Rochlin4

RATIONALIZATION OF PRODUCTION (TAYLORISM)

The texts below will give you some idea of the historical importance of the concept of scientific management, a practice, to some like Terry Smith (see below), an ideology, that is now commonly referred to as the rationalization of production or rational planning.

Terry Smith
The Making of the Modern: Industry Art, and Design in America.

Smith describes the relation between anxiety and what he presents as a vision of total rationalization with these words:

The world organized in all of its relations according to a complete clarity of articulation, the always evident logic of rational planning, functional form and efficient design, a distribution of services through channels of such transparency that the equity of their flow is everywhere observable --thus securing an ideal of human behavior open to all, in the best interest of all. A vision of progress, of the new endlessly renewing itself, a permanent revolution, a perpetual renovation. A dream, utopian in its reach through time, global in its stretch through space, complete in its desire to enlist the public and the private in all men and women.
Note how the above mimes Marx's description of the global spread of capitalism and how it rhymes with McCluhan's dream of the global village. The vision that Smith has conjured in the above is seen through the eyes of a displaced Russian functionary and is based on an episode from Konstantin Fedin's The Conflagration, trans. Olga Sharise (Moscow: Progress Press, 1968), p 280. Smith continues:
Nor was this dream held in extreme forms only in Russia. Henry Ford, no friend of political radically of any stamp, authored the most famous formulation of modernity's hatred of the past in a remark of 1919. "History is more or less bunk. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the hostory we make today. That the technology of modernity readily crossed political boundaries otherwise heavily defended is evident in Lenin's exhortation of 1918: "The possibility of building socialism depends exactly on our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends." In practice, this occurred with the most spectacular results just over ten years later when the Ford Motor Company led other U.S. and European corporations in establishing the vast Soviet tractor industry.
This view of the present seem typical of modernity and forms the contested ground of this course. When did history become irrelevant to the present? Can we find signs of such a modernity in Manet. That modernity is clearly present in Adams's essay, "The Virgin and the Dynamo." Smith continues, in the passage below, with his depiction of the certainty proposed by technology and rational systemization of production. In the phase of such certainty where do we find the reality of personal anxiety?
The unified vision of modernity, from most of those political perspectives dominant in the first half of this century was demonstrably successful in most of its undertakings, evidently capable of innovating and diversifying within its focused body, and increasingly confident of fulfilling its own prophecies of immanence. [The Making of the Modern (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1992), p. 3-4.]

Gene I. Rochlin

Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization

Chapter 4: Taylorism Redux?

Scientific Management [¶14.] As the creation of large factories or industries that employed large numbers of people to perform tasks by rote on a piecework basis shifted the emphasis from the skilled worker to the simple laborer, the more ambitious, motivated, and intelligent were quick to note that income and social mobility were increasingly associated with soft jobs such as management and sales rather than physical work, however skilled.7 Intelligence and experience were therefore leaving the plant and shop floor even before the first wave of task specialization and standardization narrowed the scope of individual tasks. Those who remained, or who replaced the ones who left, had few incentives to work any harder than was necessary. The new managers, lacking either work experience or a set of reliable measures against which to measure performance, were aware of the decline in morale, and, frequently, the decline in productivity that followed, but found it difficult to devise or enforce measures to increase efficiency in the face of worker recalcitrance.

[¶15.] It was in this context that Frederick W. Taylor was moved to introduce the principles of what he called "scientific" management, derived at first largely from the application of production engineering. As an engineer, Taylor believed that if rational rules and tight control replaced previous disorderly and informal modes of plant organization, management would be better able to combat labor problems such as soldiering and low motivation among workers.8 Many of Taylor's methods have become famous (or infamous); some, such as time-and-motion studies, were widely adopted. But others were too strict, or too mechanical, and Taylor had only moderate success in getting firms to adopt his means and methods.9 What did flourish was his agenda, with its underlying precepts of rational modeling and analysis and its emphasis on finding the correct organizational form for any business or activity.

[¶16.] As later critics have pointed out, the growing movement toward scientific management that resulted was more of an ideology than a management system in the modern sense.10 What was sought was the "one best way" to organize, to coordinate and rationalize not only to reduce conflict within the plant, but also to eliminate all forms of possible discord or disorderliness throughout the entire firm or industry. To the Taylorists, an ideal employee not only did what she was told, but stayed strictly within designated boundaