manage for success. While fighting forces have been developing such protocols since Sparta, the notion of top-down, rigidly predetermined, “scientific” management of behavior in the civilian sector is largely the legacy of the nineteenth-century Quaker Frederick Winslow Taylor. His influence on the way we think about doing things—from running corporations to positioning kitchen appliances—is profound and pervasive. For our Task Force and for other twenty-first-century organizational endeavors, the legacy of Taylor’s ideas is both part of the solution and part of the problem.

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing by Rachel Plotnick

augmented reality, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, invisible hand, means of production, Milgram experiment, Oculus Rift, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, software studies, Steve Jobs

Laborers who spent their days doing physical activity expressed disdain for button pushers because they defined “work” as physical exertion, where those who sat idly by at their desks dispensing orders—exercising nothing but their fingers—did not qualify as legitimate workers in the eyes of others.12 Rhetoric of this kind reflected the agenda of the scientific management movement, in which workers were taught to calibrate their hands with buttons that would enable them to perform “efficiently” with machines. To this end, scientists and efficiency experts rigorously documented the movements of bodies in factories and cataloged workers’ efforts in experimental laboratories to achieve optimal button pushing. Managers, too, enthusiastically invested in scientific management principles and applied electrical solutions to minimize handwork and effort, pushing buttons to enforce discipline, control, and rationalized movement of bodies.

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Only in this way may the most be got out of life.”21 These individuals believed that honing reaction time—and making one’s interactions with communication and control mechanisms effortless—would aid the human body by enabling it to achieve its full potential.22 Well-known researchers such as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the latter an advocate for a brand of scientific management known as “Taylorism,” desired this optimization to make laboring bodies, especially in factories, more efficient. In his classic book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor noted that university physiological departments routinely carried out experiments with electric buttons to “determine the ‘personal coefficient’ of the man tested.”23 He enthused that some individuals were “born with unusually quick powers of perception accompanied by quick responsive action.”24 To know each worker’s “personal coefficient” and assign him to his most effective post could help a manager to maximize production from his workers’ bodies and therefore improve his business.

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See Samuel Osherson and Lorna AmaraSingham, “The Machine Metaphor in Medicine,” in Social Contexts of Health, Illness, and Patient Care, ed. Elliot G. Mishler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 228–229. 23. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913). 24. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. 25. Angelo Mosso, Fatigue, trans. M. Drummond and W. B. Drummond (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904); Frances Gulick Jewett, Control of Body and Mind (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1908). In the latter study, an experiment involved a boy and an electric button.

Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert C. Martin

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Boeing 737 MAX, c2.com, cognitive load, continuous integration, DevOps, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Frederick Winslow Taylor, index card, iterative process, Kanban, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, remote working, revision control, scientific management, Turing machine

Indeed, there was a competing methodology that had enjoyed considerable success in manufacturing and industry at large: Scientific Management. 2. Ward’s wiki, c2.com, is the original wiki—the first ever to have appeared in the internet. Long may it be served. 3. Larman, C. 2004. Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. Scientific Management is a top-down, command-and-control approach. Managers use scientific techniques to ascertain the best procedures for accomplishing a goal and then direct all subordinates to follow their plan to the letter. In other words, there is big up-front planning followed by careful detailed implementation. Scientific Management is probably as old as the pyramids, Stonehenge, or any of the other great works of ancient times, because it is impossible to believe that such works could have been created without it.

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Pre-Agile (Agile before it was called “Agile”) took short reactive steps that were measured and refined in order to stagger, in a directed random walk, toward a good outcome. Scientific Management deferred action until a thorough analysis and a resulting detailed plan had been created. Pre-Agile worked well for projects that enjoyed a low cost of change and solved partially defined problems with informally specified goals. Scientific Management worked best for projects that suffered a high cost of change and solved very well-defined problems with extremely specific goals. The question was, what kinds of projects were software projects?

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Scientific Management is probably as old as the pyramids, Stonehenge, or any of the other great works of ancient times, because it is impossible to believe that such works could have been created without it. Again, the idea of repeating a successful process is just too intuitive, and human, to be considered some kind of a revolution. Scientific Management got its name from the works of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s. Taylor formalized and commercialized the approach and made his fortune as a management consultant. The technique was wildly successful and led to massive increases in efficiency and productivity during the decades that followed.

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

Just as Taylor had predicted, Ford paid his most productive workers twice the going rate for factory work. He said he wanted his employees to be able to afford a Ford. Taylor had let the scientific management genie out of the bottle. Taylorism spawned many new timing, bookkeeping, and accounting methods, as well as workflow charts, machine-speed slide calculators, motion studies, and assembly pacing metrics. He gave managers permission to observe, measure, analyze, and control every minute of a worker’s time on the clock. That was the core of Taylor’s scientific management, and it was hard to argue against its value. Today’s technology—including cloud computation, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, workflow apps, and robots—may seem centuries removed from Taylor and his stopwatch, but many of his ideas still dominate the business world.

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Today’s technology—including cloud computation, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, workflow apps, and robots—may seem centuries removed from Taylor and his stopwatch, but many of his ideas still dominate the business world. Oddly enough, Taylor’s system of scientific management has also become firmly entrenched in education. A century ago American educators adopted it as the best way to deal with the large influx of immigrant children. In 1912 the publication of The Elimination of Waste in Education, by John Franklin Bobbitt, set the stage for the adoption and implementation of scientific management in schools. Bobbitt argued that schools, like businesses, should be efficient, eliminate waste, and focus on outcomes. Curricula should mold students into effective workers.

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they’ve continued to survive—and even flourish: Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). “In the past, man was first”: Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1914). firmly entrenched in education: Maduakolam Ireh, “Scientific Management Still Endures in Education,” ERIC, June 2016, https://eric.ed.gov/​?id=ED566616. See also Shawn Gude, “The Industrial Classroom,” Jacobin, April 21, 2013, http://bit.ly/​2NQSOqT. “Our schools still follow”: Todd Rose, The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

It started back in my hometown of Philadelphia with Frederick Taylor—father of scientific management and the most important forgotten man in US history. Frederick Winslow Taylor was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1856. Expected to go to Harvard, he instead chose to go into industry by taking a job as a lowly machinist’s apprentice at Midvale Steelworks. As young Fred worked his way up to head engineer, he observed widespread soldiering among his coworkers. “The natural laziness of men is serious,” Taylor would later write in his 1911 magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management, “but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal.”

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“The natural laziness of men is serious,” Taylor would later write in his 1911 magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management, “but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal.” He really meant “evil,” too. Taylor was an early true believer in the idea of efficiency and productivity as savior. Increases in labor productivity at factories employing his “scientific management,” he believed, would raise the wages of the workers, which he saw as the only realistic way of ending poverty and class conflict. Scientific management, or Taylorism, was a new system of eliminating all mystery from factory work, whether it was how fast workers were really capable of going or the “sorcery and black magic” methods of skilled workers. To do this, Taylor used a relatively new technology—the affordable, accurate stopwatch—to measure and analyze previously subjective tasks.

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Dugan Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, Cathy N. Davidson McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, John F. Love On the history of work and management The Principles of Scientific Management, Frederick Winslow Taylor The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, Robert Kanigel My Life and Work, Henry Ford I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford, Richard Snow Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945, Stephen P. Waring Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century, Richard Edwards The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, James P.

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

As the world’s now pre-eminent scientist of management, Taylor was invited to lecture on the course and in 1911 published a synthesis of his various theories, The Principles of Scientific Management. Among businessmen, time and motion studies became all the rage, arriving in European factories in the years immediately prior to World War One. While the immediate clients for Taylor’s services were interested in maximizing their business revenue, the political appeal of scientific management was extremely broad. American progressives believed that with greater scientific insight, corporations could be harnessed for the common good.

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American progressives believed that with greater scientific insight, corporations could be harnessed for the common good. Socialists, including Lenin, saw in Taylorism a model for how society itself could be run in an efficient manner, without reliance on markets. Taylor himself also attached a loftier social purpose to his new science, believing that scientific management would spell the end of industrial conflict, substituting ‘hearty brotherly co-operation for contention and strife’. One of his professed advantages, when he entered firms as an outsider, was that he could avoid being dragged into industrial conflicts between management and labour and maintain a politically neutral position. In workplaces that had become conflict-riven, the consultant could have a tempering effect – though of course it was never labour that had invited the consultant to intervene in the first place.

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As Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division who hanged himself aged twenty-three, once said, ‘I used to work in a factory and I was really happy because I could daydream all day’. Labourers in a Taylorist factory brought their physical capabilities into work, to be exploited for sure, but were never expected to give anything more personal or intangible. And this is exactly why managers soon turned their backs on Taylor’s version of scientific management. Psychology gets to work In 1928, a researcher from Harvard Business School sat down with a young woman working in a telephone production plant in Cicero, Illinois, and asked her an unusual question: ‘If given three wishes, what would they be?’ The woman paused to reflect before listing her answers.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Since then, the practice of managing people, corporate structure, and strategy has continuously adapted to advancing technology and changing intellectual fashions. The management of people has been a blend of elements of scientific management, which relies on incentives, control and monitoring, and humanistic management, which assumes that workers are creative and self-motivating. Managers trained in economics tend to be the scientific management camp, while industrial psychologists and organizational behavior experts tend to be in the humanistic management camp. In structure and strategy, trends embraced over the years have included conglomerates, virtual corporations, globalization, reengineering, and strategy based on technology “platforms” rather than products.

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Nor would most of us want to. 11 THE FUTURE: DATA CAPITALISM As towering historical figures go, Frederick Winslow Taylor was deceptively slight. He stood five feet nine and weighed about 145 pounds. But the trim mechanical engineer was an influential pioneer of data-driven decision making, an early management consultant whose concept of “scientific management” was widely embraced a century ago on factory floors and well beyond. Taylor applied statistical rigor and engineering discipline to redesign work for maximum efficiency; each task was closely observed, measured, and timed. Taylor’s instruments of measurement and recording were the stopwatch, clipboard, and his own eyes.

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The time-and-motion studies conducted by Taylor and his acolytes were the bedrock data of Taylorism. Viewed from the present, Taylorism is easy to dismiss as a dogmatic penchant for efficiency run amok. Such excesses would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. But in its day, scientific management was seen as a modernizing movement, a way to rationalize work to liberate the worker from the dictates of authoritarian bosses and free the economy from price-fixing corporate trusts. Taylorism was embraced by some of the leading intellectuals of the Progressive Era. In 1910, Louis Brandeis, “the People’s Lawyer” and future Supreme Court justice, wrote, “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected, none seems to me to be equal to this in its importance and hopefulness.”

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres by Jamie Woodcock

always be closing, anti-work, antiwork, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, David Graeber, emotional labour, gamification, invention of the telephone, job satisfaction, late capitalism, means of production, millennium bug, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, profit motive, scientific management, social intelligence, stakhanovite, technological determinism, women in the workforce

Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (1979), p. 66. 105. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 35. 106. Ibid. 107. Wright, Storming Heaven (2002), p. 23. 108. Ibid., p. 54. 109. Frederick Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), p. 36. 110. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (London: Monthly Review Press, 1999), p. 60. 111. Quoted in Wright, Storming Heaven (2002), p. 38. 112. Quoted in Gigi Roggero, ‘Romano Alquati — Militant Researcher, Operaist, Autonomist Marxist — Has Passed Away, Age 75’, Fuckyeahmilitantresearch (2010), http://fuckyeahmilitantresearch. tumblr.com/post/502186794/romano-alquati-militant-researcheroperaist 113.

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The analysis of the class nature of Russia was an important point of distinction between the Communist Parties and Trotskyist groupings. The theory of State Capitalism was the source of the break from the Fourth International which later spurred attempts at workers’ inquiries. 5. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999), p. 60. 6. Ibid., p. 82. 7. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1967), p. 39. 8. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999), pp. 79, 81. 9. Taylor and Bain, ‘“An Assembly Line in the Head”’ (1999), p. 102. 10. Ibid., p. 115 11. Ibid., p. 110. 12. Ibid., p. 108. 13. Ibid., p. 116. 14. Ibid., p. 109. 15. Ibid., p. 103. 16. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 7. 17.

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Hugh Dehn, ‘UK: Back to the Floor’, Management Today, 1998, www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/411264/UK-Back-floor 6. Quoted in ibid. 7. Undercover Boss (2010). 8. Toby Miller, ‘Foucault, Marx, Neoliberalism: Unveiling Undercover Boss’, in Foucault Now, edited by J. D. Faubion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), p. 200. 9. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999), p. 63. 10. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1967), p. 36. 11. Quoted in Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1999), p. 70. 172 Notes 12. Michael is a pseudonym. His identity is kept anonymous as there is a risk of damaging his future employment prospects. 13. Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985), p. 47. 14.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

3D printing, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, continuous integration, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hockey-stick growth, Kanban, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, payday loans, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, pull request, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, scientific management, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, social bookmarking, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs

There is a thriving community of Lean Startup meetups around the world as well as online, and suggestions for how you can take advantage of these resources listed in the last chapter of this book, “Join the Movement.” 13 EPILOGUE: WASTE NOT This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, first published in 1911. The movement for scientific management changed the course of the twentieth century by making possible the tremendous prosperity that we take for granted today. Taylor effectively invented what we now consider simply management: improving the efficiency of individual workers, management by exception (focusing only on unexpectedly good or bad results), standardizing work into tasks, the task-plus-bonus system of compensation, and—above all—the idea that work can be studied and improved through conscious effort.

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On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.3 Unfortunately, Taylor’s insistence that scientific management does not stand in opposition to finding and promoting the best individuals was quickly forgotten. In fact, the productivity gains to be had through the early scientific management tactics, such as time and motion study, task-plus-bonus, and especially functional foremanship (the forerunner of today’s functional departments), were so significant that subsequent generations of managers lost sight of the importance of the people who were implementing them.

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However, Taylorism should act as a cautionary tale, and it is important to learn the lessons of history as we bring these new ideas to a more mainstream audience. Taylor is remembered for his focus on systematic practice rather than individual brilliance. Here is the full quote from The Principles of Scientific Management that includes the famous line about putting the system first: In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

The Enlightenment ideals of scientific progress and social liberalization helped propel a widespread belief in the possibility of human advancement and moral uplift through technological innovation. Taylorist scientific management principles pointed not just toward greater economic output and organizational efficiency, but toward a new era of human potential in which wealth would be created and shared, old class lines would give way to a meritocracy of achievement, and eventually a utopian society might finally emerge. Scientific management techniques would eventually reshape not just the production of goods and services, but also the contours of human knowledge itself. As companies, governments, universities, and other institutions expanded throughout the nineteenth century, the people who ran those organizations also began producing more and more paper—not just books and journals.

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Le Corbusier made his reputation by promoting a new, industrialized architectural style rooted in the scientific management theories of Taylor and Ford. Like Andersen, Le Corbusier had long harbored an interest in designing whole cities, having laid out an ambitious design for a 3-million-person metropolis in 1922—the Ville Contemporaine, or “Contemporary City.” At one point he even went so far as to propose demolishing most of central Paris and replacing it with a vast grid of sixty-story towers. Sympathetic to the industrialism and scientific management principles of Taylor and 179 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D Ford, Le Corbusier envisioned an entirely new kind of city, one better adapted to the exigencies of modern life.

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The invention of electricity and the internal combustion engine accelerated the production and transportation of goods, while new communications technologies like the telegraph and the radio started to lay the foundations for a nascent global communications network. 34 T he L ibraries o f B abel These developments in turn created the conditions for new patterns of knowledge production to emerge. As industrialization took hold across England and eventually the rest of Europe, so too did a new organizational ethos. The principles of scientific management, as it was called, most famously articulated by the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, began to shape the work practices of many growing industrial companies. Giving eloquent voice to the new industrial ethos, Taylor described how professional managers must learn to take a wholesystems view of their organizations, instituting tightly controlled processes to maximize productivity.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

Second, it needs to discipline workers to make sure their indeterminate labour-power is being applied to this labour process as intensively as possible. Management is primarily the science of that system of control. It is interested in breaking workers’ resistance in order to produce the most value possible from a given sum of labour-power. Right from its origins, in Fredrick Taylor’s writing on ‘scientific management’ in the early twentieth century, management theory reflects the obsession of capitalist managers with the question of how to force workers to work harder for longer in order to produce more. For Taylor, the main problem facing bosses was ‘soldering’ – otherwise known as workers going slow.

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In order to do so, managers needed to understand the labour process at least as well as the workers who currently dominated it. Taylor’s thesis was that, by making management more scientific, its effectiveness could be improved.2 Harry Braverman, a Marxist intellectual, identified Taylor’s system of scientific management as having two processes at its core: ‘work intensification’ and ‘deskilling’3 – that is to say, making workers work harder, and reducing workers’ control over their own work. These two processes remain the fundamental strategies of capitalist management today. So, when we are discussing a job, we’re also discussing a specific conflict.

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Machine learning processes could make decisions based on all this information, and those decisions could change how much money we earned. But we never knew if, when or how those decisions were being made. The human watching the app in Deliveroo HQ also presumably played some kind of role, but we had no idea about the specifics. When Taylor first laid out the goal of scientific management in 1911, he aimed to give managers the information required to minutely control the labour process and combat workers’ time-wasting and resistance.24 But, at Deliveroo, we didn’t even have this knowledge in the first place: we started from a position of ignorance, whilst the app collected data in huge quantities.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

He argued that comprehensive information flows and processing were essential to a new brand of organizational leadership he called “scientific management,” based on reporting, accounting, and, most of all, calculating comparisons. This regimented system, Taylor insisted, could and should be taught to every budding manager. In the throes of mass production, he found an audience eager to codify paths of control leading to efficiency. His ideas were used as the basis of the curriculum for the first master’s degree in business administration offered by the Harvard Business School. New technologies eased the collection and communication of the vast amount of data required by Taylor’s scientific management. A generation of executives eagerly enlisted the help of the punch-card tabulator invented by Herman Hollerith, whose company later became IBM.

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White, “Amazon’s Use of ‘Stack’ Ranking for Workers May Backfire, Experts Say,” NBC News, August 17, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/amazons-use-stack-ranking-workers-may-backfire-experts-say-n411306. after the scientific management principles: “Digital Taylorism,” Economist, September 12, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190-modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace-digital. The firm can be many things: See, e.g., John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2003). widespread adoption of Arabic numerals: Alfred W.

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When the Times exposé appeared, it struck a nerve, garnering 5,858 comments online, the most in the website’s history up to that point. As the Economist noted, many of the commenters “claimed that their employers had adopted similar policies. Far from being an outlier, it would seem that Amazon is the embodiment of a new trend”—what the magazine branded “digital Taylorism,” after the scientific management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor. It seemed that new technologies were ushering in a supercharged version of command-and-control, fueled by data about employees, processes, products, services, and customers. But why would a celebrated marketplace innovator like Jeff Bezos embrace the centralized structures, rules, and behaviors of the firm to manage the vast majority of his business empire rather than developing technology to capture the decentralized magic of the market?

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

"Efficiency" came to mean the maximum yield that could be produced in the shortest time, expending the least amount of energy, labor, and capital in the process. The man most responsible for popularizing the notion of efficiency 50 THE TWO F ACE S 0 F TEe H N 0 LOG Y in the economic process was Frederick W Taylor. His principles of "scientific management," published in 1895, became the standard reference for organizing the workplace-and were soon used to organize much of the rest of society. Economic historian Daniel Bell says of him, "If any social upheaval can ever be attributed to one man, the logic of efficiency as a mode of life is due to Taylor."17 Using a stopwatch, Taylor divided each worker's task into the smallest visibly identifiable operational components, then measured each to ascertain the best time attainable under optimal performance conditions.

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His studies calibrated worker performance to fractions of a second. By calculating the mean times and best times achieved in each component of the worker's job, Taylor could make recommendations on how to change the most minute aspects of performance in order to save precious seconds and even milliseconds. Scientific management, says Harry Braverman, "is the organized study of work, the analysis of work into its simplest elements and the systematic improvement of the worker's performance of each of these elements."18 Efficiency came to dominate the workplace and the life of modern society, in large part, because of its adaptability to both the machine and human culture.

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It was thought by many that by becoming more efficient, they could shorten the amount of personal labor required to perform a job and thereby gain more wealth and free time. Efficiency societies were established in offices, factories, schools, and civic institutions across the country. Reformers urged a more rational approach to the workings of the market, predicated on the principles of scientific management Economists of the day began to think of the corporate mission as much in terms of advancing technolOgical progress and the goals of efficiency as in making profits for the stockholders. Years later, John Kenneth Visions of Techno-Paradise 51 Galbraith would crystallize the new bent toward technological proficiency and productive efficiency in his book The New Industrial State.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

During a very public legal battle between the railroads and the Interstate Commerce Commission, future Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis argued vigorously that the railroads could save more money by implementing the remarkable methods of “Scientific Management” (a term he coined to describe Taylor’s work) than by winning their case. Suddenly, efficiency was on everyone’s mind. On the heels of this newfound celebrity, Taylor published Principles of Scientific Management, which would become one of the bestselling business books of the decade. In it he offered four principles that would become the duties of a new class of managers: First. They develop a science for each element of a man’s work, which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method.

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Then you need to get a work order, and a purchase order must be processed by the Procurement Engineering Group, who will then contact the vendor to ensure no changes have been made and the products meet regulatory requirements. And 180 days later, if you’re lucky, you’ll get your toilet paper. We have a name for this phenomenon: bureaucracy. For most people, the term evokes a feeling of soul-crushing inefficiency and boredom. In contrast to Scientific Management’s “one best way,” it would seem that the aim of bureaucracy is to find the one worst way—that which wastes the most time and involves the most people and steps. The origin of the word itself is the unlikely pairing of bureau (French for desk) and -kratia (Greek for power or rule). So, in a very real sense, it means management by desk, which sounds about right.

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The status quo bias adds to the illusion that the current way is the only way. We strive for improvements—better bosses! simpler budgets! fewer layers!—but they’re inherently incremental. We tweak the recipe without ever questioning whether we should make an entirely different dish. But incremental improvement can be a trap. Scientific Management reveals only the best way to do what we’re already doing. True innovation often requires a departure from the safety of the status quo. Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X), puts it this way: “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better. . . .

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

For him, the average worker was comparable to the “economic man” of classical economics: a passive, rational, and isolated individual who would respond primarily to the stimulus of narrow self-interest.14 The goal of scientific management was to structure the workplace in such a way that the only quality required of a worker was obedience. All of the worker’s activities, down to the very motions by which he moved his arms and legs on the production line, were dictated by detailed rules prescribed by the production engineers. All other human attributes—creativity, initiative, innovativeness, and the like—were the province of a specialist somewhere else in the enterprise’s organization.15 Taylorism, as scientific management came to be known, epitomized the carrying of the low-trust, rule-based factory system to its logical conclusion.

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Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 28-32. 11Charles Sabel, Work and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 31-33. 12Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate, 1800-1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 131-132; Hans-Joachim Braun, The German Economy in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 50. 13Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper Brothers, 1911). Taylor gave his first lecture on scientific management in 1895. See Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 275. 14For an overview of Taylor and his later critics, see Hirszowicz (1982), p. 53. 15Fox (1974), p. 23. 16For a description of labor-management relations in the wake of the spread of mass production, see William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 270-280. 17Alvin W.

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Their view that bigger necessarily meant better ultimately left the Soviet Union, at the end of the communist period, with a horrendously overconcentrated and inefficient industrial infrastructure—a Fordism on steroids in a period when the Fordist model had ceased to be relevant. The new form of mass production associated with Henry Ford also had its own ideologist: Frederick W. Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management came to be regarded as the bible for the new industrial age.13 Taylor, an industrial engineer, was one of the first proponents of time-and-motion studies that sought to maximize labor efficiency on the factory floor. He tried to codify the “laws” of mass production by recommending a very high degree of specialization that deliberately avoided the need for individual assembly line workers to demonstrate initiative, judgment, or even skill.

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

Ford claimed never to have read the work of Taylor (credibly enough – he wasn’t keen on books), but although there were differences in their approaches they shared the view that production could be optimised by dissecting the work process. The division of labour had been a central feature of the Industrial Revolution since the eighteenth century, but scientific management – as it became known – took this to its ultimate limit. By reducing the motion of the body to its smallest constituent parts, all ‘useless’ or ‘unproductive’ actions could be eliminated, thus speeding up production and maximising profit. Unlike earlier phases of manufacturing, which split the production process between workers, scientific management divided the workers themselves: each individual was no longer a whole, but a complex of motions that could be taken apart and put back together like components of a machine.

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However, apart from the adoption of the ‘purity’ of Kahn’s industrial architecture for the external appearance of modernist houses, there was a deeper Fordist transformation of domestic life itself: the revolution that Ford had unleashed could not be escaped by a retreat into historical fantasy. In fact American theorists had been applying the ideas of scientific management to the home for years before Ford. The pioneering writer Catharine Beecher had first advocated a rational reorganisation of the kitchen in 1842, so one could argue, turning the conventional narrative on its head, that scientific management actually began in the home rather than the workplace. Chicken-and-egg questions aside, these attempts to reform the home and the factory demonstrate that traditional boundaries between labour and rest, home and workplace were blurring.

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From workplace to bedroom – from ore to whore, one might say – the system demanded control over every aspect of the production process, now expanded to incorporate consumption; his workers had to be able to buy his cars, or the project would fall flat. The home had become part of the factory and was – just as much as a glass or tyre plant, a steel press or an iron foundry – a site of production, reconceived as a total process, and thus also subject to the improvements of scientific management. But Ford’s imperial troops eventually retreated from the battlefield of the home. In 1921 he gave up on social engineering and shut down the Sociological Department. Continuing demands for unionisation had embittered Ford. He would not countenance bargaining with his employees and felt that his five-dollar munificence was going unappreciated.

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The basic lesson remained: “Even the most basic processes can be substantially improved while providing benefit to both employer and employee.”5 Certainly Taylor packaged his ideas in a systematic and coherent manner. By this means he was able to turn himself into the 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 They promoted a form of “aggressive rationality,” with science sweeping away custom and superstition for the benefit of all.7 This involved, as Taylor put it, a “mental revolution,” required of both the workers and the management.

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The idea that this was a “science,” which raised the standing of Taylor’s claims, came from progressive lawyer Louis Brandeis, who eventually became a member of the Supreme Court. During a court case in 1910, Brandeis challenged a rise in freight rates on 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 instructions, and constant supervision would bring great rewards: “Errors are prevented instead of being corrected. The terrible waste of delays and accidents is avoided.

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., Business and Economic History, Second Series 10 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1981), 16. 2. Matthew 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 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. Taylor’s Pig-Iron Experiments,” Academy of Management Journal 17, no. 1 (1974): 26. 5.

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago, 1962), p. 48. 9. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1911). On Taylor and his influence on education reform advocates see Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, chap. 2. 10. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 275–76. 11. Taylor, quoted in James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, 1998), p. 336. 12. Frederick W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (New Haven, 1989), p. 229. 13.

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In 1911, Simon Patten, an influential professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, demanded that schools provide evidence of their contribution to society by showing results that could be “readily seen and measured.”8 Other would-be reformers sought to bring to the school system the fruits of the industrial efficiency movement, founded by Frederick Winslow Taylor, an American engineer who coined the term “scientific management” in 1911.9 Taylor analyzed the production of pig iron in factories by breaking down the process into its component parts (through time-and-motion studies) and determining standard levels of output for each job. Workers who carried out their tasks more slowly than the prescribed time were paid at a lower rate per unit of output; those who met the expectation were rewarded at a higher rate.

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Specialization and standardization of tasks, recording and reporting of all activity, pecuniary carrots and sticks—these were the legacy of Taylor and his disciples to subsequent generations. Taylorism was based on trying to replace the implicit knowledge of the workmen with mass-production methods developed, planned, monitored, and controlled by managers. “Under scientific management,” he wrote, “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 of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae…. Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of science.”11 According to Taylor, “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured.

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

When you allowed your mind to wander, it was easy to imagine a future in which human beings were wired up to devices like this twenty-four hours a day. As well as a potential forewarning of things to come, this algorithmic system of management was a throwback to the ‘scientific management’ theories of Frederick W. Taylor. In seeking to root out idleness and inefficient toil, in 1911 the wealthy mechanical engineer from Philadelphia published a monograph on what he saw as the potential for the scientific perfectibility of labour activity. Scientific management held that every workplace task ought to be meticulously monitored: watched, timed and recorded. Workers were units of production whose output ought to be measured in the same way as the machines on which they worked, and were to be directed down to the finest detail.

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‘The writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be,’ Taylor wrote disparagingly of the men whom he believed ‘incapable’ through ‘lack of mental capacity’ of understanding the theories they were to be subjected to.5 The ‘boss-class’ has enthusiastically embraced Taylor’s theories. In 2001, the Fellows of the Academies of Management voted The Principles of Scientific Management the most influential management book of the twentieth century.6 Twentieth-century communism also finds its echo in the modern workplace, both in modern corporatese and in the admonishments to feel joyful at the prospect of struggle. Socialist realism has mutated into rosy corporate uplift.

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.: These Poor Hands 23, 149, 190 courier firms 211, 215, 217, 223, 236, 244–7, 250, 256, 257 Cwm, Wales 147, 148, 187, 190, 195, 196, 197 Cwmbran, Wales 143 Daily Express 124–5 Daily Mail 66, 134, 188 Dan (bicycle courier) 248, 249 Dangerfield, George 72 Davies, Idris 148–9 Gwalia Deserta (Wasteland of Wales) 148 ‘The Angry Summer’ 174 debt 62, 69, 146, 151, 153 Deliveroo 215, 217, 223, 250, 256, 257 democratic socialists 192 Department for Work and Pensions 133 Dickens, Charles 29, 205, 210, 249; Hard Times 138–9 Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) 88–90, 109–10, 214 Dorothy (housemate of JB) 203, 204–5 DriveNow 217 Dropit 217 Eastern Europe, migrant workers from 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 26–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 45, 57, 61–2, 75, 114–16, 128–9, 154, 203–4, 260–1 see also under individual nation name Ebbw Vale, Wales 147, 149, 154; legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 Elborough, Travis 93 emergency housing 96 employment agencies 1, 16, 19, 20, 23, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 56, 65–6, 70, 72, 73, 82, 86, 127, 130, 158, 189, 194 see also under individual agency name Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) 248 employment contracts/classification: Amazon 19–20, 53, 58 care sector 87–8, 107–8, 116 Uber 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 zero-hours see zero-hours contracts employment tribunals 38, 229–30, 243–4 English seaside, debauchery and 92–3 Enterprise Rent-A-Car 214 ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) programmes 115–16 European Economic Community (EEC) 195 European Referendum (2016) 61, 195–6 Evening Standard 208, 241 Express & Star 59–60 Fabian Society 109 Farrar, James 229–31, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238, 240, 241–2, 250, 254, 255–6 Fellows of the Academies of Management 17 Fernie, Sue 182 financial crisis (2008) 1, 2, 45, 125, 195, 209 Flash (former miner) 165–8, 170, 171–2, 174, 175, 176–8, 179, 188, 196 Fleet News 246 Foot, Michael 149 football 56, 58, 92, 94, 97, 98, 126, 135, 169 fruit picking 61 FTSE 123, 262 Gag Mag 122 Gallagher, Patrick 246 Gary (homeless man, Blackpool) 96–104, 105 Gaz (Gag Mag seller, Blackpool) 122 GDP 146 General Election (2015) 109 General Strike (1926) 148, 149, 173 gentrification 219 Geoff (former miner) 189, 190, 191, 193 ‘gig’ economy 2, 208–10, 217–18, 232, 236, 242, 243–4, 248, 249–50, 252, 257 see also Uber Gissing, George: New Grub Street 64 GMB union 36 grammar schools 261 Guardian 5, 235 Hamstead Colliery, Great Barr 169 Hazel (home carer) 110–11, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119 Heller, Joseph: Catch-22 235–6 Hemel Hempstead 54, 70 Henley, William Ernest: ‘England, My England’ vii Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy 45 home care worker (domiciliary care worker): Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks 88–90, 109–10 employment contracts 87–8, 107–8, 116, 118, 120 length of home care visits 108–9, 110 local authority budget cuts and 107–10 MAR (Medication Administration Record) sheets 114, 115 migrant workers as 114–16 negligent 86–7 privatisation of social care and 106–8, 109 recruitment 82–4 ‘shadowing’ process 88, 109–10 societal view of 106 staffing crisis 85–6, 119 suicide rate among 100 typical day/workload 110–14, 118 unions and 88 view job as vocation 86–7 wages/pay 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 Home Instead 119 homelessness 95–105, 138, 187, 208 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 housing/accommodation: Amazon workers, Rugeley 20–2, 24–6 Blackpool 80, 124, 137–8 buy-to-let housing market 24 emergency housing 96 homelessness and 95, 96, 101, 102, 137–8 hostels 95, 96, 101, 102 inability to buy 62 landlords and 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 London 203–8 migrant workers and 20–2, 24–6, 197–8 social housing 62, 206 Swansea 124, 150 housing benefit 96, 137–8, 248 immigration 26–7, 61, 115–16, 128–9, 144, 193, 197–9, 236, 259–61 see also migrant workers indeed.co.uk 83–4 independent contractors 209, 248, 251–2 Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) 230, 257 inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 226, 238, 262, 263 inflation 2, 122 job centres 19, 96, 133–6, 139–40, 156, 158 Joe (housemate of JB) 22 John Lewis 23, 83 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 70, 159 June (call centre employee) 181–2, 183, 184 Kalanick, Travis 215, 228, 229, 233, 235 Kelly, Kath 66 Khan, Sadiq 256 Koestler, Arthur: The God that Failed 228 Labour Party 7, 57, 59, 61, 109, 144, 149, 150, 173, 174 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London 219 Lamb, Norman 109 Lancashire Evening Post 104–5 landlords, private 12, 21, 24, 39, 67, 69, 95–6, 137–8, 164, 204, 206, 258 Lea Hall Colliery, Staffordshire 31–2, 54, 55, 56, 57 Lea Hall Miners’ Social Club, Staffordshire 55, 56, 74 Len (step-grandfather of JB) 143–4 Lili (London) 203–4 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 Lloyd George, David 172 loan sharks 151, 156 local councils 104–5, 164 London 201–57 accommodation/housing in 65, 203–8, 218 gentrification in 219 ‘gig’ economy in 208–57, 263 homelessness in 95 migrant labour in 205–6, 213, 239 wealth divide in 207–8, 238 London Congestion Charge 254 London Courier Emergency Fund (LCEF) 247 London Metropolitan Police 90 London, Jack 205 low-skilled jobs, UK economy creation of 153 Lydia (Amazon employee) 70 Macmillan, Harold 3 manufacturing jobs, disappearance of 59, 139 Marine Colliery, Cwm, Wales 190 Mayhew, Henry 4, 205 McDonald’s 52, 68, 83 Merkel, Angela 196 Metcalf, David 182 middle-class 6, 39, 51, 67, 68, 69, 72–3, 74, 75, 149, 178, 205, 258, 259, 260, 262, 263 migrant labour: Amazon use of 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 30, 32, 33, 34, 44, 45, 46, 51, 53, 57, 61–2, 65, 71–5, 258, 260–1 care home workers 114–16 ‘gig’ economy and 203–6, 213, 239 restaurant workers 154 retail sector and 128–9 Miliband, Ed 109 mining see coal mining Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB) 173 Miners’ Strike (1984–5) 3, 174–7 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Morecambe, Lancashire 137–8 Morgan family 156–8 Morgan, Huw: How Green Was My Valley 147 Moyer-Lee, Jason 257 National Coal Board (NCB) 54, 170, 171 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 108 National Union of Miners (NUM) 174, 176 New York Times 222 NHS (National Health Service) 106, 108, 247 Nirmal (Amazon employee) 45–6, 51 Norbert (Amazon employee) 71–5 nostalgia 3, 60, 93–4, 216 Nottingham 2, 151–2 objectivism 228 oil crisis (1973) 122–3 Oliver, Jamie 154 Orwell, George 56, 169 Palmer, William 29 pay see wages and under individual job title and employer name payday loans 156 PayPal 216 Pimlico Plumbers 251–2 platform capitalism 215 PMP Recruitment 19, 189–90 Poland, migrant workers from 128–9, 130, 135, 197–8 ‘poor, the’ 145 Port Talbot, Wales 166, 176, 190, 196 ‘post-truth’ discourse 199 ‘post-work’ world 165 poverty: Blackpool and 132, 137 class and 4 darkness and 96 diet/weight and 137 ease of slipping into 5 Eastern Europe and 26 monthly salary and 156 as a moral failing 188–9 press treatment of 66–7 time and 67 working poor living in 194 Preston, Lancashire 100, 105, 138–9 private school system 123 progressive thought 262 Public Accounts Committee (PAC) 107 Putin, Vladimir 71 Rand, Ayn 228–9, 235, 236; The Fountainhead 228, 229 recession (2008) 1, 45, 104, 121, 125, 156 ‘regeneration’ 55, 60–1, 146 rent-to-own 157–8 retirement, working in 58–9 Reve, Gerard: The Evenings 160 Robin (Cwm) 196, 197 Rochelle (home care worker) 117–19 Romania, migrant workers from 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22–7, 32, 44, 46, 51, 53, 61, 65, 71–5, 203, 206, 258 Ron (former miner) 170, 195 Royal London 59 Royal London pub, Wolverhampton 71 Royal Mail 151 Rugeley, Staffordshire 28–35 Amazon distribution centre in 11–76, 79, 86, 119, 127, 128, 159, 258 decline of coal mining industry in 31–2, 54–6, 57, 169 disappearance of manufacturing jobs from 54–63 high street 28–35 immigration and 30–4, 193–4 Tesco and 58–9, 62–3 Scargill, Arthur 175 scientific management theories 17 Scotland Yard 90 self-employment: ’gig’ economy and 214–15, 222, 229–30, 234, 243–4, 245, 246, 249, 250–1 increase in numbers of workers 2, 209 ‘independent contractors’ and 209, 248, 251–2 Selwyn (former miner) 175, 178, 179, 263–4 Senghenydd, Glamorgan pit explosion (1913) 169–70 Shelter 104 Shirebrook Colliery, Derbyshire 55 Shu, William 250 Silicon Valley, California 210, 232 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 2, 3, 94 Sky Sports News 126 social democracy 3, 263 social housing 62, 206 socialism 7, 56, 131, 144, 148, 149, 173 social mobility 58, 199, 261 South Wales Miners’ Museum, Afan Argoed 166, 196 South Wales Valleys 141–200 accommodation in 150, 197 Amazon in 145–6 beauty of 148 call centre jobs in 153–64, 180–6 coal industry and 143–4, 147–9, 165–79, 180, 188, 189, 190–1, 193, 195, 196 immigration and 197–9 JB’s family history and 143–4 legacy of de-industrialisation in 187–200 nostalgia and 147 radical history of 149–50 see also under individual place name ‘spice’ 95 Sports Direct 55 squatting 96, 99 steel industry 176, 180, 188, 189, 190, 196–7 Steven (housemate of JB) 124, 126, 127–31 Stoke-on-Trent 58–9 suicide 99–100 Sunday Times 175 ‘Best Companies to Work For’ 154 Rich List 125 Swansea, Wales 145–6, 150–2, 154–64, 176, 178, 197, 205 Tata Steel 190 tax 65, 69, 70, 118, 146, 158, 159, 163, 164, 212, 229, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255 Taylor, Frederick W.: The Principles of Scientific Management 17 Tesco 35, 57, 58–9, 62–3 Thatcher, Margaret 122, 123, 146, 174–5, 193, 207, 263–4 Thorn Automation 57 Thorn EMI 59 trade unions: Amazon and 36 B&M and 130, 131 call centres and 160, 181, 184–5, 186 care sector and 88 coal industry decline and 55–6, 173, 174, 263–4 decline of 2, 3, 35 ‘gig’ economy and 230, 257, 261 objectivism and 228 oil crisis (1973) and 122 Thatcher and 123, 174, 193, 263–4 Wales and 144, 149 see also under individual union name Trades Union Congress (TUC) 173 transgender people 40–1 Transline Group 19, 20, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 65–6, 86 Transport for London (TFL) 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society 247 Trefil, Wales 149 Trump, Donald 7 Uber 207, 211–57 ‘account status’ 221 clocking in at 218 corporation tax and 229 customers 221, 222, 226–7, 237–41, 244, 257 driver costs/expenses 214, 217, 233, 241, 246, 253–5 driver employment classification/contract 214–15, 222, 229–35, 243, 245, 250–2, 257 driver hours 221, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 246, 253, 255 driver numbers 211–13, 233–5 driver wages/pay 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 employment tribunal against (2016) 229–34 flexibility of working for 213–14, 218, 230–3, 248, 250–1 James Farrar and see Farrar, James migrant labour and 213, 236 ‘Onboarding’ class 224–5, 238, 241, 256 opposition to 215–17 philosophy of 228–9, 235, 236 psychological inducements for drivers 222–3 rating system 225–7, 232, 238, 239, 243, 253 rejecting/accepting jobs 221–2, 224–5 ride process 219–21 surge pricing 237, 238, 253 TFL and 211, 212–13, 214, 233, 254, 256 Travis Kalanick and see Kalanick, Travis UberEATS 256 UberPOOL 225, 240–2, 253, 255–6 UberX 212, 225, 240, 241, 255 VAT and 229 vehicle requirements 214 unemployment 2, 32, 36, 62, 121–3, 132, 138, 148, 157, 172, 178, 179, 189–95, 199, 218 Unison 88, 108 Unite 55, 160 United Private Hire Drivers 230, 257 university education 3, 6, 61, 62, 123, 150–1, 152, 153–4 USDAW 130–1 Vettesse, Tony 138 Vicky (care sector supervisor) 86, 87 Wade, Alan 121, 123–4 wages: Amazon 18, 19, 37–9, 42–3, 65–6, 68, 69, 70, 159 call centre 155–6, 158–60, 164, 180 care sector 107–8, 117, 118–19, 159 living wage 1, 85, 160, 246 minimum wage 1, 7, 55, 62, 84, 107, 108, 118, 135, 155, 159, 173, 189–90, 209, 212, 235, 236, 245, 250, 262 Uber 212, 218, 221, 229–30, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 244, 246, 252–5 wage stagnation 2 see also under individual employer, job and sector name Wealth and Assets Survey 207–8 wealth inequality 18, 73, 123, 125, 207–8, 238 Wells, H.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Trained as a mechanical engineer, Taylor made it his life’s work to promote industrial efficiency, becoming the intellectual leader of what came to be known as the Efficiency Movement. His work was highly influential throughout the Progressive Era (1890–1920) and is encapsulated in his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor is both famous (with managers) and infamous (with workers) for developing the technique of using time-and-motion studies to determine the optimal method and target time for accomplishing each task in a production process. For example, his studies would determine the optimal amount of coal with which a worker should aim to fill his shovel.

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To Taylor, increasing efficiency was management’s most central task, as illustrated by this passage from his 1911 book: “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”23 Taylor’s work built what is now the huge field of industrial engineering and created a focus on the use of “scientific management” to drive greater and greater efficiency. W. Edwards Deming A generation later, after World War II, W. Edwards Deming helped pioneer what became the field of “total quality management.” Deming was born in the American heartland, in Sioux City, Iowa, at the turn of the twentieth century. He lived his first half-century in near total obscurity, working on statistical issues for the Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau.

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Author’s calculations from CEPII data, available at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/presentation.asp?id=32. 22. Chad P. Bown and Douglas A. Irwin, “The GATT’s Starting Point: Tariff Levels Circa 1947,” working paper 21782, The National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, 2015. 23. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911), 64. Chapter 2 1. John Perry and Heather Vogell “Are Drastic Swings in CRCT Scores Valid?” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 19, 2009. 2. WXIA-TV, Atlanta, “11 Atlanta Educators Convicted in Cheating Scandal,” April 1, 2015, and Rhonda Cook, “New Mother Gets Prison, Former Principal Jail in APS Case,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 1, 2015. 3.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Giusberti, ‘Clothing and social inequality in early modern Europe: Introductory remarks’, Continuity and Change, 15 (3), 2000, 359–65, doi:10.1017/S0268416051003674. 10Emile Durkheim, Ethics and Sociology of Morals, Prometheus Press, Buffalo, New York, 1993 (1887), p. 87. 11Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide: Etude de sociologie, Paris, 1897, pp. 280–1. CHAPTER 13 1Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management: The Principles of Scientific Management [and] Testimony Before the Special House Committee, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1947. 2Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001 (1961), p. 232. 3Peter Drucker, Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices, Heinemann, London, 1973. 4Samuel Gompers, ‘The miracles of efficiency’, American Federationist 18 (4), 1911, p. 277. 5John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life, Part II, Chapter 10, 1887, Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7952. 6Ibid., Part I, Chapter 2. 7Fabrizio Zilibotti, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren 75 Years after: A Global Perspective’, IEW – Working Papers 344, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, 2007. 8Federal Reserve Bulletin, September 2017, Vol. 103, no. 3, p. 12. 9https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf. 10Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996. 11John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it Came, Where it Went, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1975. 12Advertising Hall of Fame, ‘Benjamin Franklin: Founder, Publisher & Copyrighter, Magazine General’, 2017, http://advertisinghall.org/members/member_bio.php?

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It was there that he also began to conduct experiments with his stopwatch, carefully observing and timing different tasks to see whether he could shave a few seconds off various critical processes, and redesign job roles to ensure that labourers would find it difficult to waste effort. The same freedom that Taylor was granted to conduct his efficiency experiments at Midvale would be denied to other similarly innovative and ambitious individuals in workplaces that adopted his scientific management technique. Instead, they’d be shackled to rigid, target-driven, repetitive work regimes where innovation was prohibited and the most important role of managers was to ensure that workers performed as they were instructed to. Taylor’s scientific method was based on breaking down any production process into its smallest component elements, timing each of them, evaluating their importance and complexity, and then reassembling the process from top to bottom with a focus on maximising efficiency.

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Others were much more comprehensive and involved totally reorganising a production process or redesigning a factory. ‘It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured,’ he explained in Scientific Management. ‘Taylorism’, as it came to be called, was adopted in many workplaces, but never more famously than at the Ford Motor Company. In 1903, Henry Ford hired Taylor to assist him in developing a new production process for the now iconic Model T Ford. The result of Ford and Taylor’s collaboration was the transformation of the private motor vehicle from an ostentatious luxury into an accessible, and very practical, symbol of success and good hard work.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

In the United States they broke unions when they could, hired private armies to fight—and kill—striking employees, and persuaded the US Supreme Court that unions should be prosecuted under the antitrust laws. This view of the vast majority of employees as essentially stupid machines that were best harnessed by the skill and expertise of managers was strongly reinforced by the invention of “scientific management,” a perspective that gave a scientific imprimatur to the belief and that made it the conventional wisdom not just at GM but at most large firms for most of the twentieth century. Scientific management was invented by a man named Frederick Taylor. (Indeed, the technique is often called “Taylorism.”) Taylor was an American blue blood. He was descended from one of the Mayflower pilgrims, attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and was admitted to Harvard.

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This stress on personal experience with those who are less privileged than oneself is another theme that recurs in the accounts of purpose-driven leaders: hands-on experience often provides a motivation for exploring a different way of leading. From the beginning the brothers explicitly rejected Taylor’s approach to management. “Even if on the productive side,” one of the brothers remarked in a 1914 paper entitled “The Case Against Scientific Management,” “the results are all that the promoters of scientific management claim, there is still the question of the human costs of the economies produced.” George Cadbury told the Conference of Quaker Employers that “the status of a man must be such that his self-respect is fully maintained, and his relationship with his employer and his fellow-workmen is that of a gentleman and a citizen.”

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Advocates of Taylor’s approach still claim that putting all the expertise in the hands of management and managing people as if they were machines may have its downsides, but it has such dramatic effects on productivity that these costs are well worth paying. “Taylorism” became the conventional wisdom, and Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management became the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor’s ideas became so widely accepted that the early evidence that embracing a purpose could significantly improve performance was widely dismissed—and even when it was finally acknowledged, firms found it enormously difficult to implement the new ways of working.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Monitoring of the correct piece wage rates and of access to specialisms seemed, to them, a safer strategy.125 No wonder that Lillian Moller Gilbreth, mother of thirteen children, also applied scientific management to homemaking. Her famous Kitchen Practical, a design for a modern kitchen with electrical and gas appliances, was based on the methods of scientific management in order ‘to free up their time for paid work, to integrate male family members into the performance of domestic tasks, and to demonstrate that home life and work life were analogous spheres, both requiring management skills and human practices’.126 Scientific management was indeed applied by its protagonists and further developed in practice by entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford.

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We also find it in machine-building factories, in the printing industry and in many more industries. It is said to have been widespread around 1900 in the factories of all big European cities.22 Indeed, from about 1900, when it was probably at its peak, cooperative subcontracting was confronted with two declared enemies: on the one hand, the modern entrepreneurs and prophets of scientific management, and on the other, the modern trade union movement. We will discuss the trade union movement in the next chapter, but for now let us focus on the employers, and perhaps the most famous among them, the American Frederick W. Taylor, from whom the term ‘Taylorism’ derives. In 1911, he wrote: A careful analysis had demonstrated the fact that when workmen are herded together in gangs, each man in the gang becomes far less efficient than when his personal ambition is stimulated; that when men work in gangs, their individual efficiency falls almost invariably down to or below the level of the worst man in the gang; and that they are all pulled down instead of being elevated by being herded together.

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The largest groups there comprised roughly 1 million Poles and, of course, defeated German soldiers, who only returned to Germany in the mid-1950s.51 Whereas many states returned temporarily to unfree labour in times of war, the cases of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and China under Mao must be considered as structural. After the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, the Bolsheviks hoped to organize their alternative economy without markets. Instead, rational planning and scientific management with the party-state as the only employer, combined with well-motivated councils of workers, would, they believed, produce welfare for everyone.52 Stalin’s impatience at how long it was taking Russia to achieve this utopia resulted in him imposing a number of measures to rob Soviet artisans, peasants and workers of any kind of freedom of choice.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Gay invited Taylor to lecture at HBS. Taylor declined, insisting that scientific management could only be learned on the shop floor. (In that, he was among the first of a very exclusive group of people who have ever said no to Harvard Business School.) Gay then threatened to teach scientific management without him, at which point Taylor acquiesced, agreeing to lecture on the subject of “Task Management and Its Nature” at the School in the spring of 1909. In 1911, Taylor published the work for which he is famous, The Principles of Scientific Management. Over time, he and his disciples Carl Barth and Clarence Thompson became familiar figures at HBS and in Cambridge’s Colonial Club, the favored social redoubt of Harvard’s elite.7 Between 1909 and 1914, Taylor visited Cambridge every winter to deliver a series of lectures.

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True to the prevailing spirit of the age—that science held the answers to most of society’s ills—a “man of science” was the first-responder to this crisis. Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, was all the rage at the time, and Edwin Gay was one of his biggest fans. Gay called Taylor’s work “the most important advance in industry since the introduction of the factory system and power machinery” and put Taylorism at the heart of the original HBS curriculum. He even recruited Taylor, who lectured at the school between 1908 and 1914. 3 The “Scientist”: Frederick W. Taylor The legacy of Frederick W. Taylor is rife with contradiction. Was the father of scientific management one of the best things to happen to American management know-how or one of the worst?

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Was the father of scientific management one of the best things to happen to American management know-how or one of the worst? Was he a friend of the workingman or his enemy? Was scientific management an actual science or was it simply counting? Did he truly advance the management of business or was he simply a first mover in the business of management? At least one thing is certain: Taylor was a crucial player in the early years of the Harvard Business School, and its most prominent lecturer from the very start. When Edwin Gay was tasked with designing a curriculum and recruiting faculty for HBS, he had a fundamental problem on his hands: No one really knew what to teach. So he naturally scanned the horizon for someone—anyone—who was teaching something—anything—that seemed suited to the School’s still-unfocused ambitions.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

But despite the success of the ENIAC women in establishing a unique occupational niche for the programmer within the ENIAC community, programming continued to be perceived as marginal to the central business of computer development. By nature of their gender (female) and education (nonscientific and nonengineering), the early programmers remained isolated from their engineering and scientific managers. If software was admitted to be important, hardware was considered to be essential. The conflation of programming and coding, and the association of both with low-status clerical labor, indicated the ways in which early software workers were gendered female. In the ENIAC project, of course, the programmers actually were women.

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Engineering management promised scientific control over the often-unpredictable processes of research and development. It allowed for the orderly production of cutting-edge science and technology.34 In the language used by the managers themselves, it was a solution that “scaled” well, meaning that it could accommodate the rapid and unanticipated growth typical of cold war–era military research. Scientific management techniques and production technologies could be substituted for human resources. It was not a system dependent on individual genius or chance insight. It replaced skilled personnel with superior process. For these and other reasons, it seemed the perfect solution to the problem posed by the mass production of computer programs.

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Many of the themes developed in previous chapters—the development of new programming technologies or more “efficient” management methodologies—are closely tied to questions of professional status. If skilled programmers could be replaced by automated development tools, for example, or by more “scientific” management methodologies, then they could hardly have much claim to professional legitimacy. The question of what programming was—as an intellectual and occupational activity—and where it fit into traditional social, academic and professional hierarchies, was actively negotiated during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

He did not believe that “man at work” told the full story, or even the most important story, about human nature. But in the hands of Smith’s descendants, much of the nuance and subtlety was lost. More than a century later, Smith’s views about work guided the father of what came to be called the “scientific management” movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor used meticulous time and motion studies to refine the factory, as envisioned by Smith, so that human laborers were part of a well-oiled machine. And he designed compensation schemes that pushed employees to work hard, work fast, and work accurately.

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Pay is what would motivate them to work accurately and quickly Henry Ford, of course, created the most famous descendant of Smith’s model, and there is no doubt that it was efficient. The Ford assembly line brought the price of automobiles within the reach of ordinary people. Over the years, the efficiency of factories only grew, as F. W. Taylor, in his book The Principles of Scientific Management, laid out in microscopic detail the best ways to divide production into individual jobs, so that little skill or attention was required, and the best way to arrange pay, so that maximum effort would be produced. Factories like this have mostly left American shores, but one sees the same pattern played out in modern versions of the factory, like call centers and order-fulfillment centers.

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New York: Morrow, 1987.* Springsteen, B. Interview in Rolling Stone, December 6, 1984: 18–22, 70. Stout, L. Cultivating Conscience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.* Sullivan, W. M. Work and Integrity. New York: Jossey-Bass, 2004.* Taylor, F. W. Principles of Scientific Management (Originally published in 1911). New York: Norton, 1967. Wrzesniewski, A., and J. E. Dutton. (2001). “Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work.” Academy of Management Review, 26 (2001): 179–201.* Wrzesniewski, A., J. E. Dutton, and G. Debebe. “Interpersonal Sensemaking and the Meaning of Work.”

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

But industry needed mass labor for production and a mass market for consumption. By “mass labor” I mean a generalized pool of workers equally trainable to the highest pitch of efficiency. Forging and deploying such a mass became the goal of “scientific management” and its great apostle, Frederick Winslow Taylor. With time and motion studies in hand, the scientific manager could program his workers’ every move as if they were a single instrument – a human machine. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work.[35] The system was top-down, intrusive, and impersonal, but it became orthodoxy in the industrialized world, and it caught the attention of influential persons.

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Since the eighteenth century, when intellectuals like Voltaire felt obliged to dabble in chemical experiments, science had been considered the most rigorous domain of human knowledge. To be scientific meant to speak with great authority. Frederick Winslow Taylor, we have seen, labeled his system “scientific management.” A few decades earlier, Marx had called his political ideals “scientific socialism,” to differentiate them from utopian schemes. In general, the prestige of the scientist derived from the belief that he journeyed to realms of mystery and brought back material benefits for the human race.

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The Old Democracies And the New Structure of Information I wish to conclude with the old democracies: Europe and the United States. After the end of World War II, the material success of these countries lifted the prestige of their system of government to the heights. Capitalism and the industrial revolution were invented here, and scientific management too – the apparent ability to become rich beyond the dreams of previous generations because of brilliant top-down planning. The digital world was born here: the tsunami of information could be said to originate in that unstable seismic region south and east of San Francisco Bay. The ideals of equality, of the people as sovereign, of the public as more than a rabble, were also strongest here, part of the domestic political DNA.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

It describes what neuroscientists commonly refer to as the executive functions of the brain, a broadly accepted framework among neuroscientists compared to what is perceived as the clichéd left-brain, right-brain distinctions. Charlie Rose: The Brain Series, a ten-part series on the brain, is also instructive. It can be found at: http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702. Scientific (or industrial) management: Scientific management originated in the early 1900s, exemplified by The Principles of Scientific Management, by Frederick Taylor, Harper & Brothers (1911), a seminal book. Henry Ford’s brand of industrial management (Fordism) drew upon similar methods and techniques: The Legend of Henry Ford by Keith Sward, Rinehart & Company (1948). General Motors: Interview with Chet Huber.

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As education and creativity researcher and author Sir Ken Robinson puts it, “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Another major factor is that, for years, organizational management has been developing methods for increasing productivity and minimizing risk and errors that tend to stifle creative experimentation. The predominant approach to management that evolved during the industrial era, known as scientific management, broke jobs down into specific, sequential tasks, which could then be allocated appropriate times for completion in order to optimize efficiency. Hierarchical organizations with centralized top-down decision making facilitated this process and became the norm. These methods famously allowed Henry Ford to streamline the automobile production line, first revolutionizing manufacturing and then the service businesses as well.

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.), Winning Through Innovation, 175–76 Orland (Ted) and Bayles (David), Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, 160 Orth, Maureen, 118–19, 124 Overture, 4 Packard, David, 9, 22, 120 Packer, George, 103, 105 Page, Larry, 4–5, 8, 115 PBS, 83 Perfectionism, 51, 59, 68, 73, 76, 160 healthy vs. unhealthy, 51–52 prototyping and, 52–64 Pescosolido, Anthony, 74 Peters, Tom, 200 In Search of Excellence, 120 Petersen, Bob, 73–75, 105–106 Petraeus, David, 95, 155 Pictionary, 158 Pink, Daniel, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, 164 Pipkin, Chet, 111–13, 153 Pixar, 12, 13, 29–32, 41–45, 52, 105–106, 115, 121, 135, 142–46, 151, 153, 155, 158–59, 186–87 growth mind-set of, 41–45 humor, 73–76 plussing, 69–73 prototyping and, 59–62 questions, 105–106 small wins, 142–46, 148–49, 150 See also specific animated films Pixar Image Computer, 30, 142, 141–46 Play, 13, 65–76 genius of, 65–76 humor and, 73–76 improvisation and, 65–69 plussing and, 69–73 Politics, 55–58, 125–28 prototyping and, 55–58 Porras, Jerry, Built to Last, 166–67 Positive feedback, 147, 148 Power Point, 138 Presidential elections, 125 of 2000, 125 of 2008, 125–28 Price, David, The Pixar Touch, 31, 60, 142, 143, 145, 164, 165 Pritzker Prize, 45 Problems, 77–95, 159 smallifying, 77–95 Problem solvers, 87–88 Procedural planning, limitations of, 15–17, 19, 20, 24–26 Procter & Gamble, 62–64, 107, 113–14, 134–35 Prodigies, 7, 8, 9 Prototyping, 52–64, 80, 81, 135, 152, 158–59 Publishing industry, 138–40 Questions, 97–116, 128 Radiology, 137 Radio Shack, 112, 113 Ramadi, 94–95 Ramo, Joshua Cooper, The Age of the Unthinkable, 174 Ranft, Joe, 59, 60, 106 Rao, Hayagreeva, 42 Ratatouille (film), 59 Rauschenberg, Robert, 117 RCA, 21 Red’s Dream (film), 144–45 Reed College, 41, 108 Reels, 60 REM sleep, 66 RenderMan, 143–44, 146, 149 Reorientation, 14 Resources, 163–78 Richardson, Adam, Innovation X, 172 Ricks, Thomas, 91 Ries, Eric, 20 Right brain/left brain analogies, 15, 183–84 Ringtones, 57–58 Robinson, Sir Ken, 15 Rock, Chris, 1–3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 32, 33, 35, 47, 54, 131, 135, 137, 140, 141, 151, 153, 154–55, 158 Rogers, Everett, 131–33 Diffusion of Innovations, 133, 167–68 Romero, Eric, 74 Romney, Mitt, 125 Rospars, Joe, 57–58 Ruby, Matt, 2, 3 Russert, Tim, 118–20, 121, 124–128, 129 Saadiq, Raphael, 134 Salesforce, 91 Salonen, Esa-Pekka, 83 Sarasvathy, Saras, 10, 28–29, 30, 102, 141, 148, 183 “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial,” 10–11 Sawyer, Keith, 160 Group Genius, 118, 168 Saxnian, AnnaLee, 118 Schmidt, Eric, 5 School for Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), 27–28 Schultz, Howard, 11, 53, 146–47, 151 Pour Your Heart Into It, 147 Scientific management, 15 Scrabble, 158 Scully, John, 29, 108 Seinfeld, Jerry, 2, 109 Senge, Peter, The Fifth Element, 175 Sequential processes, 15–17 SIGGRAPH, 143, 144, 148 Silicon Graphics, 44 Silicon Valley, 10, 19, 36, 53, 75, 84, 107, 146, 153, 197, 198 Sketches of Frank Gehry (documentary), 55, 117 Sleep, 66 Slemmer, Mike, 89–90 Small problems, 77–95 Small wins, 141–52 Smart-guy syndrome, 109 Smith, Alvy Ray, 30, 149 Software, 83–91, 112, 136–37, 143–46, 149, 151 agile development, 84–91, 148, 151, 152 RenderMan, 143–44, 146, 149 waterfall method, 86–88 Solutions, problems as, 77–95 Sony, 108 Sotheby’s, 6 Soviet Army, 23–26 Sports, 37, 85 SRI International, 21 Stand-up comedy, 1–3, 12, 13, 32, 109, 128, 131, 133, 135, 140, 141, 151, 154–55 Stanford Business School, 3–4 Stanford Digital Library Project, 4 Stanford University, 12, 45, 108, 125 d.school, 12, 63, 134–35 Stanton, Andrew, 52–53, 61 Starbucks, 11, 53, 146–47, 151, 183 Status quo bias, 110 S Team, 6 Sternberg, Robert J., Handbook of Creativity, 168 Stokes, Patricia, Creativity from Constraint, 170–71 Storyboards, 59–62, 70, 145 Strategy and innovation, further readings and resources on, 173–76 Stress Factory, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1 Subtle controls, 85–86 Summit Partners, 111 SUN Microsystems, 10, 36 Superelaborate storyboards, 43 Surprises, 11 Sutherland, Jeff, 84, 85 Sutton, Robert, 42 Tait, Karen, 157–58 Tait, Richard, 155–58 Takeuchi, Hirotaka, 85–86 Tal Afar, Iraq, 92–94, 103, 150, 159 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Black Swan, 175 Taliban, 25 Technology, 17, 20, 21, 22, 29–32, 83–91, 107–108, 112, 132, 137, 142–46, 153.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

The wave peaks in the mid-1870s, with financial crisis in the USA and Europe leading to the Long Depression (1873–96). During the 1880s and 90s, new technologies are developed in response to economic and social crises, coming together at the start of the third cycle. 1890s–1945: In the third cycle heavy industry, electrical engineering, the telephone, scientific management and mass production are the key technologies. The break occurs at the end of the First World War; the 1930s Depression, followed by the destruction of capital during the Second World War terminate the downswing. Late-1940s–2008: In the fourth long cycle transistors, synthetic materials, mass consumer goods, factory automation, nuclear power and automatic calculation create the paradigm – producing the longest economic boom in history.

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Drucker’s answers are speculative but they provide the first glimpse of the framework on which a rigorous theory of postcapitalism would have to be based. Drucker divides the history of industrial capitalism into four phases: a mechanical revolution lasting most of the nineteenth century; a productivity revolution with the advent of scientific management in the 1890s; a management revolution after 1945, driven by the application of knowledge to business processes; and finally an information revolution, based on ‘the application of knowledge to knowledge’. Drucker, a pupil of Schumpeter, was consciously using the Kondratieff long cycles here (although merging the first two together), but seen from the viewpoint of the individual firm.

…

As Kealey concludes of the skilled Toronto workforce in the 1890s: ‘They had met the machine and triumphed.’17 By the 1890s, the existence of a skilled, privileged and organized layer of workers was a general feature of capitalism – not the result of one nation’s competitive advantage. The combined impact of skilled autonomy, ‘the rich associational life’ and rising social-democratic parties would force capitalism into a new adaptation. Having ‘met the machine and won’, the organized worker would, in the first half of the twentieth century, meet the scientific manager, the bureaucrat and – eventually – the guard at the concentration camp. 1898–1948: PICK UP A PIG AND WALK In 1898, in the freight yard of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, a manager called Frederick Winslow Taylor came up with a new solution to the century-old problem of skilled worker autonomy.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

Growing investment in sports led in turn to a growing need to maintain a winning record: a new concern with system, efficiency, and the elimination of risk. Camp s innovations at Yale emphasized drill discipline, teamwork. As in industry, the attempt to coordinate the movements of many men created a demand for scientific management and for the expansion of managerial personnel. In many sports trainers, coaches, doctors, and public relations experts soon outnumbered the players. The accumulation of elaborate statistical records arose from management's attempt to reduce winning to a routine, to measure efficient performance.

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Beating him would make him more unmanageable than ever in the students' view, whereas the psychiatric solution, in effect, enlists his own cooperation in the school s attempt to control him. student , ' niques into the modern corporation, ostensibly as a means of humanizing" the workplace. The ideology of modern management draws on the same body of therapeutic theory and practice that informs progressive education and progressive childrearing. Recent efforts to "democratize" industrial relations bring to a full circle the development that began when experts in scientific management began to study group dynamics in the office and factory in order to remove friction and raise output. Social scientists then applied the ideas first worked out in the study of small groups to study and treatment of the family, arguing that most domestic conflicts originated in the attempt to impose outmoded authoritarian controls on an institution that was evolving from an authoritarian to a democratic form.

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" It undertook to reform society from the top down-to professionalize the civil service, break the power of the urban " machine, and put the best men" into office. When such measures failed to stem the rising tide of labor militancy and agrarian radicalism, " reformers brought forward their own version of the cooperative commonwealth in the name of progressivism: uni" versal education welfare capitalism, scientific management of industry and government. The New Deal completed what progres, Progressivism and the Rise of the New Paternalism The new paternalism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, found political expression in the progressive movement and later in the New Deal, and gradually worked its way into every corner of American society.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

In his learned How to Keep Household Accounts: A Manual of Family Accounts (1903), he used a long history of accounting to prove that accounting applied as much to “domestic” life as it did to “finance and administration.” He cited the French Renaissance philosopher Montaigne to defend the idea that men as well as women should learn the “science” of managing households. Thus the scientific management of household accounts created a great chain of rational administration, from federal and municipal government to businesses to households. Economic utilitarianism could be systematized through business schools (in particular at New York University, Haskins’s own institution) and home economics courses.

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Seen through the accountant’s numbers, Conrad’s classic imperialist character Kurtz, and his nightmarish operation of slave labor, looked clean and efficient.14 The problem of financial success represented by numbers outweighing human rights plagued the Industrial Revolution into its later stages. From an established Philadelphia family of Mayflower stock, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) chose to be an apprentice patternmaker and machine mechanic at the Philadelphia Hydraulic Works and then, in 1871, for the Midvale Steel Company. Taylor is now known for Taylorism, his “scientific management” approach to industrial and labor efficiency. In many ways, Taylor can be seen as the Josiah Wedgwood of the age of steel. He focused on tight management of mechanical and labor costs in relation to time. Central to Taylor’s model was detailed cost accounting based on a monthly closing of books and detailed balance sheets and income statements.

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., 147, 163–164 Contaduría de Cuentas, 63 Contaduría de Hacienda, 63 Convention Nationale, 145 Coolidge, Calvin, 192 Coopers & Lybrand, 196 Copying machine, Watt and, 124 Corruption Athenian, 4 Dutch, 82 English, 111–116, 166 French, 136 professional accountants and, 178–179, 195–200 railroads in the Gilded Age and, 168, 170–171, 176 Spanish, 68 Cost accounting Nazi Germany and, 187–188 railroads and, 169–170 scientific management and, 186–187 Wedgewood and, 122–126 Council of Finance (France), 94, 96 Council of Finance (Spain), 63–64 Council of Florence, 38 Courtier, The (Castiglione), 56–57 Covenants, 22 Creative accounting, 106–107 Credit and exchange, tools of, 17, 33 Credits and debits. See Double-entry accounting/bookkeeping Cultures of accountability, xvi–xvii, 207–208 British Protestantism and, 119–122 Christianity and, 22–28 in colonial America, 149–155 in England, 103–104, 107–108, 112–113, 119–122 French Revolution and, 133 in Holland, 80, 207 Jesuits and, 57 Medici family and, 35–47 Neo-Platonism and discrediting of, 55–59 republican, 52–54 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 50 Dante, 21, 25, 189 D’Artagnan, Charles Ogier de Batz-Castelmore, comte, 93 D’Artois, Charles-Philippe de France, comte, 143 Darwin, Charles, 183–185 Darwin, Emma, 184 Darwin, Erasmus, 129, 183 Darwin, Francis, 184 Darwin, William, 183–185 Datini, Francesco, 15–22, 25–28 Davenant, Charles, 103 David Copperfield (Dickens), 180 De Bonicha, Jacobus, 12 De Calonne, Vicomte, Charles Alexandre, 137 De Chabrol de Crouzol, Christophe, comte, 167 De Computis (Pacioli), 51, 54–55 De Créquy, Marquise, Renée-Caroline, 141–142 De Gournay, Vincent, 135 De la Court, Pieter, 84–85, 86 De Solórzano, Bartolomé Salvador, 67 De Witt, Cornelis, 86 De Witt, Johan, 85–86 Death and the Miser (art) (Provost), 208 Debits and credits.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Without this invention, without his acquisition of such a watch in Switzerland, industry may have waited longer for his “time and motion” studies involving the systematic breaking down of work in to its constituent parts, a practice he called scientific management. Taken in isolation, these insights produced relatively modest gains. Only when scientific management was applied to the moving assembly devised by Henry Ford’s engineers for the Model T automotive workshop, did Ford achieve the dramatic production economies that helped to define the consumer society. The cheaply made and cheaply available yet innovative Model T, made so much profit in its first year of production, that Ford was not only able to return a huge dividend to his investors, he was also able to distribute some of that profit to employees in better wages.

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., 58 Le Bon, Gustave, 101 Lee, Richard, 26 Legal search/legal discovery, 148–150 208 Index Leisure, 3, 10, 11, 19, 27, 48, 55, 56, 59–62, 65, 77, 79, 117, 118, 159, 161, 178, 180, 182, 184, 191, 195 Levy, Frank, 126 List, Friedrich, 193 Love, 55, 74, 76, 99, 103, 106, 112, 118 Low-income jobs, 96 Loyalty, 69 Luddites, 2, 14, 18, 35, 59, 94, 96 Lyft, 136 M Machine learning, 59, 84, 90, 91, 96, 138, 139 Machines, 2, 5, 10, 12–15, 17, 19, 20, 35, 36, 38, 59, 84–87, 90–96, 99–103, 105–107, 109–121, 127–131, 138, 139, 145, 147, 148, 160, 168, 191 Machine vision, 120 Malthusian, 19 Man, Henrik de, 79 Management, 27, 30, 41, 69, 70 management theory/ organisational theory (see also Scientific management) Mann, Michael, 46 Manual work, 1 Manufacturing, 86, 87, 90, 94, 95, 176, 184, 198 Markets/market forces, 5, 6, 21, 38, 44–46, 67, 68, 70, 79, 85–88, 90, 96, 120, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 140, 141, 150, 152, 159, 164, 165, 171, 178, 183, 189–193, 195, 196, 198–200 Marx, Karl, 17, 18, 27, 56–59, 61, 62, 78 Matrimonial relationships, 37 McCormack, Win, 159 Meaning, 4, 9, 10, 19, 25, 54, 57, 58, 66, 73, 76, 78, 79, 84, 106, 116, 176, 180 Mechanisation, 15, 17, 19, 20, 192 Meckling, W., 55 Méda, Dominique, 183 Medical diagnosis (automation of ), 128, 129 Menger, Pierre-Michel, 4 Mental labour, 3 Meritocracy, 28 Middle-income jobs, 90, 93, 94 Migration, 40, 47 Minimum wage, 67, 69 Mining, 26, 38, 197 Mokyr, J., 59 Monopolies, 6, 136, 138–140 Morals/morality, 48, 77, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167 Moravec’s paradox, 131 Murnane, Richard, 126 N Nagel, Thomas, 100, 102 National Living wage, 184 Needs vs.

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Wants, 3, 30, 88 Neoclassical economics, 4, 55, 60, 62, 73 Netherlands, the/Holland, 6, 68, 151, 163, 177, 181–183 Network effects, 138 Networks, 45, 48, 138, 196 Neumann, John von, 99 New Zealand, 179 Nübler, Irmgard, 6, 194, 196 Index O Obama, Barack, 164, 165, 171 Obligation, 38, 53, 73–79 Occupations, 16, 40, 41, 46, 47, 58, 70, 83, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 106, 178, 184, 190–192, 194 OECD, 66–68, 178 O’Neil, Cathy, 6 Ontology of work, 65 Organisations dynamics of, 164 Osborne, Michael, 90 Oswald, A, 60 209 Pre-modern/pre-industrial work, 3, 11, 47, 48 Productivity, 7, 10, 79, 86, 87, 176, 178–180, 183–185, 190–192, 199 Professional work, 1, 39 Profits (different profit models), 14–18, 30, 48, 75, 79, 93, 134, 135, 138, 152, 191 Protestant work ethic, 28 Public services, 94, 167 Puritan (view of work), 28, 75, 166 R P Painting Fool, The, 115, 116, 120 Parenting, 75, 76 Patocka, Jan, 9, 21 Pattern recognition, 129 Peasant labour, 41 Perez, Carlota, 192 Philosophy of work, 30 Physical labour, 3 Piasna, Agnieszka, 181, 183 Piece-work, 30 Platform economy/platform capitalism, 6, 140 Polanyi, Karl, 192, 193 Polanyi, Michael, 127 Policy (argument against), 7, 21, 67, 68, 95, 157–173, 180, 181, 183–185, 189–200 Population, 2, 12, 15–17, 19, 28, 30, 89, 90, 117, 147, 158, 172, 198 Postmates, 136 Post-work society, 59 Poverty, 15, 47, 59, 67, 177 Redistribution, 79, 169, 199 Redundancy, 10, 12, 15–17, 19, 78, 179 Religion/religious ritual, 12, 28, 194 Remittances, 40 Responsibility, 44, 47, 76–79, 106, 107, 115, 118, 136 Retail sector, 87, 137 Retirement, 19, 67, 78 Ricardo, David, 2, 13–17 Robinson, James, 194 Robotisation, 21, 94, 95, 192 Robots carers, 106 Romantic (view of work), 34, 35 Ruskin, John, 34 S Safety nets, 67, 68 Sahlins, Marshall, 26, 158 Salazar-Xirinachs, Jose M., 198 Schumpeter, Joseph, 190, 194 Scientific management, 30 Scott, James C., 28 210 Index Searle, John, 100–103 Self-employment, 69–70, 75 Self-realisation, 57, 165 Sennett, Richard, 3 Services/service sector low frequency vs. high frequency, 134 work, 40, 68, 161, 163 Singularity, 116 Skidelsky, Edward, 60, 176 Skidelsky, Robert, 60, 176 Skills acquisition, 33, 70 skilled vs. unskilled labour/jobs, 67 Slavery, 11, 29, 30, 45 Smartphones, 140 Smiles, Samuel, 28 Smith, Adam, 12, 13, 27, 35, 54, 55, 65 Smith, Rob, 177 Social drawing rights, 70 Social interaction, 53, 88, 91 Social media, 77, 138, 168 Societal knowledge base, 196–197 Sociology (of work), 166 Spencer, David, 4, 54, 59, 61 Spinning mills (cotton industry?)

The Little Black Book of Decision Making by Michael Nicholas

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, call centre, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Frederick Winslow Taylor, hindsight bias, impulse control, James Dyson, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific management, selection bias, Stephen Hawking

However, once anything becomes automatic, assumed to be true – through a process that is normally known as conditioning – it also tends to become hard to notice when change would be beneficial, or perhaps even necessary. What if something important has changed, but not many people have noticed? In this world of scientific management, what if we should again take a look at the statement I made earlier, that decisions can be no more reliable than the superstition upon which they are based? Okay, okay, before any scientists take offence (I'm glad to have your attention), let me say what I mean by this statement. Having started my career as a chartered electrical engineer, I'm not questioning the value of science.

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This process doesn't stop in childhood, however, and new beliefs can continue to emerge at any stage of life, either individually or within society as a whole. In the context of this book, the combination of the deterministic science of the clockwork universe, together with Fredrick Winslow Taylor's scientific management, has shaped our beliefs about what constitutes high-quality decision making to an extraordinary degree. It might be anticipated that this type of rational thinking would have provided the tools to minimise the impact of conditioning, as well as its implicit limiting assumptions. In some areas that is probably the case.

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He and others have continued to incrementally refine the approach, and today the record stands at an incredible 70 hot dogs consumed in 10 minutes, but still using the basic method that Kobayashi created. The best practice has now been well honed. The Limitations of “Best Practice” The mindset involved in much decision making today is comparable to that of the best hot dog eaters in the world just before Takaru Kobayashi turned up. The scientific management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor have become embedded so firmly that their implicit assumption, of predictability and order, is largely unchallenged – with the result that “rational” thinking dominates, along with a tendency to see things in black-and-white terms. This is highly evident in strategic planning.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Politics was a domain of final ends subject to democratic contestation, whereas administration was a realm of implementation that could be studied empirically and subjected to scientific analysis. A similar intellectual revolution had been going on in the business world, with the rise of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s doctrine of “scientific management,” which used among other things time-and-motion studies to maximize the efficiency of factory operations. Many of the Progressive Era reformers sought to import scientific management into government, arguing that public administration could be turned into a science and protected from the irrationalities of politics. They hoped that the social sciences one day could be made as rigorous as the natural sciences.2 After the experiences of the twentieth century, this early faith in science, and the belief that administration could be turned into a science, seems naïve and misplaced.

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Individuals like Dorman Eaton, Woodrow Wilson, and Frank Goodnow, author of a series of influential books on public administration, cast existing American institutions in a very negative light and suggested European models as alternatives.20 These intellectuals then organized or legitimated a series of new civil society organizations, such as the New York Municipal Research Bureau, which generated policy proposals for reform, the American Social Science Association, which made civil service reform on a “scientific” basis a top priority, and the Bar Association of the City of New York, formed in 1870 to defend the professional integrity of its members.21 They would come to invoke the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management,” an approach that was seen as the cutting edge of modern business organization, as guidelines for a revamped American public sector.22 Much as the self-interest of the reformers was a basis of their activism, there was an important ethical dimension to this struggle as well. The attack on patronage and bossism took on a highly moralistic tone, with individuals across the country arguing passionately against the evils of the existing system.

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The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean that it will remain one in perpetuity. It is to the problem of political decay that we will turn in the final part of this book. PART FOUR Political Decay 31 POLITICAL DECAY How the U.S. Forest Service’s mission came to center on fighting wildfires; the failure of scientific management; how the Forest Service lost autonomy due to conflicting mandates; what political decay is, and its two sources The creation of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) under Bernard Fernow and Gifford Pinchot was the premier example of American state building during the Progressive Era. Prior to passage of the 1883 Pendleton Act and the spread of merit-based bureaucracy, American government was a clientelistic system in which public offices were allocated by the political parties on the basis of patronage.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

CHAPTER 2: The Father of OKRs In the space : While there’s no record of the session I attended, we unearthed a video recording of a similar seminar Grove gave three years later. The attributed remarks are sourced from that recording and hosted on www.whatmatters.com. Scientific management, Taylor wrote : Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1911). “crisp and hierarchical” : Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management (New York: Random House, 1983). “a principle of management” : Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1954).

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Our MBO Ancestors The early-twentieth-century forefathers of management theory, notably Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, were the first to measure output systematically and analyze how to get more of it. They held that the most efficient and profitable organization was authoritarian. * Scientific management, Taylor wrote, consists of “knowing exactly what you want men to do and then see that they do it in the best and cheapest way.” The results, as Grove noted, were “ crisp and hierarchical: there were those who gave orders and those who took orders and executed them without question.” Half a century later, Peter Drucker—professor, journalist, historian—took a wrecking ball to the Taylor-Ford model.

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He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”: “[S]tressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.” On an assembly line, it’s easy enough to distinguish output from activity. It gets trickier when employees are paid to think. Grove wrestled with two riddles: How can we define and measure output by knowledge workers? And what can be done to increase it? Grove was a scientific manager. He read everything in the budding fields of behavioral science and cognitive psychology. While the latest theories offered “a nicer way to get people to work” than in Henry Ford’s heyday, controlled university experiments “simply would not show that one style of leadership was better than another.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Remember, if such people found a company in their home country, they will probably have easy access to the American market to sell products into. They will probably have easy access to American venture capital. We will be their customers. But the jobs will be created overseas.16 Labor Relations One of the most striking claims of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1915) was that no workplace that had been organized under the principles of scientific management had ever had a strike, because when workers were treated “optimally” there was never any need for labor strife. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know this claim to be overblown: Many companies organized according to those principles have indeed endured strikes over the years.

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In fact, in many successful transformations I have witnessed, future leaders who became instrumental change agents began as ordinary employees working on early pilot projects. Once they saw what was possible, they made the choice to dedicate their careers to bringing those benefits to others in the company. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, this new way stands on the shoulders of revolutions past: scientific management, mass production, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, agile software development, customer development, maneuver warfare, design thinking, and more. Even within a single organization, entrepreneurial principles and general management principles share common foundations—especially the importance of long-term thinking—and common values—a need for rigor and discipline in execution.

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Shane, Scott Andrew. A General Theory of Entrepreneurship: The Individual-Opportunity Nexus. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2003. Sloan, Alfred P., Jr. My Years with General Motors. Edited by John McDonald, with Catharine Stevens. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Bros., 1915. LEAN STARTUP CONFERENCES Lean Startup Conferences bring the big ideas from Eric Ries’s books off the page to show how organizations are making them real around the world. We understand there’s one level of learning you get from reading and another level from doing the work—and hearing how other similar organizations are interpreting and doing the work.

Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism by Richard Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blockchain, BRICs, British Empire, business process, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Strachan, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, energy security, Etonian, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks

These sprawling concerns had to be managed by other people both for practical reasons and because the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford were, said one business historian, ‘the conquerors of capitalism, not its administrators’. 4 Those who could tell the new managers of corporate America what made up their profits, and therefore how they could be increased, were useful people to know. The technicians who took the theories of cost accounting and scaled them up for the new age were led by a mechanical engineer from the steel heartland of Philadelphia called Frederick Winslow Taylor. He refashioned industrial methods using ‘scientific management’: detailed classifications of cost, time, materials and output. ‘Taylorism’ would be credited with innovations such as the production-line system, with each worker performing a small part repetitively. Its brutal efficiency was satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, but it enabled Henry Ford’s workers to make a Model T in a couple of hours, compared to half a day beforehand.

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Alongside its advice on corporate structuring – which, then as now, generally involved carving companies up into separate divisions – McKinsey developed many of the services that the big accountancy firms would later take into the multinationals’ boardrooms. A popular one emerged in the early 1950s when one bright McKinsey spark discovered that workers’ pay was rising faster than management’s (partly because by now the unions had redressed some of the iniquities imposed by cost accounting and scientific management). Before long an executive pay consulting service was born, with bosses rewarded handsomely under schemes carrying the McKinsey stamp of approval. Since the advice would generally be to pay executives slightly more than their competitors – who wants below-par bosses? – the still spiralling gap between executive and employee wages was inevitable.

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In the countries in which the Big Four have embedded consultancy, the great splurge has coincided with historically low productivity growth of barely above 0%, compared with post-war averages of around 2% (see Figure 13).17 As improving productivity has been the purpose of consulting ever since cost accounting spawned scientific management, whatever else the industry is achieving, it is certainly not meeting its founders’ expectations. Figure 13: Rapid growth in consultancy services coincides with little or no growth in real economic productivity It was less than a decade before this rapid post-crisis growth in non-audit work started that the same firms had hived off their dedicated consultancy arms as incompatible with the essential business of accounting.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Before Wiener cemented that hardy word as central to cybernetic systems, feedback occupied a prominent position in the Soviet political imagination of itself as a “socialist democracy,” a kind of complex social entity sustained by Pavlovian mechanisms of stimulus and response and control and cooperation between rulers and masses.131 With little work, the term noise reduction came to stand for a technical synonym for continuing political censorship in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Wiener’s twinning of the modern laborer with an automaton echoed of Stalin’s attempts to make Soviet labor and industry efficient with the scientific management techniques of Taylorism. Wiener’s theories of systematic information control and communication, once translated into Russian, appeared to be a recuperation of ideas that already were well understood.132 Perhaps this history of Soviet cybernetics is most helpful not for what it says about cybernetics but for what the discursive pliancy of cybernetics allows us to see in Soviet society.

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Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 93. 5. Much of the vast literature on the Soviet command economy is dated to cold war research concerns. The part that was consulted (and sometimes critiqued) in this work includes Mark Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Peter Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1956); Michael Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR: The Contributions of Mathematical Economics to Their Solution, 1960–1971 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning (New York: Cambridge, 1978); Paul R.

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Stark, The Sense of Dissonance, 1–34, see also 35–51, 54–80. 36. Spufford, Red Plenty, 208–209. 37. Kornai, The Socialist System, 121. 38. Ibid., 121. 39. Ibid., 122. 40. Ibid., 122–123. 41. Castells, End of the Millennium, 24. 42. For a basic review of tolkachy and other informal mechanisms in the economy, see Mark Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors; and Alena V. Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 43. Byung-Yeon Kim, “Informal Economy Activities of Soviet Households: Size and Dynamics,” Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (3) ( 2003): 532–551. 44.

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

All these communications technologies, like transportation, also “knit the nation together” and led people to identify with their national political unit rather than with their local political units. Scientific management Can you imagine a world in which files do not exist? The growth of large-scale bureaucracy required advances in recording, processing, manipulating, and communicating data within an organization and also across organizations. Welfare states could not have arisen unless central governments had means of identifying, tracking, and monitoring potential recipients, which included doctrines of scientific management. We take the practices of modern bureaucracy for granted, but most of them are quite recent.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

For one thing, they are print artifacts that incite manuscript, as James Green and Peter Stallybrass have noted.10 For another, the script they incite can be prompted by oral communication, as census enumerators write down on forms what they are told by people, for instance, or as corporate managers—in the name of scientific management—learned in the early twentieth century to direct their underlings on memo blanks with printed headings like “Verbal orders don’t go” and “Don’t say it, write it.” And if blanks help to demonstrate as well as to ensure the continued interdependence of the oral, the written, and the printed, then they also raise questions about the digital.

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According to historians of technology, “the machine tool industry was the main transmission center for the transfer of new skills and techniques” among industries in the important machine-­making sector of the economy: firms that made firearms, sewing machines, typewriters, bicycles, and eventually automobiles. Production techniques that were developed in one industry spread to other industries when people changed jobs, and also when machine-­tool makers transferred their own developing expertise among their customers.48 So too the job printer—like the scientific management guru in the twentieth century49—must have served as a locus of transmission, where the designs and genres produced for one client might inform the work produced for another. “Printers are rapidly educating the business community,” the trade magazine Printers’ Circular noted hopefully in 1870.50 That claim may be impossible to prove, but the coherence of job printing as a specialty in a sense testifies to the emerging coherence of bureaucratic methods within the broader cultural economy.

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This chapter pursues the largely forgotten work of Binkley and the Joint THE TYPESCRIPT BOOK 55 Committee for two reasons: first, to gently suggest a deeper history of sorts (there must be other such histories) for the digital humanities, and second, to sketch a more ample and more specific account of typed documents and their reproduction than has yet been rendered either by scholars in media studies or by accounts of what William Stott called “documentary expression” in the 1930s.11 However paradoxical it may seem, finding a predigital history for the digital humanities stands to open for scrutiny precisely the connections between “methods of reproducing” and “research materials,” between media and the modes and substances of inquiry in the domains of history, arts, and letters. Like Liu’s predigital history of encoded discourse—the standards and meta-­standards of scientific management applied to knowledge work in the early twentieth century—such a history is one of surprising continuities rendered against obvious and admitted discontinuities.12 That such a project must involve typescripts will I hope become clear. By adding the subject of job printing back into media history, the previous chapter revealed the many and varied organizational structures of modern life that printed jobs helped to articulate.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

A worker who has been sexually harassed by her boss normally has recourse to intrafirm procedures for resolving her complaint. Such protections reflect a worldwide “blurring of boundaries” among business, nonprofit, and state organizations, which appears to be driven not simply by legal changes, but by cultural imperatives of scientific management and ideas of individual rights and organizational responsibilities.43 Some but not all of these managerial developments are salutary. They are proper subjects of investigation for political theory, once we get beyond the subject’s narrow focus on the state. A just workplace constitution should incorporate basic constitutional rights, akin to a bill of rights against employers.

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Anderson’s focus is, roughly, how things, as bad as they were in the tenements, might have gotten worse had they gone to work in the factories—if, six days a week, they had to cross back and forth over the border into some capitalist’s shirtwaist Lichtenstein. But how does “government” make things worse? No doubt, it can be irksome to have your boss, copy of Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management in hand, peering over your shoulder.4 And it can be unpleasant to be restricted in the minutiae of when, where, and how you work—for example, not being free to put needle and thread down whenever nature calls. However, monitoring and restriction takes place even in the absence of “government.”

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Of course, to the extent that the patriarchal family was itself a little firm, or to the extent that the operation was just a sweatshop in what was also a place of residence, there was government even in the tenements. For the required contrast, we have to imagine that piecework, perhaps contrary to fact, wasn’t like this. This makes the thought experiment no longer so “natural.” 4. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1911). 5. R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4 (1937): 386–405. 6. Granted, this worry may not be limited to the firm. A monopsonist might threaten to refuse to do business with an independent artisan, unless he votes for his candidate.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

They trade life hacking tips and cut out unnecessary cognitive burdens by wearing the same clothes every day or eating the same thing at every meal. Hustle culture has a long lineage. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a former steelworker named Frederick Winslow Taylor came up with a theory of “scientific management” that took the American business community by storm. Taylor believed that most jobs could be broken into standardized, measurable tasks, and that those tasks could be perfected over time by ironing out inefficiencies and shaving away every millisecond of wasted time. Ultimately, he believed that enhanced productivity would be a win-win: companies would increase their output, and workers would get the satisfaction of operating at peak performance.

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Marissa Mayer, the former chief executive at Yahoo, bragged in a 2016 interview about how hard she worked, saying that it was technically possible to work as many as 130 hours a week “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.” Unlike Taylor’s scientific management, which was often mandated from the top down, hustle culture is typically self-imposed. It’s an outgrowth of the philosophy the writer Derek Thompson has called “workism”—the belief, common especially among type-A millennial overachievers, that work is not just an economic necessity but the primary source of identity and meaning in our lives.

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Another article called factory automation Rick Wartzman, “The First Time America Freaked Out over Automation,” Politico, May 30, 2017. Today, Kawai is a living legend at Toyota “Toyota’s ‘Oyaji’ Kawai Calls to Protect Monozukuri,” Toyota News, June 17, 2020. a former steelworker named Frederick Winslow Taylor Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915). Gary Vaynerchuk, a marketing guru and social media influencer Ted Fraser, “I Spent a Week Living Like Gary Vaynerchuk,” Vice, December 17, 2018. Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX founder, famously works Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk on Working 120 Hours in a Week: ‘However Hard It Was for [the Team], I Would Make It Worse for Me,’ ” CNBC, December 10, 2018.

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

As Drucker later recalled, Sloan once said the following about being a successful manager: “He must be absolutely tolerant and pay no attention to how a man does his work.”33 This idea re-emerged in Drucker’s thinking in the 1950s and 1960s, a period in which he coined the term knowledge work as he began to grapple with an emerging economy where the output of brains was beginning to prove more valuable than the output of factories. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive. “He must direct himself.”34 This was a radical idea. In the nation’s factories, centralized control of workers was the standard. Influenced by the so-called “scientific management” principles popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor, who would famously prowl the factory floor with a stopwatch, rooting out inefficient movements, industrial management saw workers as automatons executing optimized processes carefully designed by a small cadre of wise managers. Drucker argued this approach was doomed to fail in the new world of knowledge work, where productive output was created not by expensive equipment stamping out parts, but instead by cerebral workers applying specialized cognitive skills.

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These articles were almost universally breathless with excitement about how much more money could be made by industrial organizations once they began to think more systematically about how their work was actually conducted. The articles were also, it soon became clear, largely quite boring to the modern reader. Scientific management in this era seemed to have a lot to do with filling out forms in triplicate. System magazine loves forms. In its pages, you’ll find pictures of forms, and you’ll learn about their colors, how they’re perforated, even the material of the folders that hold them (manila is preferred).1 Hidden among these minutiae, however, I found a case study from a 1916 issue that caught my attention.

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, in other words, the Pullman brass works had devolved into something that looks a lot like the hyperactive hive mind workflow. However, unlike the many knowledge work organizations of today that are suffering from a similarly informal workflow, the leaders of Pullman, swept up in the excitement of scientific management, were willing to experiment with radical solutions. * * * — To make the brass department more efficient, Pullman’s executive team did something counterintuitive: they made its operation more complicated. If you needed some brass work done, you now had to submit an official form that contained all the relevant information.

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Peter Behrens, considered by many to be the first modern industrial designer, recognized the power of design to make these devices iconic, delightful, and easy to use, informing the Bauhaus’s later faith in the promise of modern industry. 1909: SELFRIDGE DEPARTMENT STORE, Harry Gordon Selfridge Selfridge was the first department store to move products out from under the counter and onto open shelving where customers could touch and feel them directly, without asking for a shopkeeper’s help. 1911: THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT, Frederick Winslow Taylor Taylor’s rigorous observation of factory worker efficiency led to a focus on ergonomics and usability to minimize wasted effort and boost productivity. His time-saving approach was based on optimizing human behavior to suit the capabilities of the machines before them and to minimize human error. 1915: FORD ASSEMBLY LINE, Henry Ford The Ford assembly line was the definitive application of Taylor’s principles of scientific management. Ford optimized his assembly line to make the Model T as cheaply and uniformly as possible, with no room for customization or consumer taste, thereby reducing the cost of an automobile from $825 to $260 by 1924. 1920s: HOME ECONOMICS, Christine Frederick Home economics attempted to free up leisure time for women so that they might pursue their own betterment.

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For those first-wave feminists, home economics was about fostering more efficient housework so that women could pursue more “individuality and independence”—the chance to be more fulfilled, more influential. The era’s undisputed master of time-saving was Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose school of “scientific management” advocated watching every action on a factory floor for wasted seconds. Henry Ford was one of his early devotees; Christine Frederick was another. In Taylor’s ideas, Frederick saw a way to connect women’s work to broader notions about modern progress—and a way to boost how society valued a woman’s labor.

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., 87 Neeleman, David, 309 Nespresso, 117 Nest, 92, 336, 344–45 Netflix, 230–31, 260, 351n33 neural networks, 36, 44 neuroscience, 96 Newby, Paul, 342 news feeds, 134, 247, 248, 318 New York, 94 New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, 303 New York City subway system, 311 New Yorker, The, 67–68 New York Times, The, 110, 183, 225, 259, 263 Nielsen, Jakob, 318 911 emergency calls, 51–53, 71; Ripple device as alternative to, 53–55, 80, 117, 204 Nokia, 308 Norman, Donald, 22–26, 45–46, 86, 95, 96, 103, 112, 124, 272, 287, 302, 318, 326, 334; at Apple, 22–23; The Design of Everyday Things, 22, 312, 339, 340; Emotional Design, 326, 340; Three Mile Island and, 24–25, 30, 38, 338–39 Nostradamus, 198 Noyes, Eliot, 8 nuclear radiation exposure, 19–20 nuclear reactors, 23, 25, 26, 29, 44, 45, 80, 113; see also Three Mile Island nuclear weapons, 100, 164, 167, 261, 291; missile warning, 121–22 Nuttall, Mike, 177 obsolescence, artificial, 69 Omondi, Wycliffe Onyango, 281–85 “On Exactitude in Science,” 91–92 operations research, 6 Oppenheimer, Robert, 247, 261 organized crime, 39 Ossete, Leslie Saholy, 279–85 OXO peeler, 202–203, 341 Padgett, John, 217, 221–22, 226, 228–32, 234, 235, 237–39, 242, 312, 323–24, 345 Page, Larry, 342 paintbrushes, 358n22 Panama-Pacific Exposition, 60 Papanek, Victor, 290 Patnaik, Dev, 307 Pattison, Mary, 63, 64 Pearl, 50 Pearlman, Leah, 247–49, 262, 292, 344 peeler, OXO, 202–203, 341 Peloton, 316 personality, 265–67 personalization, 231, 239, 245; Carnival’s Ocean Medallion and Personal Genome, 233–39, 268, 296; Disney’s MagicBand and MyMagic+, 217–29, 237, 243–44, 288, 304, 317, 345 personas, 178, 207, 261, 341 personification, 155–57 personnel research, 81 Piano, Renzo, 157 pilots: crashes of, 77, 81–85, 102–103, 104, 106, 121, 257; lost and confused, 75–78, 86, 87, 144; “pilot error” concept, 81, 83, 102–103, 121, 335 Pittman, Matthew, 260 Pitts, Walter, 36 Pixar, 211 Plunkett, Joseph, 57–58 Poland, 276 Polaroid camera, 117, 336, 342 politeness, 108–10, 112, 113, 239–40, 258; driverless cars and, 125, 126 Porter, Joshua, 329 postmodernism, 157–58 pottery making, 90 PowerPoint, 208–209 Princess Cruises, 230; see also Carnival Cruise Line Princess phone, 337, 371n21 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 333 prototypes, 165, 180–82 psychologically natural controls, 84, 85; scrolling, 359n25 psychophysics, 84, 95 purpose, 33 radar, 32, 76–79, 83, 87 radio, 76, 77, 79, 84–85 Rams, Dieter, 46, 90, 338, 343, 370n17 Rand, Paul, 8 Raskin, Jef, 140, 141 Ratzlaff, Cordell, 317 razors, disposable, 154–55, 157 Read, Max, 262 Reddit, 249 Reeves, Byron, 110 Regal Princess, 229–30, 236 Renuka, 130–33, 147, 315 rewards, variable, 254, 255, 259 Ripple help button, 53–55, 80, 117, 204 RKO theater, 55–56, 92, 173–74, 335 robots, 115, 117; see also artificial intelligence (AI) Rogers, Richard, 157 Rohingya, 263 Rolls, Charles, 332 Rosenstein, Justin, 247–51, 262, 274, 291–92, 344 Russia, 201, 250, 313 Saarinen, Eero, 5, 8 Saproo, Sameer, 125–27 Sarajevo, 49–50, 54 savings accounts, 319 Scheiber, Noam, 259 Scheimann, Fred, 15–18 Schiller, Phil, 342 Schmidt, Eric, 191 Schon, Donald, 358n22 Schüll, Natasha, 255 Schulze-Mittendorff, Walter, 334–35 Schwartz, Barry, 231 science, 45 scientific management, 63, 333 Scott, Walter Dill, 81 scrolling direction, 359n25 Sears, 66, 69, 335 self-driving cars, see cars, self-driving Selfridge, Harry Gordon, 150, 333 self-service checkouts, 303 semiconductors, 168, 175 senses, 84 sewing machine, 72 sexual assault, 51–55, 204, 352n4 Sheehan, Kim, 260 Sholes, Christopher Latham, 332 Shum, Albert, 202 Silicon Valley, 3, 168, 175, 177, 180, 182, 221, 229, 257–59, 270, 291–92, 340 Simpsons, The, 161–62, 164, 180 Singapore, 24 Siri, 122, 151, 190–91, 193, 195, 208, 312 Sittig, Aaron, 344 skeuomorphism, 148, 202, 210 Skinner, B.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

As Manuel Castells noted, “Knowledge and information are critical elements in all modes of development, since the process of production is always based on some level of knowledge and in the processing of information.”48 This phenomenon was noted by the American engineer Frederick Taylor, who, operating from the perspective of capital, developed the theory of scientific management through a series of time and motion studies. Taylor observed that “managers assume…the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen.”49 Taylor himself carried out this process of knowledge theft—managers stealing from workers—during his experiments at the Midvale Steel Company, where, while working on machine lathes, he tried to understand the labor process from the shop floor.

…

From the 1970s onward, “many corporate managers…were only too eager to impose new technologies and development methodologies that promised to eliminate what they saw as a dangerous dependency on programmer labor,” while workers did not create the institutions or structures like labor unions that other professions had.56 In the context of software development, Philip Kraft has argued that workers were undergoing a process to “break down, simplify, routinise, and standardise” their work in order for it to be completed by “machines rather than people.”57 This claim, made almost forty years ago, explains the ongoing attempts of capital to reduce its reliance on labor in the digital field by driving down the average level of skill required. Similarly, Joan Greenbaum argues that the “design of information systems today is built on a base of previous divisions of labor” inspired by Taylor’s scientific management theory.58 The application of Taylorism, or at least the standardization of software development in videogames, has involved large-scale investment of capital and intensive division of labor. Within this process, “the creative role of designers and developers faces off against the economic imperatives of efficient production for a competitive market, reflected in the demands of publishers and console manufacturers and embodied in technology.”59 Most videogames are not made from scratch.

…

Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community in the Service of Capital: Community Managers in the Digital Games Industry,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 32, no. 3 (2015): 190. 36Kerr and Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community,” 190. 37Kerr and Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community,” 190. 38Kerr and Kelleher, “The Recruitment of Passion and Community,” 191. 39Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 5. 40Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 77. 41Pun Ngai, Labour in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2016). 42Bernard Girard, The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It (San Francisco: No Starch Press, 2009). 43Johanna Weststar, Victoria O’Meara, and Marie-Josée Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” International Game Developers Association, 2018, 22. 44Weststar, O’Meara, and Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” 19. 45Weststar, O’Meara, and Legault, “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2017 Summary Report,” 32. 46Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 27. 47Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, xxix. 48Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 17. 49Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967), 36. 50Romano Alquati, Sulla FIAT e altri scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975), 51. Quoted in Devi Sacchetto, Emiliana Armano, and Steve Wright, “Coresearch and Counter-Research: Romano Alquati’s Itinerary Within and Beyond Italian Radical Political Thought,” Viewpoint, September 27, 2013, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/coresearch-and-counter-research-romano-alquatis-itinerary-within-and-beyond-italian-radical-political-thought. 51Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 27. 52Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, 27. 53Nathan Ensmenger and William Aspray, “Software as Labor Process,” in History of Computing: Software Issues – International Conference on the History of Computing, eds.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Authors Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel discuss the age of the Utopia Victoriana in Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 759. The other great influence on Vail’s time was Frederick Taylor—his theories of scientific management and the concept of the “one right way.” The classic is Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911); see, generally, Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988). 5. See Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph for 1910, 36; and “Public Utilities and Public Policy,” Atlantic Monthly (1913): 309.

…

He came to power in an era that worshipped size and speed (the Titanic being among the less successful exemplars of this ideal), and in which there prevailed a strong belief in both human perfectibility and the unique optimal design of any system. It was the last decades of Utopia Victoriana, an era of faith in technological planning, applied science, and social conditioning that had seen the rise of eugenics, Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” socialism, and Darwinism, to name but a few disparate systematizing strains of thought. In those times, to believe in man’s ability to perfect communications was far from a fantastical notion. In a sense, Vail’s extension of social thinking to industry was of a piece with Henry Ford’s assembly lines, his vision of a communications empire of a piece, too, with the British Empire, on which the sun never set.4 Vail’s dream of a perfected, centralized industry was predicated on another contemporary notion as well.

…

No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organically for centuries. These thinkers were speaking up against a moribund belief in human perfectibility, or scientific management theorist Frederick Taylor’s the “one right way.”13 Cities, like markets, had an inscrutable, idiosyncratic logic not easily grasped by the human mind but deserving of respect. It was beginning to seem that the same might be true of information systems. While its design had been born of necessity, through the 1970s and early 1980s the Internet’s developers began to see a virtue in it.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

It can also measure how well they’re talking to them—by recording things like how often they make hand gestures and nod, and the energy level in their voice.” Other companies are developing Google Glass-style “smart glasses” to accomplish similar things. A little more than a century ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced scientific management to American factories. By tracking and measuring the activities of workers as they went about their work, Taylor believed, companies could determine the most efficient possible routine for any job and then enforce that routine on all workers. Through the systematic collection of data, industry could be optimized, operated as a perfectly calibrated machine.

…

Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

…

., 329–30 pop culture, fact-mongering in, 58–62 pop music, 44–45, 63–64, 224 copying technologies for, 121–26 dead idols of, 126 industrialization of, 208–9 as retrospective and revivalist, 292–95 positivism, 211 Potter, Dean, 341–42 power looms, 178 Presley, Elvis, 11, 126 Prim Revolution, 26 Principles of Psychology (James), 203 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 238 printing press: consequences of, 102–3, 234, 240–41, 271 development of, 53, 286–87 privacy: devaluation of, 258 from electronic surveillance, 52 family cohesion vs., 229 free flow of information vs. right to, 190–94 internet threat to, 184, 255–59, 265, 285 safeguarding of, 258–59, 283 vanity vs., 107 proactive cognitive control, 96 Prochnik, George, 243–46 “Productivity Future Vision (2011),” 108–9 Project Gutenberg, 278 prosperity, technologies of, 118, 119–20 prosumerism, 64 protest movements, 61 Proust and the Squid (Wolf), 234 proximal clues, 303 public-domain books, 277–78 “public library,” debate over use of term, 272–74 punch-card tabulator, 188 punk music, 63–64 Quantified Self Global Conference, 163 Quantified Self (QS) movement, 163–65 Quarter-of-a-Second Rule, 205 racecars, 195, 196 radio: in education, 134 evolution of, 77, 79, 159, 288 as music medium, 45, 121–22, 207 political use of, 315–16, 317, 319 Radosh, Daniel, 71 Rapp, Jen, 341–42 reactive cognitive control, 96 Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, 91 reading: brain function in, 247–54, 289–90 and invention of paper, 286–87 monitoring of, 257 video gaming vs., 261–62 see also books reading skills, changes in, 232–34, 240–41 Read Write Web (blog), 30 Reagan, Ronald, 315 real world: digital media intrusion in, 127–30 perceived as boring and ugly, 157–58 as source of knowledge, 313 virtual world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30, 303–4 reconstructive surgery, 239 record albums: copying of, 121–22 jackets for, 122, 224 technology of, 41–46 Redding, Otis, 126 Red Light Center, 39 Reichelt, Franz, 341 Reid, Rob, 122–25 relativists, 20 religion: internet perceived as, 3–4, 238 for McLuhan, 105 technology viewed as, xvi–xvii Republic of Letters, 271 reputations, tarnishing of, 47–48, 190–94 Resident Evil, 260–61 resource sharing, 148–49 resurrection, 69–70, 126 retinal implants, 332 Retromania (Reynolds), 217, 292–95 Reuters, Adam, 26 Reuters’ SL bureau, 26 revivification machine, 69–70 Reynolds, Simon, 217–18, 292–95 Rice, Isaac, 244 Rice, Julia Barnett, 243–44 Richards, Keith, 42 “right to be forgotten” lawsuit, 190–94 Ritalin, 304 robots: control of, 303 creepy quality of, 108 human beings compared to, 242 human beings replaced by, 112, 174, 176, 195, 197, 306–7, 310 limitations of, 323 predictions about, xvii, 177, 331 replaced by humans, 323 threat from, 226, 309 Rogers, Roo, 83–84 Rolling Stones, 42–43 Roosevelt, Franklin, 315 Rosen, Nick, 52 Rubio, Marco, 314 Rumsey, Abby Smith, 325–27 Ryan, Amy, 273 Sandel, Michael J., 340 Sanders, Bernie, 314, 316 Sansom, Ian, 287 Savage, Jon, 63 scatology, 147 Schachter, Joshua, 195 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 229 Schmidt, Eric, 13, 16, 238, 239, 257, 284 Schneier, Bruce, 258–59 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 218 science fiction, 106, 115, 116, 150, 309, 335 scientific management, 164–65, 237–38 Scrapbook in American Life, The, 185 scrapbooks, social media compared to, 185–86 “Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts” (Katriel and Farrell), 186 scythes, 302, 304–6 search-engine-optimization (SEO), 47–48 search engines: allusions sought through, 86 blogging, 66–67 in centralization of internet, 66–69 changing use of, 284 customizing by, 264–66 erroneous or outdated stories revived by, 47–48, 190–94 in filtering, 91 placement of results by, 47–48, 68 searching vs., 144–46 targeting information through, 13–14 writing tailored to, 89 see also Google searching, ontological connotations of, 144–46 Seasteading Institute, 172 Second Life, 25–27 second nature, 179 self, technologies of the, 118, 119–20 self-actualization, 120, 340 monitoring and quantification of, 163–65 selfies, 224 self-knowledge, 297–99 self-reconstruction, 339 self-tracking, 163–65 Selinger, Evan, 153 serendipity, internet as engine of, 12–15 SETI@Home, 149 sexbots, 55 Sex Pistols, 63 sex-reassignment procedures, 337–38 sexuality, 10–11 virtual, 39 Shakur, Tupac, 126 sharecropping, as metaphor for social media, 30–31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88 Shirky, Clay, 59–61, 90, 241 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 265 Shuster, Brian, 39 sickles, 302 silence, 246 Silicon Valley: American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 171–73, 181, 241, 257, 309 commercial interests of, 162, 172, 214–15 informality eschewed by, 197–98, 215 wealthy lifestyle of, 16–17, 195 Simonite, Tom, 136–37 simulation, see virtual world Singer, Peter, 267 Singularity, Singularitarians, 69, 147 sitcoms, 59 situational overload, 90–92 skimming, 233 “Slaves to the Smartphone,” 308–9 Slee, Tom, 61, 84 SLExchange, 26 slot machines, 218–19 smart bra, 168–69 smartphones, xix, 82, 136, 145, 150, 158, 168, 170, 183–84, 219, 274, 283, 287, 308–9, 315 Smith, Adam, 175, 177 Smith, William, 204 Snapchat, 166, 205, 225, 316 social activism, 61–62 social media, 224 biases reinforced by, 319–20 as deceptively reflective, 138–39 documenting one’s children on, 74–75 economic value of content on, 20–21, 53–54, 132 emotionalism of, 316–17 evolution of, xvi language altered by, 215 loom as metaphor for, 178 maintaining one’s microcelebrity on, 166–67 paradox of, 35–36, 159 personal information collected and monitored through, 257 politics transformed by, 314–20 scrapbooks compared to, 185–86 self-validation through, 36, 73 traditional media slow to adapt to, 316–19 as ubiquitous, 205 see also specific sites social organization, technologies of, 118, 119 Social Physics (Pentland), 213 Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, 243–44 sociology, technology and, 210–13 Socrates, 240 software: autonomous, 187–89 smart, 112–13 solitude, media intrusion on, 127–30, 253 Songza, 207 Sontag, Susan, xx SoundCloud, 217 sound-management devices, 245 soundscapes, 244–45 space travel, 115, 172 spam, 92 Sparrow, Betsy, 98 Special Operations Command, U.S., 332 speech recognition, 137 spermatic, as term applied to reading, 247, 248, 250, 254 Spinoza, Baruch, 300–301 Spotify, 293, 314 “Sprite Sips” (app), 54 Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 240–41 Srinivasan, Balaji, 172 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 68 Starr, Karla, 217–18 Star Trek, 26, 32, 313 Stengel, Rick, 28 Stephenson, Neal, 116 Sterling, Bruce, 113 Stevens, Wallace, 158 Street View, 137, 283 Stroop test, 98–99 Strummer, Joe, 63–64 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), xxiii Such Stuff as Dreams (Oatley), 248–49 suicide rate, 304 Sullenberger, Sully, 322 Sullivan, Andrew, xvi Sun Microsystems, 257 “surf cams,” 56–57 surfing, internet, 14–15 surveillance, 52, 163–65, 188–89 surveillance-personalization loop, 157 survival, technologies of, 118, 119 Swing, Edward, 95 Talking Heads, 136 talk radio, 319 Tan, Chade-Meng, 162 Tapscott, Don, 84 tattoos, 336–37, 340 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 164, 237–38 Taylorism, 164, 238 Tebbel, John, 275 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 138, 235 technology: agricultural, 305–6 American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 174–77, 214–15, 229–30, 296–313, 329–42 apparatus vs. artifact in, 216–19 brain function affected by, 231–42 duality of, 240–41 election campaigns transformed by, 314–20 ethical hazards of, 304–11 evanescence and obsolescence of, 327 human aspiration and, 329–42 human beings eclipsed by, 108–9 language of, 201–2, 214–15 limits of, 341–42 master-slave metaphor for, 307–9 military, 331–32 need for critical thinking about, 311–13 opt-in society run by, 172–73 progress in, 77–78, 188–89, 229–30 risks of, 341–42 sociology and, 210–13 time perception affected by, 203–6 as tool of knowledge and perception, 299–304 as transcendent, 179–80 Technorati, 66 telegrams, 79 telegraph, Twitter compared to, 34 telephones, 103–4, 159, 288 television: age of, 60–62, 79, 93, 233 and attention disorders, 95 in education, 134 Facebook ads on, 155–56 introduction of, 103–4, 159, 288 news coverage on, 318 paying for, 224 political use of, 315–16, 317 technological adaptation of, 237 viewing habits for, 80–81 Teller, Astro, 195 textbooks, 290 texting, 34, 73, 75, 154, 186, 196, 205, 233 Thackeray, William, 318 “theory of mind,” 251–52 Thiel, Peter, 116–17, 172, 310 “Things That Connect Us, The” (ad campaign), 155–58 30 Days of Night (film), 50 Thompson, Clive, 232 thought-sharing, 214–15 “Three Princes of Serendip, The,” 12 Thurston, Baratunde, 153–54 time: memory vs., 226 perception of, 203–6 Time, covers of, 28 Time Machine, The (Wells), 114 tools: blurred line between users and, 333 ethical choice and, 305 gaining knowledge and perception through, 299–304 hand vs. computer, 306 Home and Away blurred by, 159 human agency removed from, 77 innovation in, 118 media vs., 226 slave metaphor for, 307–8 symbiosis with, 101 Tosh, Peter, 126 Toyota Motor Company, 323 Toyota Prius, 16–17 train disasters, 323–24 transhumanism, 330–40 critics of, 339–40 transparency, downside of, 56–57 transsexuals, 337–38 Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, The (Merton and Barber), 12–13 Trends in Biochemistry (Nightingale and Martin), 335 TripAdvisor, 31 trolls, 315 Trump, Donald, 314–18 “Tuft of Flowers, A” (Frost), 305 tugboats, noise restrictions on, 243–44 Tumblr, 166, 185, 186 Turing, Alan, 236 Turing Test, 55, 137 Twain, Mark, 243 tweets, tweeting, 75, 131, 315, 319 language of, 34–36 theses in form of, 223–26 “tweetstorm,” xvii 20/20, 16 Twilight Saga, The (Meyer), 50 Twitter, 34–36, 64, 91, 119, 166, 186, 197, 205, 223, 224, 257, 284 political use of, 315, 317–20 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 231, 242 Two-Lane Blacktop (film), 203 “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Frost), 247–48 typewriters, writing skills and, 234–35, 237 Uber, 148 Ubisoft, 261 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 102–3, 106 underwearables, 168–69 unemployment: job displacement in, 164–65, 174, 310 in traditional media, 8 universal online library, 267–78 legal, commercial, and political obstacles to, 268–71, 274–78 universe, as memory, 326 Urban Dictionary, 145 utopia, predictions of, xvii–xviii, xx, 4, 108–9, 172–73 Uzanne, Octave, 286–87, 290 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 277 vampires, internet giants compared to, 50–51 Vampires (game), 50 Vanguardia, La, 190–91 Van Kekerix, Marvin, 134 vice, virtual, 39–40 video games, 223, 245, 303 as addictive, 260–61 cognitive effects of, 93–97 crafting of, 261–62 violent, 260–62 videos, viewing of, 80–81 virtual child, tips for raising a, 73–75 virtual world, xviii commercial aspects of, 26–27 conflict enacted in, 25–27 language of, 201–2 “playlaborers” of, 113–14 psychological and physical health affected by, 304 real world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30 as restrictive, 303–4 vice in, 39–40 von Furstenberg, Diane, 131 Wales, Jimmy, 192 Wallerstein, Edward, 43–44 Wall Street, automation of, 187–88 Wall Street Journal, 8, 16, 86, 122, 163, 333 Walpole, Horace, 12 Walters, Barbara, 16 Ward, Adrian, 200 Warhol, Andy, 72 Warren, Earl, 255, 257 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 86, 87 Watson (IBM computer), 147 Wealth of Networks, The (Benkler), xviii “We Are the Web” (Kelly), xxi, 4, 8–9 Web 1.0, 3, 5, 9 Web 2.0, xvi, xvii, xxi, 33, 58 amorality of, 3–9, 10 culturally transformative power of, 28–29 Twitter and, 34–35 “web log,” 21 Wegner, Daniel, 98, 200 Weinberger, David, 41–45, 277 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 236 Wells, H.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

., and Dubner, S. (2005), Freakonomics (London: Allen Lane), 10. 31 Schelling, 116. 32 The argument in this paragraph is heavily influenced by Debra Satz’s discussion of Schelling’s Titanic example. See Satz, 84–9. 7. EVERYONE HAS A PRICE 1 Aitken, Hugh G. J. (1985; first published 1960), Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908–1915 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 2 Quoted in David Montgomery (1989), The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 251. 3 Taylor, F. (1911), Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper), 7. 4 O’Connor, S. ‘Amazon Unpacked’, Financial Times, 8 February 2013. 5 Levitt, S., and Dubner, S. (2005), Freakonomics (London: Allen Lane), 20. 6 Hayek (1956), Collectivist Economic Planning (London: Routledge), 4. 7 See R.

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But it is hardly surprising that businesses cheat when a licence for bad behaviour is so easy to find: simply combine Becker’s inability to understand that crime is morally wrong with Friedman’s insistence that the only responsibility of business is to maximize profit. How many more business leaders, politicians and others in positions of power have excuses from economic imperialists being whispered in their ears? 7 Everyone Has a Price In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, an aristocratic Philadelphian, published The Principles of Scientific Management. Later dubbed ‘the Isaac Newton of the science of work’ by 1970s management guru Peter Drucker, Taylor was arguably the world’s first management consultant. His book paved the way for what are now mainstream management techniques to improve worker efficiency. But Taylorism, as it became known, had a shaky start.

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One result of this was the US government’s ban on the use of the stopwatch to monitor workers in army workshops – to modern eyes, an astonishing political intervention. At the time, though, both supporters and critics of Taylorism saw it as a political and moral project, so the direct involvement of politicians would have surprised no one. Taylor did not see his ‘scientific management’ as morally neutral or apolitical. He argued that workers were simpletons whose behaviour had to be controlled by managers with superior intelligence. As Taylor explained to the Congressional committee: ‘I can say, without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.’2 The Congressional investigation concluded that Taylorism had a dehumanizing effect on workers.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

To bridge the gap between Foucault and Uber, we need to go back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the godfather of “scientific management.” In 1881, Taylor sought to pierce the mystery of why some factory workers were faster than others by timing their every motion and measuring their exact output.34 Armed with this knowledge, he would devise the “one best way” to accomplish their task, then extrapolate the maximum theoretical output per worker. That maximum output would become the target for all workers and the basis for their compensation. His theory was so influential around the world, it became known as Taylorism. Workers hated Taylorism, and they had good reason to.35 Scientific management was anything but scientific, frequently relying on incomplete and biased measurements whose errors were magnified by spurious methods of extrapolation.

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In early 2020, the City A.M. newspaper reported that Barclays introduced a pilot of Sapience’s computer surveillance system in the investment banking division of their London headquarters.45 The fully automated system monitored employees’ computers in real time, instructing perceived slackers to spend more time “in the Zone” and “mute the phone, disable email/chat pop-ups, avoid breaks for 20+ minutes, 2–3 times a day.” Drawing a direct link to Taylorism, Sapience claims it has “the most cost effective and accurate way of doing time and motion studies,” time and motion studies being a scientific management technique related to Taylor’s work with stopwatch timers, as well as Lillian and Frank Gilbreth’s practice of filming workers’ motions to examine and improve repetitive physical work.46 Instead of filming workers’ movements, Sapience collects metadata about their computer activities, such as the websites they visit, their time on websites, and their use of corporate software.

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Res. 90… [Oct. 4, 1911–Feb. 12, 1912] (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1912), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002007191. 38. “The Stopwatch and the Chronograph Part 1,” Seiko Museum Ginza, accessed November 26, 2021, https://museum.seiko.co.jp/en/knowledge/story_06. 39. Jennifer deWinter et al., “Taylorism 2.0: Gamification, Scientific Management and the Capitalist Appropriation of Play,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 6, no. 2 (June 2014): 109–127, https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw.6.2.109_1; “Digital Taylorism,” Schumpeter, Economist, September 10, 2015, www.economist.com/business/2015/09/10/digital-taylorism. 40. “Working as a Call Center Supervisor,” Dialpad Help Center, Dialpad, accessed November 26, 2021, https://help.dialpad.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005100283-Working-as-a-Call-Center-Supervisor. 41.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes.49 By 1918, with 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 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 attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin.

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The paradox is largely resolved, I believe, if we consider the "efficiencies" of the plantation as a unit of taxation (both taxes on profits and various export levies), of labor discipline and surveillance, and of political control. Take, for example, rubber production in colonial Malaya. At the beginning of the rubber boom in 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 systematically favoring rubber estates at some considerable cost to the overall economy of the colony. The infamous Stevenson scheme in Malaya during the worldwide depression was a particularly blatant attempt to preserve the failing estate sector of the rubber industry by limiting smallholder production.

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The crucial advantage of the factory, from the boss's point of view, was that he could more directly fix the hours and the intensity of the work and control the raw materials.77 To the degree that efficient production could still be organized on an artisanal basis (such as early woolen manufacturing and silk ribbon weaving, according to Marglin), to that degree was it difficult for the capitalist to appropriate the profits of a dispersed craft population. The genius of modern mass-production methods, Frederick 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 of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae.... Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the law of science.""

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Amazon today uses similar technology in its factories, where ‘fulfilment associates’ (a.k.a. product pickers) are issued with handheld computers which record how fast they complete individual orders. Taylor’s ideas of scientific management didn’t only favour employers. He strongly believed that the ability to measure work should also go hand-in-hand with incentivised remuneration, so that a low-performing employee with poor productivity does not make as much as a higher-performing one. All this makes perfect sense in theory, but critics point to the fact that scientific management also reduces autonomy, penalises the old, weak or disabled, and, in an ironic twist given the topic of Artificial Intelligence, treats men like machines.

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The research firm CDW Healthcare has reported that wearable technology could reduce hospital costs by as much as 16 per cent over the course of a five-year period. But with this comes the threat of a more Orwellian society. In particular, it is reminiscent of ‘Taylorism’, an early twentieth-century movement pioneered by the engineer Frederick Taylor. In Taylor’s influential 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, he laid out his beliefs that the purpose of human work and thought should be increased efficiency. Taylor carried out studies designed to teach employers about how to measure the previously unmeasurable to increase their profits. For instance, in his ‘science of shovelling’ experiment, Taylor determined that the optimal amount of weight a worker should lift with a shovel was precisely 21 pounds.

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Cal Newport, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Glass-Steagall Act, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, Naomi Klein, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, power law, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, single-payer health, social intelligence, statistical model, uranium enrichment

Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism. A related ideology was lauded by Business Week in the early 1980s as the “New Industrial Relations.”16 It was touted as a new form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer” than the earlier “scientific management” and social engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick Taylor.17 Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and “quality circles.”

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Peer pressure--from a worker’s own team-- formed a strong disincentive for anyone to report a job-related injury to avoid having to wear the arm band. González in Brave New Workplace described a long and double-edged history of attempts to reconcile workers’ interests with those of corporations. It dated back to the “scientific management” methods of Frederick Taylor, who, in the name of efficiency, “‘streamlined’ assembly plants by conducting time-motion studies of each worker, breaking down each movement into a number of discrete steps, and then reorganizing them in a more efficient sequence by eliminating all unnecessary movements.”26 This dehumanization led Taylor’s disciples to take another approach.

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Rosenthal, Joe Roth, Joseph Roth, Philip Rover (company) Rubin, Robert Rumsfeld, Donald Ruskin, John Russert, Tim Rwanda Sadism Salon.com Sam (FedEx Kinko’s trainee) San Jose State University Sands of Iwo Jima (movie) Satan Saul, John Ralston Savio, Mario Scheer, Robert Schumpeter, Joseph Schwartz, Charles Scientific management Second World War Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence Self-help books and specialists Seligman, Martin Senate Intelligence Committee September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks 700 Club (television show) Sex and the City (television show) Shadow Statistics Shetty, Shilpa Shopping Siegel, Bugsy Simon, Bob Simon, Scott Simpson, O.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

For all its hiding behind the image of soft “servant leadership” the real thing an entity such as Google’s People Analytics group returns to prominence is the concept of “Taylorism.” Created in the early 20th century by engineer Frederick Taylor, the ideas behind Taylorism were outlined in a 1911 book called The Principles of Scientific Management.28 At the center of Taylor’s beliefs was the idea that the goal of human labor and thought should be increased efficiency; that technical calculation is always superior to human judgment; that subjectivity represents a dumbing-down of clear-thinking objectivity; and that whatever is unable to be quantified either does not exist or has no value.

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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 27 Manjoo, Farhad. “The Happiness Machine.” Slate, January 21, 2013. slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/google_people_operations_the_secrets_of_the_world_s_most_scientific_human.html. 28 Taylor, Frederick. The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967, 1947). 29 Hogge, Becky. Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia (Saffron Walden, UK: Barefoot, 2011). 30 O’Connor, Sarah. “Amazon’s Human Robots: They Trek 15 Miles a Day Around a Warehouse, Their Every Move Dictated by Computers Checking Their Work.

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(Comte) 114 PlentyOfFish 81 police, see law and law enforcement Pollock, Jackson 185 Poole, Steven 55 Popenoe, Paul 72 Popular Press, 1833–1865, The 177 Posner, Richard 155–56, 158–60, 168, 169 Poupyrev, Ivan 181 Poverty of Philosophy, The (Marx) 137n “precogs” 118 see also law and law enforcement predictive behavioral routing 22–23 “Predictive Policing” (McCue, Beck) 107 see also law and law enforcement PredPol 113 Present Shock (Rushkoff) 195 Principles of Psychology, The (James) 17 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor) 42 Process Communication 22–24 Proust, Marcel 83 psychic energy 100–101 Punin, Nikolai 178 Pygmalion (Shaw) 102 Quantcast 18–20, 55, 107 Quantified Self movement 12–16 Queenan, Joe 167 Quetelet, Adolphe 114–18 Quora 30 “Race Against the Machine” (McAfee, Brynjolfsson) 217 Radin, Max 157 Raiders of the Lost Ark 161 Ramsay, Stephen 182–83, 187 RealCog 120 see also law and law enforcement reductio ad absurdum 37 Reiser, Stanley 142 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 202 Rifkin, Jeremy 217 riots, UK (2011) 113 robo-cizing the world 13–15 Rochberg-Halton, Eugene 100 “Role of the Judge in the Twenty-First Century, The” (Posner) 156–57 Roth, Eric 167 Rothko, Mark 201 Rowling, J.

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

British Empire, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Dava Sobel, digital divide, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Silicon Valley, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair

Sociology and psychology fragmented time into investigative frames, showing, through microanalysis, the irrational to be familiar, and the “normal” to be nothing less than bizarre. Individuals learned they were strangers to their own motivations; societies were seen as structured around prejudice, superstition, and irrationality. In American factories, Frederick W. Taylor introduced “scientific management,” using the stopwatch instead of a stop-action camera to reduce the “natural” habits of laboring men and women to microanalyzable segments, with an aim toward improving productivity by replacing natural routine with rational efficiency. In painting, the impressionists broke with the careful perspective and shadowing of the Salon, the calculated posing and anecdotal portraiture, favoring instead bright shards of pure, unmodulated color, the painterly equivalent of stop-action.

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Technical inventions such as Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch and the high-speed camera demonstrated our inherent physical frailty, our unconscious reliance on habit, and our physiological capacity for self-deception. Those vulnerabilities foretold the intellectual enterprise of the new social sciences—sociology, anthropology, scientific management, political science, psychology. For the most part, the social sciences brought unwelcome news: we’re less in control than we thought we were; less free, less virtuous, less enlightened. They also broke down the apparently natural continuity of observed human activity and interaction into discrete stills, stopped-time frames that would, ideally, yield up a clearer picture and deeper understanding of our unconscious motives.

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New York: Viking Press, 1940. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Morris, Richard. Time’s Arrows: Scientific Attitudes Toward Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Nelson, Daniel. Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Newcomb, Simon, and Holden, Edward S. Astronomy for High Schools and Colleges. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1881. North, J. D. The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology. New York: Dover Books, 1965. ____. Stonehenge: Neolithic Man and the Cosmos.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Direct contact between consumers and workers may occur, of course, but the fact that you order your food from a waiter does not make that waiter an inde- pendent entrepreneur. 6. Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Harper & Brothers 1919). 7. TaskRabbit, ‘Summer tasks’, http://www.taskrabbit.co.uk/m/summer-tasks, archived at https://perma.cc/49G5-3TPP; ‘Digital Taylorism’, The Economist (10 September 2015), http://www.economist.com/news/business/21664190- modern-version-scientific-management-threatens-dehumanise-workplace- digital, archived at https://perma.cc/97U5-FGBF 8. TaskRabbit, ‘Terms of service’, Introduction and clause 1, http://www.taskrab- bit.co.uk/terms, archived at https://perma.cc/WX39-9PJE 9.

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In consequence, for a large number of workers, the reality of life as a Tasker, Driver-Partner, or Turker is more reminiscent of Victorian labourers’ daily grind than the glam- our of Silicon Valley: long hours for low wages, constant insecurity, and little legal protection—with no chance of a future upside. Life as a Micro-Entrepreneur Frederick Taylor’s 1911 Principles of Scientific Management promised to improve the efficiency of businesses across the world by means of close monitoring of workers, an emphasis on rigid control over discreet tasks, and ever- changing adjustment of pay structures in response to individual output.6 In reality, this translated into long dull hours under strict control and little pay, dehumanizing workers as drones on long assembly lines.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

If financial incentives do not motivate us personally, why would we think they motivate others? I now believe financial incentives are: Outdated Misguided Potentially dangerous and poisonous Hard to get right in any event Let me elaborate. Financial incentives are outdated as they were designed for a different type of work Frederick Taylor based his approach of scientific management on the premise that, as work was a tedious and unenjoyable means to an end (see chapter 2), the only way to motivate an otherwise unmotivated workforce was money. Indeed, the narrowing of focus that incentives bring about, though terrible for innovation and lateral thinking, helps speed up simple tasks.

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It may be tempting in the short term, but you keep shouldering more weight, which will crush you. If Maurice got involved at the district level, he would be doing the regional managers’ job on their behalf. Instead, he had to let them stand on their own feet. This was a long way from the scientific management and strategic planning approach I had been schooled in, which former secretary of defense Robert McNamara exemplified. The approach was to plan, organize, direct, and control, based on the idea that management could be a pure science. A small team of smart people at the top, informed by data and statistical analysis, decided on a rational plan, which then trickled down.

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., 79 Ritter, Kurt, 199 role modeling, 141 ROWE (results only work environment), 176–177 Sacilor, 213 safety, environment of, 150–151, 153–154, 193, 227–228 Saksena, Asheesh, 197–199 Salesforce, 54, 89–90 Samsung Electronics, 86–87, 196 Samuel (Father), 37–39, 41, 47 Scarlett, Kamy, 144, 147–148, 152, 153, 190 Schmidt, Chris, 184–185, 186 Schulze, Dick, 1–2, 102–104, 110, 123–125 scientific management, 127, 168 Sears, 58 service customer, 14–15, 21, 31, 34 leader’s clarity of goals for, 224–226 purpose tied to, 6, 30–31, 51, 67–68, 69, 75, 242n14 work as opportunity for, 27–28, 238n7 SFR, 57 shareholders business connection to, 68 calls for action for, 235 environmental and social issue importance to, 60–61, 241nn11–12 expectations for businesses, 4 positive environment creation for, 114–115 responsible investments of, 241n11 rewarding, 91–92 shareholder value, 6, 51, 54–62, 63–65, 74, 192 transparency with, 115–116 shareholder value Best Buy’s, 58–59, 61, 192 dangers of singular focus on, 57–59 employee engagement and, 61–62 healthy approach to, 62 maximization of, fallacy of business purpose as, 6, 51, 54–62, 63–65 as misleading measure of economic performance, 56–57 purposeful and human approach improving, 74 scandals due to excessive focus on, 59 stakeholders antagonized by singular focus on, 59–61 Sheth, Jag, 73 Shin, J.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Some of this is inherent in the changing nature of business itself. It was Frederick Winslow Taylor who laid the groundwork for the twentieth-century view of “scientific management.” Work could be broken into individual components, he argued, and workers could be given a task to complete. Strategy was conceived at the top of the organization, and orders cascaded down the hierarchy. As my Fortune colleague Geoffrey Colvin put it, scientific management was all about making humans act more like machines. Each was a cog in the great wheel. But the source of value has shifted from machines to people. The flow of information has moved from hierarchical to omnidirectional.

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The path to bankruptcy is littered with retailers like Sears and others that focused more on short-term profits than on investing in talent and better serving customers. My central message in this book is that a new age of business requires the new approach to leadership exemplified by Joly. Joly puts Milton Friedman, who articulated the doctrine of shareholder primacy, and Robert McNamara, who instituted scientific management at Ford, at the top of his “FBI most wanted” list. “This is what got us in trouble. So much of what I learned in business school is either wrong, dated, or at best incomplete.” The new model, he said, requires leaders who can create “an environment that unleashes human magic, rather than pretend they can come up with all the answers.”

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

The new brands established predictable pricing of products and standardized product quality, transforming consumption into a rational process that guaranteed uniformity across national markets. The rationalization of production and distribution of products required a rationalization of the workforce itself. Frederick Taylor became the first management expert. His theory of scientific management was designed to recast the persona of the worker to comport with the operational standards that were used to maintain new, centralized, corporate bureaucracies. Taylor used efficiency principles already developed by engineers and applied them to workers with the expectation of turning them into living machines, whose performance could be optimized, much like the continuous production processes churning out standardized products.

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He wrote: The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. . . . [T]his task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.8 The principles of scientific management quickly crossed over from the factory floor and commercial offices into the home and community, making efficiency the cardinal temporal value of the new industrial age. Henceforth, maximizing output with the minimum input of time, labor, and capital became the sine qua non for directing virtually every aspect of life in contemporary society.

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Knowledge, according to Bruffee and other educational reformers, is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a learning community.17 If knowledge is something that exists between people and comes out of their shared experiences, then the way our educational process is set up is inimical to deep learning. Our schooling is often little more than a stimulus-response process, a robotic affair in which students are programmed to respond to the instructions fed into them—much like the standard operating procedures of scientific management that created the workers of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. Peer-to-peer learning shifts the focus from the lone self to the interdependent group. Learning ceases to be an isolated experience between an authority figure and student and is transformed into a community experience.18 Students are dividing up into small working groups and tasked with specific assignments.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

By contrast, data-driven logistics, built on infrastructures of connection and fueled by artificial intelligence, convert all aspects of production—far beyond the factory walls and in every corner and moment of a transnational supply chain—into a managed assembly line. The new infrastructure of data processing that sustains data relations extends so-called scientific management in ways that recall classic diagnoses of industrial capitalism: “The image of the process, removed from production to a separate location and a separate group, controls the process itself.”69 Through data, capitalism begins to govern the whole social domain with management logic, another aspect of its annexation of human life.

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Polanyi (Great Transformation, 78–79) had a similar formulation when he analyzed industrial capitalism in terms of “fictional commodities”: the transformation of work into “labor,” land into “real estate,” and exchange into “money.” Building on Polanyi, Zuboff (“Big Other,” 84) argues that “reality” is now being turned into tracked “behaviour.” 67. The Economist, “Data Is Giving Rise to a New Economy,” May 6, 2017. 68. We are condensing here the three principles of “scientific management” in Braverman, Labor, 78–82. 69. Braverman, Labor, 87. 70. Capitalism here aims at the state in which, as Marx (Capital, vol. I, 952) put it, “All the means of labour . . . now also serve as ingredients in the valorization process. Where they are not converted into actual money, they are converted into accounting money.”

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Pomeranz argues that “slavery helped make Euro-American trade unlike any between Old World cores and peripheries” (267) by making “the flow of needed resources to Europe self-catalyzing in ways that consensual trade between Old World regions was not: it anticipated, even before industrialization, the self-perpetuating division of labor between primary products exporters and manufacturing regions in the modern world” (24). 17. Tomich and Zeuske, “Second Slavery,” 91. 18. Baptist, “Political Economy,” 40. 19. Rosenthal, “Slavery’s Scientific Management”; and Baptist, “Political Economy.” 20. Tomich and Zeuske, “Second Slavery.” 21. Shilliam, “Redemptive Political Economy,” 51. 22. Bartley, “Hidden Costs of Computing.” 23. Qiu, iSlave, 11. 24. Beckert and Rockman, Slavery’s Capitalism, 1. 25. Sa’di, “Colonialism and Surveillance,” 151. 26.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Bundy’s invention represented an early move towards a more scientific, regulated, empirical system of people management. Since Bundy’s time – he died in 1907 – methods of managing employees became progressively more sophisticated. Methods like Bundy’s would be applied systematically across industries. The tipping point was the rise of scientific management, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Like Mark Zuckerberg more than a century later, Taylor attended the prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy before attending – and dropping out of – Harvard. He went on to work in a machine shop in the steel industry at the age of 19. During his experiences on the shop floor, he noted that workers soldiered at a ‘slow easy gait’ because of a ‘natural laziness’.

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This system of management works like Taylorism on steroids – with all the dehumanising downsides but without the commensurate high pay or job stability. One Amazon worker’s claim, reported in The Guardian, that the company leaders ‘care more about the robots than they care about the employees’ encapsulates one of the oldest criticisms of scientific management.73 Except, this time round, workers don’t have the collective bargaining power they once did. In the ultra-Taylorist companies of the twenty-first century, the power balance is skewed heavily in the favour of bosses. Amazon automatically fires about 10 per cent of its factory staff annually, for not being able to move packages through the system quickly enough.74 The company’s ‘proprietary productivity metric’, which dictates how quickly workers must process each order, gets our one-day Prime deliveries to us on time.

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Lyft’, Bloomberg Second Measure, 2020 <https://secondmeasure.com/datapoints/rideshare-industry-overview/> [accessed 23 September 2020]. 54 ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 55 Ravi Agrawal, ‘The Hidden Benefits of Uber’, Foreign Policy, 16 July 2018 <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/why-india-gives-uber-5-stars-gig-economy-jobs/> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 56 Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘Gig Economy Research’, Gov.uk, 7 February 2018 <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gig-economy-research> [accessed 21 September 2020]. 57 Directorate General for Internal Policies, The Social Protection of Workers in the Platform Economy, Study for the EMPL Committee, IP/A/EMPL/2016-11 (European Parliament, 2017). 58 Nicole Karlis, ‘DoorDash Drivers Make an Average of $1.45 an Hour, Analysis Finds’, Salon, 19 January 2020 <https://www.salon.com/2020/01/19/doordash-drivers-make-an-average-of-145-an-hour-analysis-finds/> [accessed 27 March 2021]. 59 Kate Conger, ‘Uber and Lyft Drivers in California Will Remain Contractors’, New York Times, 4 November 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/technology/california-uber-lyft-prop-22.html> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 60 Mary-Ann Russon, ‘Uber Drivers Are Workers Not Self-Employed, Supreme Court Rules’, BBC News, 19 February 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56123668> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 61 ‘Judgement: Uber BV and Others (Appellants) v Aslam and Others (Respondents)’, 19 February 2021 <https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2019-0029-judgment.pdf> [accessed 19 March 2021]. 62 ‘Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Scientific Management Thinker’, The British Library <https://www.bl.uk/people/frederick-winslow-taylor> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 63 Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), p. 42. 64 Saval, Cubed, p. 56. 65 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese and danah boyd, Workplace Surveillance (Data & Society Research Institute, 4 January 2017) <https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/7ryk4>. 66 ‘In March 2017, the Japanese Government Formulated the Work Style Reform Action Plan.’, Social Innovation, September 2017 <https://social-innovation.hitachi/en/case_studies/ai_happiness/> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 67 Alex Hern, ‘Microsoft Productivity Score Feature Criticised as Workplace Surveillance’, The Guardian, 26 November 2020 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/26/microsoft-productivity-score-feature-criticised-workplace-surveillance> [accessed 1 April 2021]. 68 Stephen Chen, ‘Chinese Surveillance Programme Mines Data from Workers’ Brains’, South China Morning Post, 28 April 2018 <https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2143899/forget-facebook-leak-china-mining-data-directly-workers-brains> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 69 Robert Booth, ‘Unilever Saves on Recruiters by Using AI to Assess Job Interviews’, The Guardian, 25 October 2019 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/25/unilever-saves-on-recruiters-by-using-ai-to-assess-job-interviews> [accessed 6 October 2020]. 70 Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, ‘Workplace Technology: The Employee Experience’ (CIPD: July 2020) <https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/workplace-technology-1_tcm18-80853.pdf> [accessed 19 May 2021]. 71 Sarah O’Connor, ‘When Your Boss Is an Algorithm’, Financial Times, 7 September 2016 <https://www.ft.com/content/88fdc58e-754f-11e6-b60a-de4532d5ea35> [accessed 3 August 2020]. 72 Tom Barratt et al., ‘Algorithms Workers Can’t See Are Increasingly Pulling the Management Strings’, Management Today, 25 August 2020 <http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/article/1692636?

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Steel, Sears Roebuck, General Electric—and nobody knew how to run them. Big universities started founding business schools in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the business schools needed something to teach, so they taught Taylorism. Taylor’s best-known work, The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911 and became the biggest-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Armed with Taylor’s theories, an army of mini Taylors with freshly minted MBAs marched into the corporate world. A century later, the MBA has become the most popular master’s degree in the United States, with universities churning out 185,000 of them each year.

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Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017. Sloan, Alfred P., Jr. My Years with General Motors. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Stewart, Matthew. The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009. Taylor, Frederick W. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006. Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. New York: Currency, 2014. Ton, Zeynep. The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

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Chapter 3: A Very Brief History of Management Science (and Why You Shouldn’t Trust It) Lashinsky, Adam. “How ‘The Lean Startup’ Turned Eric Ries into an Unlikely Corporate Guru.” Fortune, February 22, 2018. http://fortune.com/2018/02/22/lean-startup-eric-ries. Lepore, Jill. “Not So Fast: Scientific Management Started as a Way to Work. How Did It Become a Way of Life?” New Yorker, October 12, 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast. “Poor Man’s Agile: Scrum in 5 Simple Steps.” Hacker News. Last modified March 22, 2013. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406384. “Who Should the Scrum Master Report To?”

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

Given that the dawn of the industrial revolution was in the late 1700s, and if we use 30 as an average age for a new parent (it used to be much lower), we’re living through a nine-times generational shift in lifestyle and economic understanding. This is a significant amount of indoctrination handed down from parents and employers of how things should be done and what works in this world. It’s pretty hard to unlearn all of this, especially when most of it has been proven empirically. We can thank Fredrick W. Taylor and his scientific management techniques2 for the overly rational and logical approach to business. Taylor believed that workers could be regarded as cogs in the overriding industrial machine and that the tasks undertaken by workers could be analysed down to a minute level of movement and time and then designed, iterated and improved for the ultimate in efficiency.

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The technology revolution means that many industrial-era ideas and markets will be leap-frogged by developing economies. Notes 1 http://60secondmarketer.com/blog/2011/10/18/more-mobile-phones-than-toothbrushes and also www.chartsbin.com/view/1881 2 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=HoJMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA3&redir_esc=y CHAPTER 3 The social reality: beyond the surface of social media Social media is only a small part of the change we’re living through; it’s a surface indicator or a symptom of the times. The fact that all of it has been enabled by an omnipresent and ultra-cheap space race in technology tells us much more about why it matters.

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INDEX 3D printing access and accessibility see also barriers; communication; digital; social media — factors of production — knowledge adoption rates advertising see also marketing; mass media; promotion; television Airbnb Alibaba Amazon antifragility Apple artisanal production creativity audience see also crowd — connecting with — vs target Away from Keyboard (AFK) banking see also crowdfunding; currencies barriers Beck (musician) big as a disadvantage bioengineering biomimicry biotechnology bitcoins blogs borrowed interest brand business strategies change see disruption and disruptive change Cluetrain Manifesto co-creation coffee culture Cold War collaboration collaborative consumption collective sentience commerce, future see also retail and retailers communication see also advertising; promotion; social media; social relationships — channels — tools community vs target competition and competitors component retail computers see also connecting and connection; internet; networks; smartphones; social media; software; technology era; 3D printing; web connecting and connection see also social media; social relationships — home/world — machines — people — things consumerism consumption silos content, delivery of coopetition corporations see also industrial era; retail and retailers; technology era costs see also finance; price co-working space creativity crowd, contribution by the crowdfunding cryptocurrencies culture — hacking — startup currencies see also banking deflation demographics device convergence digital see also computers; internet; music; smartphone; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships; technology; web; work — cohorts — era — footprint — revolution — skills — strategy — tools — world disruption and disruptive change DNA as an operating system drones Dunbar's number e-commerce see retail and retailers, online economic development, changing education employment, lifetime see also labour; work ephermalization Facebook see also social media finance, peer to peer see also banking; crowdfunding; currencies Ford, Henry 4Ps Foursquare fragmentation — of cities — industrial — Lego car example gadgets see also computers; smartphone; tools games and gaming behaviour gamification geo-location glass cockpit Global Financial Crisis (GFC) globalisation Google hacking hourglass strategy IFTTT (If this then that) industrialists (capital class) industry, redefining industrial era see also consumerism; marketing; retail and retailers — hacking — life in influencers information-based work infrastructure — changing — declining importance of — legacy innovation intention interest-based groups see also niches interest graphs internet see also access and accessibility; connecting and connection; social media; social relationships; web Internet.org In Real Life (IRL) isolation iTunes see also music Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act (USA) keyboards knowledge economy lab vs factory labour see also work — low-cost language layering legacy — industries — infrastructure — media Lego car project life — in boxes — in gaming future — hack living standards see also life location see place, work making see also artisanal production; retail and retailers; 3D printing malleable marketplace manufacturing see also artisanal production; industrial era; making; product; 3D printing; tools — desktop marketing see also advertising; consumerism; 4Ps; mass media; promotion; retail and retailers — demographics, use in — industrial era — language — mass — metrics — new — post-industrial — predictive — research — target — traditional mass media ; see also advertising; marketing; media; promotion; television — after materialism media see also communication; legacy; mass media; newspapers; niches; television — consumption — hacking — platform vs content — subscription Metcalfe's law MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Moore's law music Napster Netflix netizens networks see also connecting and connection; media; social media; social relationships newspapers see also media niches nodes nondustrial company Oaida, Raul oDesk office, end of the omniconnection era open source parasocial interaction payment systems Pebble phones, number of mobile see also smartphones photography Pinterest piracy place — of work platforms pop culture power-generating technologies price see also costs privacy see also social media; social relationships product — unfinished production see also industrial era; product; 3D printing — mass projecteer Project October Sky promotion see also advertising; marketing; mass media; media quantified self Racovitsa, Vasilii remote controls RepRap 3D printer retail cold spot retail and retailers — changing — digital — direct — hacking — mass — online — price — small — strategies — traditional rewards robots Sans nation state economy scientific management search engines self-hacking self-publishing self-storage sensors sharing see also social media; social relationships smartphones smartwatch social graphs social media (digitally enhanced conversation) see also Facebook; social relationships; Twitter; YouTube social relationships see also social graphs; social media — digital software speed subcultures Super Awesome Micro Project see Lego car project Super Bowl mentality target tastemakers technology see also computers; digital; open source; social media; smartphones; social relationships; software; 3D printing; work — deflation — era — free — revolution — speed — stack teenagers, marketing to television Tesla Motors thingernet thinking and technology times tools see also artisanal production; communication; computers; digital; making; smartphones; social media; 3D printing — changing — old trust Twitter Uber unlearning usability gap user experience volumetric mindset wages — growth — low — minimum web see also connecting and connection; digital; internet; retail and retailers, online; social media; social relationships — three phases of — tools Wikipedia work — digital era — industrial era — location of — options words see language Yahoo YouTube Learn more with practical advice from our experts WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.wiley.com/go/eula to access Wiley’s ebook EULA.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

Once a manufacturer had broken an intricate process into a series of well-defined “simple operations,” it became relatively easy to design a machine to carry out each operation. The division of labor within a factory provided a set of specifications for its machinery. By the early years of the twentieth century, the deskilling of factory workers had become an explicit goal of industry, thanks to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s philosophy of “scientific management.” Believing, in line with Smith, that “the greatest prosperity” would be achieved “only when the work of [companies] is done with the smallest combined expenditure of human effort,” Taylor counseled factory owners to prepare strict instructions for how each employee should use each machine, scripting every movement of the worker’s body and mind.29 The great flaw in traditional ways of working, Taylor believed, was that they granted too much initiative and leeway to individuals.

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Bates, “Clinical Decision Support and the Law: The Big Picture,” Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law and Policy 5 (2012): 319–324. 24.Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (New York: Henry Holt, 2010), 161–162. 25.Lown and Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation?” 26.Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 34–35. 27.Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 840. 28.Ibid., 4. 29.Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1913), 11. 30.Ibid., 36. 31.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 147. 32.Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 307. 33.For a succinct review of the Braverman debate, see Peter Meiksins, “Labor and Monopoly Capital for the 1990s: A Review and Critique of the Labor Process Debate,” Monthly Review, November 1994. 34.James R.

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., 62 robotics, robots, 2, 6, 13, 19–20, 29, 30, 33, 39–41, 118, 153, 156, 219, 225, 227, 257n capabilities of, 8, 9 essence of, 36 ethical questions about, 183–93, 204 killer, 187–93, 198, 204 speed of, 186 Rodriguez, Dayron, 103 Roomba, 185 Royal Air Force, 49 Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), 170–71 Royal Majesty (ship), 68 Rubin, Charles, 186 Russell, Bertrand, 21, 39 Rybczynski, Witold, 142 safety, 46, 53–59, 61, 91, 154, 169, 170, 184, 207 safety alert for operators (SAFO), 1, 170 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 51, 53 Sarter, Nadine, 162 satisfaction, 14, 16, 17, 85, 132 Scerbo, Mark, 91 Schön, Donald, 143, 144 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 179n Schulman, Ari, 133 Schumacher, Patrik, 141 Science, 73, 79, 219 scientific management (Taylorism), 107, 114, 158, 207 scientists, science, 46, 151, 155, 159, 160, 214, 217 scythe, 218–19, 221, 222, 224 search engines, 78–80, 206–7 self, 132, 161, 205–6, 216–17, 220 self-consciousness, jail of, 16 self-fulfillment, 24, 85, 157, 161 self-interest, 59–60 self-renewal, 132 senses, 8, 69, 83, 131, 134, 149–51, 201, 217, 219 sensors, sensing mechanism, 8, 36, 38, 46, 52 Shanghai Tower, 167 Shaw, Rebecca, 43–44 ships, 36–37, 68 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 147–48 Shushwap tribe, 228–29, 232 Silicon Valley, 7, 33, 133, 194, 226, 227 Simons, Daniel, 201 simplicity, 180, 181 Singhal, Amit, 78–79 60 Minutes (TV show), 29 Sketchpad, 138 SketchUp, 146 Skidelsky, Robert, 31–32 Skiles, Jeffrey, 154 skill fade, 58 skills, 80–85, 161, 216–17, 218, 219 degradation of, 106–12, 125–31, 157 see also specific skills skill tunneling, 202 Skinner, B.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

It is a world of inklings, passions, and appetites—wild fits of fury perfectly excusable as expressions of one’s humanity. When British and American landscapers make urban parks resemble rambling nature, it is an unwitting nod to Rousseau’s outlook. The same dichotomy played out in twentieth-century business. Frederick Taylor’s influential theory of scientific management aimed to quantify every aspect of a company’s operations. Managers armed with stopwatches and clipboards paraded the factory floor to ensure productivity. Yet the century ended with the celebrated success of GE’s voluble chief executive Jack Welch, whose business autobiography was aptly subtitled Straight from the Gut.

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See also entries beginning with cognitive adhering to well-honed mental models as default of, 127, 179, 207 agility of mind, 215–218 causality as foundation of, 12 of children, 80–82 counterfactuals as form of evolution of, 93–94 counterfactuals as natural to, 77 creating model of world as main purpose of, 226 defining characteristics of, 211 dimensions of, 13 dissonance of reframing, 140 as essence of humanness, 180 fundamental nature of framing to, 5 homogeneity of, as death of counterfactuals, 207 hyper-rationalists and ultra-emotionalists and uniqueness of, 18 importance of pluralism to, 181 mental models as fundamental to, 5, 11, 25, 26, 208 mental models reduce load on, by focusing, 11–12 mutability and, 106–107 preference for processing efficiently, 110 restrictions on, 175–176 science and understanding, 206 as simulation of reality, 26 social structure’s belief in validity of dominant mental model and, 179 terrrorists’ consistency, 213 human progress, 19–21 Hume, David, 68 hyper-rationalists scientific management theory, 17 technology as answer to problems, 15–16, 69, 210–211 IBM, 182 IKEA, 129–130 imagination advantages and disadvantages of lively, 38 agility of mind and, 218 AI lacks, 119 constraints and, 47, 220 counterfactuals and, 76, 79, 90 enabled by frames, 26, 33 literature and, 82–85 tolerance and, 192–193 values and, 39 immigration, 191–194 implicit knowledge and counterfactuals, 90–91 information, free flow of, 215 “insight problems,” 152 instinct, 16–17, 69 Internet Protocol, 132 inventions, changing frames for, 10 irrationality and humanness, 16 Israel, 97–100, 101, 107, 115 Jobs, Steve, 149, 150–151, 159, 194 Johnson-Laird, Philip, 226 Joy, Bill, 165 Kaepernick, Colin, 6 Kahneman, Daniel, 10, 90 Kamprad, Ingvar, 129 Kaplan, Craig, 152 Kay, Alan, 158–159, 241 Kennedy, John F., 89–90, 234 Kim, W.

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See also alternative realities causality enables comprehension and explainability of, 52, 60 constraints as impacting current, 117–118 frames simplify, 9 human cognition as simulation of, 26 human comprehension of, through analogies, 230 order in, 71 of terrorists, 214 Redd, Dana, 135 reframing characteristics of individuals involved in, 136–137 circumstances surrounding, 140–141 difficulty of repeatedly, 138–139 difficulty of unlearning, 140 efficiently, 129–131, 144 effort demanded by, 139–140 examples of, 123–126, 202–203 failure and, 132–133 frequency of, 11, 143 impacts of inventions on, 10 importance of mental diversity when, 162–163 paradigm shifts and, 10–11 provides new options, 126 by reinvention, 131–132, 220 by repertoire riffling, 13–14, 128–129, 220 by repurposing, 129–131, 203–204, 220 as revolutionary act, 133 as riskier and potentially more rewarding than staying with existing mental models, 209 tendency to coalesce around consensus position when, 164 timing of, 141–142 Regional Advantage (Saxenian), 183 Remarque, Erich Maria, 83–84 The Republic (Plato), 77 responsibility, 64, 65–66 right-wing populists, governance by innate sense of rightness of one’s beliefs, 16 The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida), 192 Rorschach tests, 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 16–17, 80, 132 Sacco, Joe, 135 same-sex marriage campaign (US), 188–190 Sapiens (Harari), 79 SARS, 31, 32 Saxenian, AnnaLee, 183 Schwartz, Peter, 111–113 Science, 163–164 sciences broadening range of frames, 160–161, 241 China versus Europe, 184–185 development of drugs, 2–3 free flow of information and, 215 invention of new frames and physics, 7–8 reframing in, 131–132, 137 tension between mental models in, 160 understanding human cognition and, 206 scientific management theory, 17 scientific method, 67 self-driving cars, 92–93 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 60–61, 62 Seuss, Dr. (Geisel), 101–102, 103 sexual harassment in Hollywood, 23–24 Shklar, Judith, 197–198 Shomron, Dan, 97, 98, 99, 107 Simon, Herbert, 152 simulations, importance of, 115–117 Singapore, 144–145 “singularity,” 15 Smalltalk, 159, 241 social coordination human understanding of need for, 57–58 individual and, 221 as marker apex of our past and elixir of our future, 205–206, 208 social structures agency and, 66 belief in validity of dominant mental models, 179 benefits from pluralism to, 176 Camden, New Jersey, police force, 134–136 constraints as impacting, 117–118 friction resulting from pluralism, 194–195 mutability and, 107 pluralism and survival of, 177–178 rise and fall of, and mental diversity, 183–185 role of “loyal opposition”/court jester, 168–169 tendency toward homophily, 89, 162, 234 solutions advantages of variation when identifying, 166–167, 176 from faulty mental models, 60–61 framing need for efficient, 144 hyper-rationalists’ reliance on technology, 15–16, 69 mental models as means of finding, 4–5, 8, 38–39 Occam’s razor, 108 “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence” (McCarthy), 44 Soviet Union, Lysenkoism, 7 space exploration mental models and, 33–35 mutability principle applied to, 105–106 SpaceX, 105–106, 107 Spielberg, Steven, 111–113 Spotify, 145–146 statisticians and causality, 68 Stern, Johanna, 173–174 stimuli, reacting to, 52 Stockfish program, 18 Strassmann, Fritz, 132–133 “structural holes,” 157 subconscious, development of frames, 8 Süskind, Patrick, 83 Tamir, Noam, 99, 100 Taylor, Frederick, 17 technology.

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

Taking the Pianist Out of the Brothel Before James McKinsey could be successful, he had to clean up the reputation of management as a concept. In The Management Myth, philosophy-student-turned-consultant-turned-author Matthew Stewart’s highly critical look at the history of management thinking, the author argued that it was flawed from the get-go. And he pinned original sin on Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientific management.” Taylor’s famous time-and-motion studies used stopwatch analyses of manual labor with the goal of shaving seconds off rote, repeated activities, thereby enhancing productivity. There was, Taylor argued, just “one best way” to produce anything, and a manager armed with Taylor’s tools could identify it.

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In Stewart’s account, Taylor was a pseudoscientific proselytizer who promoted the spurious notion that “laborers are bodies without minds, managers are minds without bodies.”27 But Taylor’s ideas about improving the efficiency of labor were very popular and influential in his day; in 1911 he published Principles of Scientific Management, an instant hit that was eventually translated into eight languages. In 1914 he attracted 16,000 people to a New York speech on his theories.28 Edwin Gay, who opened the Harvard Business School, was a Taylor disciple. Henry Ford’s line production system was a pure distillation of Taylor’s thinking.

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McKinsey’s efforts in this area would take the firm into uncharted territory: popular culture. The holy grail of the consultant is an idea that attracts clients but is still vague or complex enough that they need your help in carrying it out. This is why consultants are great progenitors of buzzwords, ideas like scientific management or lean production or reengineering. If it’s got its own name, you probably want to hire the expert on it, don’t you? In the 1970s and 1980s, the argument extended all the way to the land of the rising sun. Having lost significant market share in industries from automobiles to consumer electronics, managers gladly paid through the nose for the inside scoop on Japanese management techniques, such as just-in-time production, total quality management, and continuous improvement.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

., “Long-term Perspective on Wildfires in the Western USA,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 9 (2012), no. 3203. 7 but as Marshall noted: Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1920): 3–4, 288. 8 Expertise became institutionalized: From Robert H. Nelson, “The Religion of Forestry: Scientific Management,” Journal of Forestry, November 1999, available at http://faculty.publicpolicy.umd.edu/sites/default/files/nelson/files/Forest_Fires/The_Religion_of_Forestry_Scientific_Management.pdf. The American Planning Association was formed in 1978 but traces its roots to 1909. 9 financially illiterate: Edmund Morris, in his biography Theodore Rex: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Roosevelt (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 498, writes: “It was exchanges such as this that persuaded some men that Roosevelt was fiscally retarded.” 10 One of his influences: The progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, his influences, and his role in creating the Federal Reserve are from Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson, 1875–1910 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 55; Papers of Woodrow Wilson, February 24, 1898, 440, and December 23, 1913, 65; and Gerald T.

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Roosevelt turned the Sherman Antitrust Act, largely toothless since its passage in 1890, loose on anticompetitive monopolies, passed legislation to regulate food and drugs and interstate commerce, and expanded the system of national parks. Often his actions were informed by progressive ideas of scientific management. At the Forest Service, Roosevelt’s friend Pinchot was steeped in principles of forest management he had learned in Europe, where forests were treated as farms—resources to be cultivated and harvested, not left to burn. On the big economic question of the day, monetary reform, Roosevelt was inconsequential.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Inherent in the mechanical view is the idea that all knowledge is explicit, and can be represented in manuals, documentation, and quantitative metrics. This is a behaviorist concept that harkens back to Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, a theory of management that was based on measuring and analyzing work with the idea of reorganizing it to make it more efficient. The focus in scientific management is on defining and measuring work in the form of words, charts, and numbers. In other words, what can be seen and recorded is the only thing that matters. Results are achieved by administering positive and negative reinforcement—rewards and punishments—to individuals, based on how well they are able to meet performance measures.

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Results are achieved by administering positive and negative reinforcement—rewards and punishments—to individuals, based on how well they are able to meet performance measures. This way of inducing behavior is called operant conditioning and comes from the behaviorist school of psychology, which, like scientific management, focused exclusively on observable phenomena. What this behaviorist philosophy fails to take into account is that many important drivers of success cannot be easily observed, counted, documented, or measured. Intrinsic Rewards Drive Productivity Certainly people respond to punishments and rewards. The threat of jail keeps most of the population decent, and most of us go to work so we can earn money and buy things.

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round by Daniel Davies

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, cryptocurrency, fake it until you make it, financial deregulation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, illegal immigration, index arbitrage, junk bonds, Michael Milken, multilevel marketing, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, railway mania, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, social web, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, vertical integration, web of trust

If you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it is something of a caricature* of modern management science, but it expresses a deep truth; management is an information-processing job, and the development of large corporations has been made possible by the parallel development of reporting structures, quality and output measures and other tools for getting that information from the machines into the offices. Modern management science could fairly be said to have started with The Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911, which first advocated the ‘time and motion study’ and the scientific analysis of business processes, starting with a famous study of how many rest breaks a man should take while shoveling iron ore onto a truck. And it could almost as fairly be said that a very great proportion of management theory since Taylor has been made up of calls to measure different things, in order to correct for the biases introduced by the previous round of changes.

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The underlying problem is that most of the time, we are trying to manage or administer things which are too complicated to be aware of every detail at every time, so we need to choose what we hope will be a representative subset of all the information that we have. As well as refining techniques of measurement of inputs and outputs, the twentieth century also saw the beginnings of an attempt to apply scientific techniques to the organisation of the processes themselves. This had always been implicit in the theory of scientific management, but it took a huge step forward with the Second World War, in which ‘operations research’ began to be recognised as an important field of military planning, with applications from the optimal size of convoys* to the effectiveness of area bombing. The military also began to attempt to systematise techniques of gathering and processing information, such as the ‘OODA Loop’ (observe-orient-decide-act), which proved highly influential in business thinking after the war.

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A. 201–3,205 Henry VIII 216 high-net worth investors tendency to have time on hands 109 tax strategies of a proportion of 266–8 Hippocratic Oath 134 hire purchase scam (Leslie Payne) 36, 39–40 homomorphism 209, 212 Hooley, Ernest ‘The Millionaire’ 230 hotel bills 37 House of Commons 1 Howe, Sarah 90, 116–19, 222 HSBC 188, 189, 280 Hudson Oil 249, 251 Humphery, John Stanley 228 I IBM 64–8 Iceland 218–22 Inca Empire 226–7 Incentives 13, 22, 62, 74, 115, 135, 159, 165, 174, 185–6, 205, 210 incidental fraud vs entrepreneurial 213, 215, 287, 288 Infinity Game 92–9 information 24, 71, 199–208, 211–15, 238 control of by fraudsters 41, 65, 71, 115, 173 insider, securities fraud 23, 239–42, 260 inheritance 117, 217, 218–22, 235, 266 insider dealing 23, 106, 129, 241–43, 260 insurance 36, 39–40, 65, 163–4, 171, 225, 228 medical 74–7, 84 Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) 187–97 insurance scam (Leslie Payne) 40–41 International Reply Coupons see Ponzi, Charles investors 1, 16 in OPM leases 65–7, 69–71 Charles Ponzi’s 86–9 hedge fund 96, 104–9, 113 in pigeons 100, 103 institutional 104 nineteenth century female 118–20 mining 126–30 reliance on accounts 142–54 expectations of UK banks 188 Victorian 228, 231 Retail 240–43 in Piggly Wiggly 256–61 IRS vs UBS 263–4 Israel, Sam see Bayou Capital drug habit of as potential indicator something was wrong 116 J Jehoash (high priest) 217 John Bull 230 K Keating Five 182 Keating, Charles 177–83, 214 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 61 Kerviel, Jerome 165 King, Don 163 Knights of Industry 234, 237 Kolnische Volkszeitung 232, 234, 236, 237 KPMG 150 Kray, Ronnie and Reggie 26–7, 31, 36, 39, 41 Kutz Method 152–3 KYC (know your customer) 281 L Lab fraud anaemia 74 Ladies’ Deposit Bank (Boston) 116–19 lawyers 19, 27, 33–4, 39, 45, 71, 115, 117, 161, 180, 182, 194, 196, 225, 267, 271, 272, 281 (they’re usually in the background even when not specifically mentioned) professional qualifications of 114 extreme expensiveness of 234 leasing tax advantages of 64 see also OPM Leasing importance of residual value 66 accountancy issues 152 Leeson, Nick 17, 165–73, 285 Lehman Brothers collapse 13 relationship with OPM Leasing 65, 71 Lehnert, Lothar 235–7 Lernout & Hauspie 150 Let’s Gowex see Gowex letterhead 31, 70, 80, 122 Levi, Michael 81, 216, 283 Levy, Jonathan 224 libel 77, 236–8 LIBOR 1–4, 12–16, 193, 205, 215, 244 Liman & Co 235–6 limited liability 34, 225, 231 Lincoln Savings & Loan 177–8, 180, 182–3 livestock 100 Livingstone, Jesse 259 Lloyd’s of London 164, 225 Lomuscio, Joe 59 Long firms 21, 23, 27, 29, 35, 41–2, 43–50, 61, 63, 72, 73–5, 77, 79–82, 96, 141, 142, 163, 164, 212, 224, 283, 284 ‘sledge-drivers’ 232–4 against government 271–4 Lucifer’s Banker 263 M MacGregor, Gregor 5, 8, 9, 17, 77, 78, 214 dubious knighthood of 7, 162 military career 7 previous frauds 18 Madden, Steve 147 Madoff, Bernard 96, 104–5, 113 Mafia 41, 253 Mahler, Russ 249–53 management scientific 19, 200, 206–12, 215 risk management 212–13, 287 strategic 248 public sector 264 marginal cost pricing 248 Marino, Dan (fraudster) 107–9, 113, 115 Marino, Dan (quarterback) 107 maritime capitalism 34, 224–6 market corner 259 market crimes 23, 24, 58, 194, 239–62, 271, 282, 289 markets general characteristics of 23, 197, 201–4, 208, 278, 289 financial 3, 4, 8, 13, 26, 58–60, 99, 100, 107–8, 129, 132, 142–5, 147–8, 149, 150–56, 161, 163, 166, 171–2, 176, 195, 230–31, 239–40, 242–4, 256–61 pharmaceutical, ‘grey’ 136–7 drugs, illegal 43–50 prime bank securities 110–11, 184 real estate 179–80 supermarkets 213, 255 Marx, Groucho 66 Marx, Karl 84, 232, 247 McGregor, Ewan 165, 173 McVitie, Jack ‘The Hat’ 26, 41 Medicare 73–6,134–5, 199, 289 Merchant of Venice 34 Merck Pharmaceuticals 138–40 Michaela, Maria 215, 222 military planning 204, 207, 211 Milken, Michael 177, 183 Miller, Norman 52 mis-selling 194–6 money laundering 278–82 Monopolies Commission (UK) 247 mortgages 38, 77, 101, 175–9, 188, 191, 194, 215, 238 multi-level marketing 94–5 N New England Journal of Medicine 139 New Zealand 9, 172, 241 newspapers 9, 125, 152, 230, 237, 252, 262 Nichols, Robert Booth 110–12 Nikkei index 170–71, 173 nobility Scottish 7 phony scottish 5–9, see Gregor MacGregor phony 223 North Wales Railway Company 229 notaries 114, 125, 133 indiscriminate stamping of documents by in 1920s Portugal 121–2 O ODL Securities 112–13 OECD 268 oil recycling 249–54 OODA loop 208 operations research 204, 208–10, 289 OPM Leasing 63–72 snowball effect of interest expense 98 accounting trick 152–3 options markets 163–4, 171–2 Optitz, Gustav 235–7 Opus Dei 53, 57 Original Dinner Party 92 Other People’s Money 63, 285 P Paddington Buys A Share 20, 43 Parmalat 155 Patsies see fronts Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) 187–97 Payne, Leslie 26–8, 30, 33–6, 39–42, 67, 73, 98, 163, 237, 283 petrol stations 190, 247–8 pharmaceutical industry 133–41 track and trace 136 Philadelphia Savings Fund 70–71 Pigeon King International see Galbraith, Arlan pigeons, racing 100–103 Piggly Wiggly 255–61 Ponzi, Charles 84–90, 96, 109, 116 trial of 90 takeover of Hanover Trust 88–9 launch of scheme 86 Portuguese Banknote Affair 120–25 Powers, Austin 263 Poyais 5–9, 15, 78, 121, 162, 215, 219, 287, 297 prime bank securities 110–13, 122, 184 Prince 135 Prince Albert 228 Princess Caraboo see Baker, Mary Princesses 6, 223 Principles of Scientific Management 206 Prison 18, 61, 112, 119, 125, 173, 208, 252, 270 debtor’s 34, 225 private equity 144 psychology 17, 87 public choice theory 210–11 pump and dump 147 pyramid schemes 91–5, 116, 184, 222 Q Quakers 118 quality control 184, 207, 213–15, 287 Quanta Resources 251–2 Quarterly Review 162 Queen Victoria 228 Queenan, Joe 10 Qwest 150 R Rabelais, Francois 120 Railway Mania 176, 231 Ranbaxy Laboratories 137 Reagan, Ronald 174–5, 251 real estate 89, 177–81, 214, 281 Reddit 48 regulators financial 2, 4, 14, 18, 99, 165, 177–83, 194–5, 240, 260–61, 280–81, 289 softness of in 1960s London 40 environmental 250–51 pharmaceutical 136, 137, 140 Reuschel, Rollo (Stanislaus Reu) 232–8 libel case 237 Richmond-Fairfield 107 Robb, George 228 Rockwell Industries 66–71 Rogers, Will 283 rogue traders 98, 165–73, 215 Royal Canadian Mounted Police 129 S salting (mining fraud technique) 127 Sarbanes-Oxley 194, 202 Saunders, Clarence 255–61 Savings and Loans 174–84, 185, 196, 285, 289 economic theories of failure 174 business model 175 settlement, securities 60, 107, 108, 112, 163, 257, 261 Sherman Antitrust Act 246 shipowners 10, 116, 117, 164, 224–6 ships 164, 207, 221, 224–6 US Navy 89, 249 short firm 73–5, 93 short selling 147, 258–9, 261, 283 shotgun/rifle technique 76–7, 134 signatures, forged 67, 123 Silk Road (online market) 44, 47–8, 50 simplified summary which hopefully captures the important structural features see homomorphism Sketch of the Mosquito Shore 8, 162 Skilling, Jeff 17, 142, 153 slaves 34, 219–21, 225 ‘sledge-drivers’ 232–8 SLK Securities 108, 115 Smith, Adam 11, 213 on cartels 246 snowball effect see compound interest societies, high and low trust 10, 16, 62, 125, 166–7, 264, 287 Soviet planning 204, 208, 227 Sparrow, Malcolm 74, 76 St Joseph (fictitious city) 5 stock exchanges Alberta 11, 129 Toronto 129 Vancouver 11, 126 London 9, 117 New York 59–60,147, 228–31, 256–61 Chicago 59–60, 256 Singapore 170–72 Osaka 170 Tokyo in general 142–5, 147, 163–4,241–2 NASDAQ 240 Strangeways, Thomas 162, see also Gregor MacGregor Strathclyde Genetics see Galbraith, Arlan Stratton Oakmont 145–8 Sufficient Variety, Law of 209 Sullivan, Scott 154 Susquehanna River 251, 252 T tacit knowledge 202–3 Tarantino, Quentin 105 tax 32, 64, 69, 98, 155, 159, 177, 191, 263–71 value added see VAT Taylor, F.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

We transitioned from an event-based and product-based economy to a time-based economy in which we are paid per unit sold, if hourly, or lump sum, if salaried.”3 For many of us, clock time dictates what we do at work. The importance of clock time in the workplace can be traced back to Frederick Winslow Taylor. In 1909, Taylor, a former lathe operator, engineer, and management consultant, published The Principles of Scientific Management, a book advocating the use of time as a tool for improving workplace efficiency.4 Taylor argued that companies should replace rules of thumb for accomplishing tasks with precise instructions based on scientific analysis of the timing of tasks. He told factory managers to break jobs into parts and use stopwatches to time their workers and determine how long each part should take.

…

Working Paper Series, December 20, 2010, http:/ssrn.com/abstract=1665936. 2. Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (Free Press, 2008), p. 30. 3. Zimbardo and Boyd, The Time Paradox, pp. 38, 40. 4. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1909). 5. See, for example, Heather Menzies, No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005). 6. Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, “Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2007): 969–1006. According to the HarrisInteractive annual poll of work and leisure time, from 1980 until recently the median weekly work hours for Americans has held in the range of forty-seven to fifty-one.

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., 188 Mutual funds, 176, 178 NASDAQ, 36 National Association of Broadcasters, subliminal advertising and, 51 National Football League, 66n, 80 National Geographic, 57 Nervous system, 10 Neuroeconomics, 151 Neurofinance, 151 Neurons, 68, 69 Neuroscience, x, xi New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 35, 36 New York Times, 143, 192 News gathering, writing and, 193 Newton, Isaac, 214, 218, 226 Nicklaus, Jack, 68 1984 (Orwell), 51 Nixon, Richard, 132 Nordhaus, William, 239 Normal accidents, 44, 245 Normal Accidents (Perrow), 44 Novices, decision-making and, 75, 76, 77 Obama, Barack Croft interview of, 187–188 thoughtfulness/decisiveness of, 191 Observe-orient-decide-act (OODA), 126, 127, 128, 135, 139, 145, 180, 190, 224 Observe-process-act, 45, 142, 143 Obsessive-compulsive disorder, 167 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 238, 239, 240–241 On Apology (Lazare), 135, 138 One-Marshmallow Child, 14 Online dating sites, 118, 119 Options, comparing/choosing among, 71, 75 Orwell, George, 51 Overindulgence, 164, 237 Oxygen, discovery of, 229, 230 Packard, Vance, 51 Page, Larry, 229 Palin, Sarah: squirmish and, 108, 109 Panic, 5, 104–105, 110n, 113, 116, 122 impact of, 103–104, 106 obsession with, 110–111 pauses and, 114 time and, 104, 106, 116 Passion of the Christ, The (movie), 140 Pause points, using, 182–183 Pauses, xii, 115–116, 185 panic and, 114 Pay hourly, 203, 204 inequities, 208 Payne, Max, 105 Payne, Neo, 105 Performance, 6, 25, 113, 231 Perold, André, 33, 34, 48 Perrow, Charles, 44, 245 Perry, John: procrastination and, 169, 170, 171 Personality, 89, 150 Pervasive developmental disorder, 15 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 205 Philosophical questions, unanswerable, 240 Physical reactions, 23, 96 unconscious, 20 visual reaction versus, 21 Pigeons attention spans of, 161 discount rates of, 161 experiment with, 159–160 procrastination by, 162 Pink, Dan, 203 Pisarcik, Joe, 65, 66, 67, 77, 78, 79 Pitt, Brad, 49 Planning, 48, 202, 238, 245 Pneuma-gastric nerve, 3 Poker strategy, teaching, 45 Policy decisions, strategic thinking and, 243 Porges, Stephen, 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 222 heart rate variability and, 3 heart rhythm tests and, 3 on nervous system, 10 psychological states and, 1, 5 raising children and, 12 research by, 7 theory of, 6, 8 vagal nerve and, 2 Poses, high-power/low-power, 97, 98 Post-it, 226–227, 228, 230 Postmortem reviews, 76 “Predicting Divorce Among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion” (Gottman), 87 Preferences, unconscious, 83 Prejudice, 81, 83, 84 Premortem, 76–77 Prepare phase, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30 Pressure, biological reactions in, 79 Priestly, Joseph: oxygen and, 229, 230 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 200 Probabilities, 94 discounting and, 154, 155 procrastination and, 153 Procrastination, xi, 147, 155–156, 162, 166, 171, 218 active/passive, 150 challenging, 173 chronic, 149 covert, 169 delaying, 150, 156 discount rates and, 153, 154, 158, 164 economic model of, 158 economist approach to, 150–151 good/bad, 167 guilt about, 149 impatience and, 159, 164–165 meaning of, 168 as mental disorder, 167 overindulgence and, 164 pigeon, 162 research on, 149–150 stopping, 166, 167, 170 theory of, 152, 164 time inconsistency and, 160 “Procrastination and Obedience” (Akerlof), 152 “Procrastination, or The Sin and Folly of Depending on Future Time” (Edwards), 148 “Procrastination Workshops,” popularity of, 149 Procter & Gamble, 43 Psychological Bulletin, 85 Psychological disorders, 13, 16 Psychological states, 2, 3, 5, 54, 68 Psychology, xi, 2 economics and, 176 time and, 199 Pujols, Albert, 31 Punch lines, 107, 109, 126 Race, 90, 91, 93, 99, 100, 101, 185 behavior and, 83 epidemiology and, 184 treatment based on, 81–82 Racial preferences, 83, 84, 99, 100, 101 Racism, 82, 94 conscious, 83 implicit, 83n, 99 institutional, 84 medical, 184 unconscious, 83, 85 Raising CEO Kids, 14 Rationality, 71, 155 Rawls, John: well-being and, 240 Reactions, 88, 88n automatic, 64, 103 biological, 68, 69, 79, 90, 97 delaying, 14, 178 emotional, 7, 69, 136, 137–138 hard-wiring for, 244 physical, 20, 21, 23, 96 preconscious, 17, 27, 107 skills, 25–26 snap, 117, 126, 129, 184 superfast, 16, 113, 117 time for, 3, 25, 26, 114 unconscious, 111 visual, 21, 23, 25 Reagan, Ronald, 114 Relationships, 7, 120, 123 Remorse, 138, 139, 140 Reporters, 194 bloggers and, 193 Rescuers, The (movie), subliminal messages in, 52, 53 RescueTime.com, 165 Research programs, 54, 223, 243 Responses, 12, 25, 244 brain, 6, 21 delaying, 17 emotional, 16, 136, 137–138 fight-or-flight, 9, 69 gut, 128 psychological, 68 reptilian shutdown, 10 snap, 17, 28, 64, 111, 121–122, 124 sophisticated/creative, 20 Risk, 44, 242, 245 time and, 157 Robertson, Julian, 179 Rockne, Knute, 64 Roddick, Andy, 21, 22 Rogers, William C., III, 72, 77 attack by, 74–75 high-pressure situation for, 73–74 Rooney, Andy, 187 Rosenthal, Robert, 85, 86, 87 Ross, Wilbur L., Jr., 177 Ruffle, Bradley, 92, 93 Rule, Nicholas: female CEOs and, 91 Rumsfeld, Donald: unknown unknowns and, 245 Safety, 13, 233, 243 panic and, 104 paying for, 241 St.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

By the sixteenth century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds.21 This abstract time came to shape everything—work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the sixteenth century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks.22 In the twentieth century, as assembly lines in Detroit churned out Henry Ford’s Model T, “scientific managers” were measuring units of work called therbligs (an anagram of their developers’ last name, Gilbreth): each one a mere one-thousandth of a second.23 The conquest of the Americas therefore involved inculcating in their residents a new notion of time as well as of space. Wherever European empires penetrated, there appeared the image of the “lazy” native, ignorant of the imperatives of Christ and the clock.

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Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege. San Francisco: City Lights. Prashad, Vijay. 2012. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London: Verso. Price, Brian. 1992. “Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and the Motion Study Controversy, 1907–1930.” In A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor, edited by Daniel Nelson, 58–76. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Prince, Hugh C. 1988. “Art and Agrarian Change, 1710–1815.” In The Iconography of Landscape, edited by D. Cosgrove and S.J. Daniels, 98–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quaglia, Lucia, and Sebastián Royo. 2015.

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See also Russia Spanish empire, xiv–xv map 1, 9; colonization policies, 61–62; Genoese banking and, 77, 82; global silver trade and, 81–85, 85; New World frontier, 50–51; New World production system of, 46; Reconquista, 9, 13; slave trade, 91; time concept in, 98; Valladolid controversy, 36–37; war financing, 78–81; wool export, 77 Spice Islands, 52–53 Standard Oil Company, 148–49 Standing Rock protest, 206, 211, 226n44 stint/stinting, 60, 161 Stoler, Ann, 115 Sudan, 70 sugar production: in Brazil, 31; deforestation on, 16; division of labor for, 16; industrialization in, 100; during Industrial Revolution, 144; laborers, 16; on Madeira, 16–17; mills, 17; rolling mills, 100; slave labor, 29; sugarcane processing, 15; sugar consumption, 34; two-roller mills, 16 Sweden, xiv–xv map 1, 52–53 technologies: in agricultural sector, 103–4; coal and, 171–72; in food industry, 104; global silver trade and, 84; iron industry, 171; mechanical clock, 97–98; order, process and specialization, 29; textile industry, 171–72 temporal ecology. See time management textile industry, 98, 100, 171–72 Thompson, Edward, 99 time management: African slaves and, 99–100; assembly lines, 98, 100, 104, 109, 135; and capitalism’s ecology, 99; Indigenous Peoples and, 99–100; racism and, 99; scientific management, 98; time-use surveys, 230–31n79; wageworker resistance to, 99, 226n33 Timmermann, Cristian, 212 Toledo, Francisco de, 82–84 Trump, Donald, 38 Turkey, 38 Twelve Articles manifesto, 74 unions. See labor organizing United Kingdom, xiv–xv map 1; agricultural revolutions, 232n12; financialization in, 69; food consumption, 33; food price changes, 154 fig. 5; land expansion, 220n51; sugar consumption, 34.

Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

Baily was speaking in his capacity as senior adviser to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), its associated think tank. He rattled his way through the list, highlighting shifts in centers of economic activity, consumer trends, and corporate oversight. It was the ninth item on the list that really captured my attention. At that point, Baily eloquently and enthusiastically described how scientific management would triumph over gut instinct and intuition. Interest piqued, I visited the McKinsey Web site the next morning to learn more. Posted there was an article by Ian Davis (then McKinsey’s worldwide managing director) and his colleague Elizabeth Stephenson entitled, “Ten Trends to Watch in 2006.”

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Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable. Long gone is the day of the ‘gut instinct’ management style,” they continued. “Today’s business leaders are adopting algorithmic decision-making techniques and using highly sophisticated software to run their organizations. Scientific management is moving from a skill that creates competitive advantage to an ante that gives companies the right to play the game.” 4 The smart and capable McKinsey folks are far from the only ones casting intuition into the dustbin of history. Many businesses increasingly rely on algorithm-based decision-making and decision-support software.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management , was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency.

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Search Marketing Ovid Oxford English Dictionary Page, Larry PageRank Palin, Sarah Paperbacks Paradise Lost (Milton) Participatory media Pashler, Harold Patterson, Thomas Paul, Ron PayPal Penchina, Gil Perceptual coherence field Pergams, Oliver Perl Perry, Bruce Personalization Peterson, Lloyd Peterson, Margaret Petrilli, Michael Pets.com Pew Charitable Trust Pew Internet and American Life Project Phaedrus (Plato) Photoshop PHP PickupPal PimpMySpace.org Pinkerton, Brian Plastic Plato PlayStation Podcasts Poe, Edgar Allan Poets and Writers (magazine) Pokémon Politics campaign websites Digital Natives and fund-raising in Internet and Internet media for Net Geners and participatory media and social networking sites and television and Wales, J., and Pong (video game) Portraits Post-Gutenberg economics Postman, Neil Post-traumatic dissociative disorders PowerPoint Prensky, Marc The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) Printing press Privacy Procter & Gamble Producer public Progressive Group of Insurance Companies Project Muse Protean self The Protean Self (Lifton) Proust, Marcel Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Wolf) Psychoanalysis schools Ptolemy Publishing Purohit, Sanjay Python Quake (video game) Ranadive, Vivek Rather, Dan Raymond, Eric RAZR phone Reading brain and deep expert Internet use and teenagers’ skills at time spend in Web use skills and Real-time feedback loops Real-time search Real World (television series) Reason Foundation Reflection Reformation Reintermediation Religious fundamentalism Republic (Plato) Research skills, Internet use and Research strategies Results-only work environment (ROWE) Reynolds, Glenn Rheingold, Howard Robinson, Marilynne Rock, Jennifer Romanticism Romantic solitude Rosen, Jay ROWE.

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See Results-only work environment RSS Rushkoff, Douglas Rutgers University Safire, William Salon.com Samsung San Francisco Chronicle Sanger, Larry SAP Sartre, Jean-Paul Saturated self Saturday Night Live (television series) Scalable Fabric Scarcity Scherf, Steve Schindler’s List (film) Schmidt, Eric Science (journal) Scientific Learning Scientific management Scion Scope Screenagers Scrutiny The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Battelle) Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Search engines. See also specific sites Search strategies Search Wiki Sebald, W. G. Seigenthaler, John, Sr.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Harnessing electricity and Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the first commercial steam-powered engine, in 1712, made twice as powerful by James Watt in 1781, propelled manufacturing forward. [back] 6. Stephen Waring argues that Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management focused much of early-day industry on wrestling control from the tradesmen coordinating most skilled craftwork. As Waring puts it, “New managerial capitalism emerged from a search for ways to coordinate operations and control workers.” Stephen P. Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Also see Shelley Pennington and Belinda Westover, “Types of Homework,” in A Hidden Workforce, Women in Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 44–65, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19854-2_4.

…

Journal of Technology Transfer 33, no. 3 (June 1, 2008): 285–99. Valentine, Melissa, and Amy C. Edmondson. “Team Scaffolds: How Minimal In-Group Structures Support Fast-Paced Teaming.” Academy of Management Proceedings 2012, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 1. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2012.109. Waring, Stephen P. Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. We Are Dynamo. “Dear Jeff Bezos.” We Are Dynamo wiki. Accessed May 8, 2018. http://www.wearedynamo.org/dearjeffbezos. Weber, Lauren. “Some of the World’s Largest Employers No Longer Sell Things, They Rent Workers.” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2017. https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-of-the-worlds-largest-employers-no-longer-sell-things-they-rent-workers-1514479580.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Its remit is strikingly different from publicly traded, private or family businesses. But the company’s ambivalent embrace of experimentation reflects how profoundly the move to complex systems has unsettled traditional ideas of management. Many retailers like John Lewis have devoted years to so-called ‘scientific management’ aimed at improving competitive efficiency. Algorithmic task assignments directed employees as discrete units, hoping that more work would get done by fewer people. Today, in private, most acknowledge this was a disaster. Even relatively simple businesses like supermarkets and department stores have to be prepared for the unexpected – the toddler who knocks down a display, an inexplicable run on coconuts.

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The prevailing efficiency ethos and an addiction to planning and measurement are too embedded, and the risk feels too great to do what Jos de Blok did with Dutch homecare nurses: let people think for themselves. Each time I talk to chief executives or boards or senior leadership about less management and more freedom, they understand the opportunity but cling to the ancient reassurance of scientific management. Standardising and measuring work is what they are good at, and most are more comfortable reading surveys about employee engagement than talking to people about what it feels like to work in their company. They’re up to their necks in a status-quo trap, believing that a well-measured if scary present is less risky than an ambiguous future.

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., 94 ‘Rosina’ anecdote, 173 RTÉ, 145 Rubbia, Carlo, 207, 216 rules-bound games, 107–8 Rumi, 296 Russell, Bertrand, 97 Russia Today (RT), 111 Sagrada Família, 224–8, 232 St Margaret’s Hospice, 289–94, 321 St Patrick’s Cathedral, 260 Samaritans, 119 same-sex marriage, 140 Sanford Underground Research Facility, 204 Sanger Centre, 219–21, 224, 231, 232 Santayana, George, 51 Saquinavir, 266 Sargent, Singer, 15 SARS, 298 Saunders, Cicely, 289 scenario planning, 155–75 Schatz, Albert, 15 schizophrenia, 92, 93, 96 Schoenberg, Arnold, 197 Schrödinger, Erwin, 206 Schubert, Franz, 277 scientific management, 120, 199 Scotland, independence sort by, 39 Seagram Building, 226 Sears, 117 Second World War, 54, 73, 80, 99, 147, 152, 162, 164, 273–4, 279 seedbanks, 306, 316 segregation, 33, 97, 129 self-discipline, 19, 230 self-interest, 23, 29, 36, 174 Sencer, David, 58–9 sensitive humility, 192 Shafak, Elif, 191 Shakespeare, William, 31, 108–9, 184, 195, 198, 275–6 shamanism, 2 Sharper Image, 247 Sheffield Health Geeks, 118 Shell Oil Corporation, 154–66 passim short-termism, 78, 308 sickle-cell anaemia, 89 Siilasmaa, Risto, 248–50 ‘Silence = Death’ campaign, 265 Silicon Valley, 33, 129, 246, 285 Skidelsky, Robert, 25 Sky, 111 ‘sleeping beauties’, 82 sleight of hand, 3 Sloane Kettering Cancer Center, 296 social connection, 103 social efficiency, 101 ‘social rubbish’, 97 social turmoil, 4 soft data, 156, 159, 168 ‘something for everyone’, 76 soothsaying, 2 Sophocles, 177 Spence, Basil, 226 Spiritual Association of the Devotees of Saint Joseph, 224 SSC, 209 stability, 17–18, 22, 56, 113, 154, 158, 282 Standard Life (SL), 251 Stanford, 273 statistics, 16, 20, 23, 40, 74, 82, 92, 136, 139, 178 stereotyping, 79–80, 93, 95, 151 sterilisation, 97 Stonyfield, 113–14, 115 Strauss, Levi, 274 Stravinsky, Igor, 15 streptomycin, 15 Suez Crisis, 53 Sugrañes, Domènec, 225 Suharto, Tommy, 254 Sulston, John, 219 Sumpter, Donald, 195 super-collider projects, 185, 204–32 super-forecasting, 37, 38, 41, 63 SUperSYmmetry (SUSY), 216 surrender, 7, 36, 96, 102, 103, 202, 242, 319 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 309 SUSY, 216 Svalbard, 306–7, 316 swine flu, 57, 58 Symbian, 247 Syngenta, 160 Szabłowski, Witold, 121 Tambo, Oliver, 258 Tate, 186 taxation, 28 taxi drivers/driving, 42–6, 63, 181, 314 TB, 14–15, 19, 41 Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), 257–8, 268 terrorism, 15, 36, 85–6, 173, 305 test-tube baby, first-ever, 222 Tetlock, Philip, 5, 27–8, 36–7, 40 Texas University, 129, 163 Thamotheram, Raj, 279, 294 Thatcher, Margaret, 209 Thiel, Peter, 286 Third Law of Motion, 19 THT, 257–8, 268 Thunberg, Greta, 269, 317 Tóibín, Colm, 179 Toys “R” Us, 248 track record, 5, 28, 41 trade wars, 4 Transcend, 283 transformation programmes, 116, 166, 199 transhumanism, 280, 283–7 Trump, Donald, 4, 28, 39, 40, 170, 176 trust, 2, 9, 17, 19, 28, 41, 54, 70, 103, 108, 112, 140, 151, 163–5, 172, 182–7, 201, 211, 221–2, 234, 244, 249, 252, 255, 266, 270, 302, 304–7, 316, 318 tuberculosis, see TB 21/7, 85 23andMe, 95 Twitter, 4 tyranny, 7, 63, 121–2 Umbert, Esteve, 229–30 Unified Planning Machine, 154 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 312 United Nations (UN), 309, 313 unknowns, density of, 17 urban crowding, 14 US Congress, 1, 24, 58, 264 utopia, 6, 103, 312, 313 vaccines, 14, 57–8, 297–304, 298–304 Venter, Craig, 219 Vera Drake, 185, 192 Vidal, Francesc de Paula Quintana i, 227 Vietnam War, 53–4 Vision for Slovenia, 162–5 volatility, 3, 4, 17–18, 147, 155, 157, 224, 237 W boson, 207, 216 Wack, Pierre, 154, 155–6, 159, 168 Waksman, Selman, 15 Wall Street, 20 Walmart, 151 war on cancer, 82 Warnock Commission, 222, 223, 234 Warnock, Mary, 222–3, 316 Washington Mutual, 248 wasteful exuberance, 20 Webb, Beatrice and Sidney, 97 wellbeing, 118, 156, 164, 309, 312 Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015) (Wales), 309, 310, 311, 313 Wellcome Sanger Institute, 219, 224, 231 Wellcome Trust, 85 Wells, H.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

By 1900, more than four hundred US manufacturing establishments—half of them in the iron or steel and textile industries—employed more than a thousand workers each.2 Unable personally to supervise huge concerns and enormous workforces, capitalists were forced to rely on a new kind of professional, the managers, who increasingly were trained in scientific management at newly founded business schools. In one sector of the economy after another, mass production by workers using advanced machinery replaced small-scale craft production by artisans. The mechanization of agriculture destroyed the livelihoods and communities of tenants and family farmers. Around smoke-spewing factories, shantytowns of workers grew, spawning crises of sanitation, health, and crime.

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Nils Gilman observes: “If populism as a general political phenomenon was a byword for the wrong sort of politics, anti-Communist liberals at the apogee of their mid-century technocratic self-confidence believed that ‘the right kind of revolution’ would be elite-led and technocratic—precisely what Hofstadter believed he saw foreshadowed in the Progressive movement, with its commitment to scientific management, evidence-based public policy, credentialing and professionalization, education as a mode of social control, and the idea of best practices (then called ‘one best system’).”34 As part of his project of rewriting America as a story of rational technocratic reform threatened by dangerous democracy, Hofstadter misled a generation of readers into thinking that the American agrarian populist crusade of the 1890s had been an essentially anti-Semitic and protofascist movement.35 Jon Wiener writes that Hofstadter “saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest.

Loving Someone With Asperger's Syndrome: Understanding and Connecting With Your Partner by Cindy Ariel

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, index card, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, place-making, scientific management, theory of mind

Logical systems of action can sound too scientific to you, but might help you get more of what you need in your relationship. In an Internet thread I read recently, someone complained that her AS partner didn’t share in the workload at home. She wished she had a system for getting things done. This elicited a response from a blogger with AS, who suggested this couple try the System of Scientific Management, developed in 1911 by Frederick W. Taylor. Using this scientific system to complete household chores might improve efficiency but would probably leave a non-AS partner feeling very unhappy. Taylor’s system may be too extreme for home use, but developing a rational plan of action can be just the thing to help get things done around the house.

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“Dating, Marriage, and Autism: A Personal Perspective.” Advocate, 4th ed., 24–27. Smith Myles, B., M. L. Trautman, and R. L. Schelvan. 2004. The Hidden Curriculum: Practical Solutions for Understanding Unstated Rules in Social Situations. Shawnee Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company. Taylor, F. W. 1911. The Principles of Scientific Management. Norwood, MA: The Plimpton Press. Viorst, J. 2003. Grown-Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know about Being Married. New York: The Free Press. Wallerstein, J. S., and S. Blakeslee. 2003. What About the Kids? Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

Frick, Robert K. Greenleaf: A Life of Servant Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004), 293. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 47. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 65. Herbert A. Simon, quoted in Stephen P. Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 66. Nelson, Managers and Workers, 150. Waring, Taylorism Transformed; Ronald G.

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Blake, Synergogy: A New Strategy for Education, Training, and Development (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1984), 5; for the authors’ place among the human relations theorists of the postwar years, see Kurt W. Back, Beyond Words: The Story of Sensitivity Training and the Encounter Movement, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), 164; Stephen P. Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 109–15. Davis, “Biographical Information on Robert T. (Sonny) Davis”; Mauro F. Guillén, Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 64–65.

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., 30, 32, 162 Rotary clubs, 129, 183 Route 66, 12–13, 36 Rove, Karl, 216 Rural issues, 2, 7–11, 16–19, 22, 29–30, 43–47, 51, 67, 70, 72, 80, 84, 133, 139, 153, 292n7. See also Agriculture; Small farms/farmers Scholarships. See Walton International Scholarship Program School prayer, 4 Schwarz, Fred, 166 Scientific management, 108 Scopes monkey trial, 87 Scott, Lee, 64, 262 Searcy, AR, 14–15, 163–166, 193, 228 Sears, Roebuck, 47, 80, 83–84 Seay, Bill, 179–182 Secularism, 87–88, 113, 131 Segregation, 3, 30, 39, 264, 266, 286n19 Seiyu stores, 262 Sells, James, 186–188 Serrano, Jorge Elias, 229 Servant leadership, 102, 106–107, 110–115, 118, 123–124, 240, 251.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

He opposed excessive quotas (if the “man is overtired by his work, then the task has been wrongly set and this is as far as possible from the object of scientific management”) and stressed that the combined knowledge of managers falls “far short of the combined knowledge and dexterity of workmen under them,” and hence called for “the intimate cooperation of the management with the workmen” (Taylor 1911, 115). Taylor’s recommendations were initially rejected (Bethlehem Steel fired him in 1901), but his Principles of Scientific Management eventually became a key guide for global manufacturing. In particular, the global success of Japanese companies has been founded on a continuous effort to eliminate unproductive labor and excessive workloads, to eliminate an uneven pace of work, to encourage workers to participate in the production process by making suggestions for its improvement, and to minimize labor-management confrontation.

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Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) was the pioneer of such studies. Starting in 1880 he spent 26 years quantifying all key variables involved in steel cutting, reduced his findings to a simple set of slide-rule calculations, and drew general conclusions for efficiency management in The Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor 1911); a century later its lessons continue to guide some of the world’s most successful makers of consumer products (box 6.3). Box 6.3 From experiments with steel cutting to Japan’s car exports Frederick Winslow Taylor’s main concern was with wasted labor, that is, with the inefficient use of energy—those “awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men” that “leave nothing visible or tangible behind them”—and argued for optimized physical exertion.

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Tropical forests and shifting cultivation: Secondary forest fallow dynamics among traditional farmers of the Peruvian Amazon. Ecological Economics 32:109–124. Coopersmith, J. 2010. Energy, the Subtle Concept: The Discovery of Feynman’s Blocks from Leibniz to Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copley, Frank B. 1923. Frederick W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers. Cornways. 2015. Combine. http://www.cornways.de/hi_combine.html. Cotterell, B., and J. Kamminga. 1990. Machines of Pre-industrial Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulomb, C. A. 1799. Résultat de plusieurs expériences destinées à déterminer la quantité d’action que les hommes peuvent fournir par leur travail journalier. … Mémoires de l’Institut national des sciences et arts—Sciences mathématiques et physique 2:380–428.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Carnegie’s employees were organized in layer upon layer of managers, from foremen to direct his gangs of workers, to mill and furnace managers, to money managers, salesmen, marketing specialists, and two dozen partners with equity in his firm. The line production system was perfected by Henry Ford (1863–1947). Ford’s engineers borrowed particularly from the “stopwatch” ideas of the first great management guru, Frederick Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911. They designed improved machinery, such as conveyors, rollways, and gravity slides, to assure the regular flow of materials. Their stroke of genius was to introduce conveyor belts to move parts past the workers on the assembly line. This reduced the time it took to make a Model T from twelve hours to two and a half hours.

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Management thinkers also began to follow the trail blazed by Frederick Taylor (1856–1915). Arthur D. Little was the first of a new class of management consultants, soon followed by James McKinsey, who set up shop in 1926, three years after the American Management Association was founded. Even politicians joined the craze: Herbert Hoover tried to apply scientific management to government. From the very first, these management thinkers offered contradictory advice. A rival “humanist” school, including Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) and Elton Mayo (1880–1949), challenged Taylor’s dominant “rationalist school,” arguing that the key to long-term success lay in treating workers well.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

The economic depression that followed the war threw labor on the defensive. Faced with an immediate threat to their standard of living and the survival of their unions, workers lost interest in control of production. In 1913, Cole predicted that the struggle over scientific management would end either in one of the "greatest steps" toward workers' control or in "Labour's most crushing defeat." By the early twenties, however, the unions had come to terms with scientific management (as had the Bolsheviks, for different reasons), in order to concentrate all their efforts on the maintenance of wartime wage levels. Both the emergence of communism and the deterioration of working conditions strengthened the Labour party—the only effective counterweight, it seemed, to the combined threat of reactionary employers and irresponsible revolutionaries.

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Although he deplored violence, he agreed with the syndicalists that workers could be trained for "self-government" only in the school of class "warfare." Their "independence ... would not amount to much," he thought, if it was "handed down to them by the state or by employers' associations." Like Cole, Croly believed that Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management might precipitate a struggle for workers' control of production. The unions could not be expected to welcome appeals for greater efficiency as long as the "elimination of waste" served merely to speed up ____________________ * In all likelihood, Croly took this idea directly from Cole's World of Labour.

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Clecak, Peter: on nostalgia, 117 clothing: symbolism of, 130 -31, 227 -30 Cobbett, William, 181 -85, 195, 196, 197, 210, 272; against humanitarianism, 184 ; compared with Paine, 181 -83; on "paper system," 183 Cohen, Albert: on working-class insularity, 466 Cohn, Norman: on millennialism, 41 Cole, G. D. H., 16, 304, 334, 340, 341, 404, 438 n.; on "community," 328 ; on decline of proprietorship, 317 ; disavows "our particular form of cant," 327 ; on IWW, 333 n.; on Marxism, 318 ; on nationalization of industry, 325 ; on scientific management, 326; on socialism, 319 ; on Sorel, 314 ; on syndicalism and guild socialism, 323 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 134 n., 136 ; on memory, 88 -89 Cotes, Robert, 493 collectivism, 319, 322 ; see also communism, social democracy, socialism Coming of Post-Industrial Society, The (Bell), 5I3 Commentary (New York), 30, 512 Commoner, Barry: on economic growth, 44 n.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Whether their goals were to increase profits, improve law and governance, advance the sciences, or simply help us to lead better, happier lives, leading researchers and thinkers have long sought to improve the way these systems are designed. In the twentieth century’s first six decades, the favored approaches reflected the Leviathan; most systems were large, hierarchical, and controlled. Within the United States, this trend began in companies, when, early in the century, Frederick Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management, which concerns a management process by which every action, by every employee, was described, timed, measured, and monitored to assure the most efficient operation, reducing the employee to a very well-regulated component in a perfectly designed system—one that was controlled by the powers above.

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In GM’s Fremont, eighty industrial engineers gave each individual employee strict, detailed instructions on how tasks had to be performed, right down to every movement of an arm or pressing of a button. They timed employees, and monitored and measured their output and performance—much as Frederick Taylor had recommended a hundred years ago when he developed his Leviathan-inspired Principles of Scientific Management. In NUMMI, on the other hand, employees were organized into collaborative teams of four to six, each led by a team leader (to cement the solidarity even further, these were union members). There were no industrial engineers looming over every employee. Their every motion wasn’t prescribed.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Follett was a contemporary of the other, more famous, turn-of-thecentury North American management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, and the stark contrast between their views is revealing. Following in Sir Francis Bacon’s footsteps, Taylor advocated replacing the rule-of-thumb procedures developed informally by workers themselves with formal rules developed independently of them by “scientific” managers.21 Where Fol­ lett endorsed a form of authority arising immanently from an internally differentiated but nonhierarchical group, Taylor insisted on a sharp, hier­ archical distinction between the managers, who would analyze the work process to formulate rules of procedure, and the workers, who would merely carry them out.

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In other words, all the powers we now attri­ bute to individuals, and locate ‘inside’ them , as personal powers, must be seen in this view as social pow ers, sustained ‘in’ the individual only in virtue of his or her embedding w ithin a particular ‘region’ or ‘locus’ of social activity” (127). 21. See Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, 4, in w hich he states that “the development of [management] science . . . involves the establishment of many rules, laws, and formulae w hich replace the judgm ent of the individual w orkm an.” 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Ibid., 23; emphasis original. See also p. 8: “there is a science o f handling pig iron, and . . . this science am ounts to so much th at the m an who is suited to handle pig iron cannot possibly understand it, nor even w ork in accordance w ith the laws of this science, w ithout the help of those w ho are over him.” 24.

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B oston: Beacon Press, 1994. Surow iecki, Jam es. “T h e Science o f Success.” New Yorker, July 9, 2 0 0 7 . -------- . The Wisdom o f Crowds. N ew York: D oubleday, 2 0 0 4 . Taylor, C harles. Hegel and Modern Society. C am bridge: C am bridge U niver­ sity Press, 1979. Taylor, F rederick. The Principles of Scientific Management. 1 9 1 1 . R ep rin t, N ew York: W . W . N o rto n , 1967. Taylor, M ark . The Moment o f Complexity. C hicago: U niversity o f C hicago Press, 2 0 0 1 . Taylor, M ichael. The Possibility of Cooperation. C am bridge: C am bridge U ni­ versity Press, 1987. T hew eleit, K laus. Male Fantasies. 2 vols.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

The economy and the expansion of the public sector required more Head jobs and relatively fewer Hand ones, and as we shall see in the next chapter, the income returns to knowledge and education began to take off in the 1970s after almost a century of income compression between Head and Hand. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theories of scientific management developed in the United States before the First World War had produced the giant mass-production factory by ending skilled workers’ monopoly of production know-how and breaking it down into easy-to-perform functions. This required less manual skill but some degree of literacy and numeracy.

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., The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 122 Gottfredson, Linda, 57, 70–71 grammar school education, 46, 58, 65, 82, 98, 100 grandes écoles (France), 44, 48, 81, 102, 118, 141, 156 Gray, John, 166, 279 Great British Class Survey, 191, 191n great compression, 134 great divergence, 134–41 Green, Francis, 208–9 Greening, Justine, 17 grit (Duckworth), 67 groupthink, 20 Guilluy, Christophe, 126 Guyatt, Richard, 182 Hacker, Andrew, 82 Haidt, Jonathan: Heterodox Academy (US), 282–83 The Righteous Mind, 70 Hakim, Catherine, 248–49 Haldane, Andy, 255–58, 262, 298 Hall, Peter, 204 Hanbury, Jonathan, 238–39 Hand (manual) work, 189–215 Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 12–20, 27 careers vs. jobs and, 211–12 Covid-19 crisis and, 7, 23, 26, 203, 277–78 craft skills, 114, 194, 195, 256–57, 294–96, 299–300, 301–2 decline of shop and home economics classes, 195–97 declining status of, 4–5, 13, 15, 189–95, 203–15 gender and, 190–94 globalization and, 194–95, 198–206, 258–61 immigration and, 194–95, 198–206 income divergence with Head (cognitive) work, 133–41 job/income decline and, 193–95, 199–200, 209, 210 new technologies in, 192, 198, 199 nostalgia for, 193, 194, 201–3 productivity in, 16–17 rebalancing with Head and Heart work, ix–xiii, 4–5, 20–29, 257–58, 275, 277–78, 284–301 as route to theoretical understanding, 196–97 scientific management and, 97, 260 separation from Head (cognitive) work, 97–99 skilled trades worker shortages, 15, 197–203 union membership decline and, 139–40 work satisfaction and, 208–11 see also apprenticeships Hankin, Steven M., 133, 142 happiness research, 11, 16–17, 220, 288, 302–3 Harari, Yuval Noah, 21, 36, 218–20, 299 Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, 47 Hargreaves, James, 42 Harrington, Mary, 248 Haskins, Ron, 82 Head (cognitive) work: Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 12–20, 27 artificial intelligence (AI) and, 23–25 cognitive-analytical ability as gold standard of human esteem, 3–5, 11–12, 28 Covid-19 crisis and, 7, 23, 62, 277–78 crisis of meaning vs.

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How Democracy Ends, 165 Russell Group (UK), 80, 102, 107, 125, 130, 263 Ryle, Gilbert, 38 Sacks, Jonathan, 21, 179 Salvini, Matteo, 155 Sanandaji, Tino, 78 Sanders, Bernie, 14 Sarmiento-Mirwaldt, Katja, 171 SAT (US), 20, 52, 64, 65–68, 80, 114–15, 117, 287 Saunders, Peter, 77 Savage, Michael, 191, 191n Scargill, Arthur, 139 Schleicher, Andreas, 294 School21 (UK), 300 scientific management: digital Taylorism, 23–25, 144, 258–61 Taylorism, 97, 260 scientific racism, 63–64, 73 Scotland, 48, 49, 97–98, 122–23, 128, 239, 241 Scruton, Roger, 183 Seagram Building (New York City), 184–85 secondary education: A levels (UK), 35, 46, 57–60, 95–96, 98, 105, 108–10, 124, 141, 192 credits increase and, 116 decline of shop and home economics classes, 112, 195–97 effectiveness of, 113 eleven-plus (UK), 20, 65–66, 82, 100, 196 free public education, 43–44 General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs, UK), 95–96, 141, 192, 198, 262 high school graduation (US) and, 14–15, 35, 40, 51, 95–96, 98–99, 116, 118, 124 O levels (UK), 95–96 Sennett, Richard, The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Cobb), 190 service job categories, 144, 260–61 Shakespeare, William, 58, 181 signaling effect, of education, 94–96, 121–26, 267, 271 Singapore, 85 Skills and Employment Survey (UK), 266 Smith, Adam, 42 Snedden, David, 49 social gradient (Marmot), 207 social intelligence, 7, 21, 56, 66–67, 258 social justice, importance of, 28 social media: Covid-19 crisis and, xiii, 16 digital giants and, xiii, 16, 33, 273 mental well-being and, 37, 278–81 social mobility, 75–84 Anywhere-Somewhere divide and, 13–20, 287–91 assortative mating and, 79–83 in class stratified societies, 34–35 college/university education and, 6, 103, 105, 125–31, 253–55, 268–71 downward vs. upward, 76, 265–68 in fair society, 8–9 “genetics of success” and, 75 geographic mobility and, 17–19, 125–31, 273–74, 277, 287–91 graduates moving to non-graduate jobs, 24, 265–68 “leaving” mentality and, 126–31, 164 selection into cognitive classes and, 75–84, 268–71 in the UK, 75–78, 80–81, 126–31 in the US, 78–84 socioeconomic status, cognitive ability and, 78–82, 83–84 Sommers, Tim, 83–84 Soskice, David, 104–5, 126–27, 129 Soskice, Frank, 104 Spearman, Charles, 64 Speckesser, Stefan, 265 St George’s Hospital (Tooting, South London), 233, 234–37, 245 Standard Occupational Classification schema (UK), 146–47 Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, 64 Star Trek (TV series), 303 State of Mental Health in America (Mental Health America), 222 status, 203–15 career vs. job and, 211–12 cognitive aptitude correlation with socioeconomic, 78–82, 83–84 decline for Hand (manual) work, 4–5, 13, 15, 189–95, 203–15 distribution of status of self-respect, 10–11 gender divide in, 190–92, 213–14 “graduatization”/income divergence of the labor market, 133–52, 234–39 income inequality vs., 28, 37–38 measuring, 203–15 mental well-being and, 206–7 objective/subjective, 203–4 shift to Head (cognitive) work and, 214–15 sources of, 190 work satisfaction and, 208–11 STEM education, 101–2, 108, 111, 236, 265, 268 Stern, William, 64 Sternberg, Robert, 67 Stewart, James, 276 Strachey, John, 61 Suh, Jooyeoun, 246 Sullivan, Louis, 184 Sumption, Jonathan, 155 Sunstein, Cass, 285 Susskind, Daniel: The Future of the Professions (with R.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

Crown Film Unit, The Railwaymen (1946), available at www.bfi.org.uk/inview/title/6300 (restricted access). 19. George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) (Cambridge, 1934), pp. 201–2. 20. Michael R. Weatherburn, ‘Scientific Management at Work: The Bedaux System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British Industry, 1914–48’ (PhD Dissertation, Imperial College London, 2014), p. 79. Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2006). 21. Weatherburn, ‘Scientific Management at Work’, provides the only reliable biography. 22. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, for example, did a lot of work on technology and work organization in the 1940s.

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Hence the title of Margaret Gowing’s brilliantly clear Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, 2 vols. (London, 1974). 34. Ibid., vol. 2: Policy Making, p. 189. 35. Ibid., p. 449. 36. Ibid., pp. 172–85. 37. Communist Party of Great Britain, For Soviet Britain. 38. S. Sturdy and R. Cooter, ‘Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain c. 1870–1950’, History of Science 36 (1998), pp. 421–66; Charles Webster, ‘Conflict and Consensus: Explaining the British Health Service’, Twentieth Century British History 1.2 (1990), pp. 115–51. Daniel M. Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics: The British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton New Jersey, 2014). 39.

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Stranges, Anthony, ‘From Birmingham to Billingham: High-Pressure Coal Hydrogenation in Great Britain’, Technology and Culture 26 (1985), pp. 726–57. Stubbs, J. O., ‘Lord Milner and Patriotic Labour, 1914–1918’, The English Historical Review 87.345 (1972), pp. 717–54. Sturdy, S. and Cooter, R., ‘Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain c. 1870–950’, History of Science 36 (1998), pp. 421–66. Summerfield, Penny, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester, 1998). Supple, Barry (ed.), Essays In British Business History (Oxford, 1977). —, ‘Fear of Failing: Economic History and the Decline of Britain’, The Economic History Review 47 (1994), pp. 441–58. —, The History of the British Coal Industry, vol. 4 (Oxford, 1987).

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

People have to be compelled to work; if the poor are to be given relief so they don’t actually starve, it has to be delivered in the most humiliating and onerous ways possible, because otherwise they would become dependent and have no incentive to find proper jobs.4 The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it. In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case. Human beings certainly tend to rankle over what they consider excessive or degrading work; few may be inclined to work at the pace or intensity that “scientific managers” have, since the 1920s, decided they should; people also have a particular aversion to being humiliated. But leave them to their own devices, and they almost invariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do. There is endless empirical evidence to back this up. To choose a couple of particularly colorful examples: working-class people who win the lottery and find themselves multimillionaires rarely quit their jobs (and if they do, usually they soon say they regret it).5 Even in those prisons where inmates are provided free food and shelter and are not actually required to work, denying them the right to press shirts in the prison laundry, clean latrines in the prison gym, or package computers for Microsoft in the prison workshop is used as a form of punishment—and this is true even where the work doesn’t pay or where prisoners have access to other income.6 Here we are dealing with people who can be assumed to be among the least altruistic society has produced, yet they find sitting around all day watching television a far worse fate than even the harshest and least rewarding forms of labor.

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To the elite, he argued that coddling the poor with high wages was not good for “the race.”44 The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on popular knowledge. Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else. The real question to be asked here, it seems to me, is: Why was this campaign so successful? Because it cannot be denied that, within a generation, “producerism” had given way to “consumerism,” the “source of status,” as Harry Braverman put it, was “no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them,”45 and the labor theory of value—which had, meanwhile, been knocked out of economic theory by the “marginal revolution”—had so fallen away from popular common sense that nowadays, only graduate students or small circles of revolutionary Marxist theorists are likely to have heard of it.

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As the examples I cited at the time make clear, people do really think in these terms when they reflect on the “social value” of their jobs.49 To think of labor as valuable primarily because it is “productive,” and productive labor as typified by the factory worker, effecting that magic transformation by which cars or teabags or pharmaceutical products are “produced” out of factories through the same painful but ultimately mysterious “labor” by which women are seen to produce babies, allows one to make all this disappear. It also makes it maximally easy for the factory owner to insist that no, actually, workers are really no different from the machines they operate. Clearly, the growth of what came to be called “scientific management” made this easier; but it would never have been possible had the paradigmatic example of “worker” in the popular imagination been a cook, a gardener, or a masseuse. • • • Most economists nowadays see the labor theory of value as a curiosity from the formative days of the discipline; and it’s probably true that, if one’s primary interest is to understand patterns of price formation, there are better tools available.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Throughout the text the term ‘paradigm’ alone will sometimes be used as a short reference for techno-economic paradigm. Chandler (1977) pp. 281–3. Technological Revolutions and Techno-Economic Paradigms 17 time they taught modified versions of Taylor’s early ideas. Decades later, with the mass-production paradigm, the assembly-line version of Taylorism, called ‘scientific management’ (in its ‘Fordist’16 form), was taught and applied across the industrial spectrum. The task becomes harder the further one goes into the past, because in real life the paradigm is mostly an imitative model, made up of implicit principles that soon become unconscious ‘talent’ and later get subsumed into ‘rules of thumb’.17 So, an explicit identification of such guidelines might not be readily found in the historical record.

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Of these, one of the most important is the willingness to try out truly radical innovations as improvements that will stretch the life cycle of established technologies or reduce the cost of peripheral activities. Crude versions of the high pressure engine were tried in the early 1800s to increase the productivity of textile machinery; ‘scientific management’ of work organization, which is the core of mass production, was first developed by Taylor at the turn of the century to increase the productivity of moving steel products in the steel yards; automation was given trial runs by the automobile industry in the early 1960s, control instruments in their pre-digital forms went far in development in the process industries from early on, numerical control machine tools were introduced in shoe manufacturing and aerospace in the 1960s and 1970s.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

By the early twentieth century, as historian Paul Israel has shown, even the tasks of invention – once the realm of inspired individuals in machine shops – moved to industrial laboratories and became subject to the bureaucratic routines of corporate strategists who were themselves inspired and emboldened by the new ideology of scientific management. As they rejected independence in favor of the corporate life, “inventor-engineers came to personify engineering values of standardization and efficiency.”31 Electrical Measurement The international and transnational dimensions of telegraphy – and of industrial and scientific standardization more generally – become evident when we consider the dilemmas of electrical transmission in European networks.

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For the most part, AT&T leaders believed their competitive advantages flowed from keeping the company’s patents and practices closed and secretive. Their insular attitude began to change in the years before the First World War. One indication of the change may be seen in Henry F. Albright’s speech at the 1915 conference of Bell System engineering and manufacturing personnel. Albright, who was the leading proponent of scientific management at Western Electric, asked his colleagues to reconsider the potential benefits of professional activities outside the Bell System. He suggested that individual employees could gain “an enlarged circle of acquaintances” and learn about other engineering methods if they joined industrywide associations and societies.

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Vail and the Civic Origins of Universal Service,” Business and Economic History 28 (1999): 71–81; Milton Mueller, Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press and American Enterprise Institute, 1997), 92–135; John, Network Nation, 340–345; Lipartito, The Bell System and Regional Business, 139; Federal Communications Commission, Investigation of the Telephone Industry of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 475–485. 18 Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1911), 7. 19 Mueller, Universal Service, 129–145; Lipartito, The Bell System and Regional Business, 185–207; John, Network Nation, 340–369. 20 Kenneth Lipartito, “Rethinking the Invention Factory: Bell Laboratories in Perspective,” in Clarke, Lamoreaux, and Usselman, eds., The Challenge of Remaining Innovative, 133.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra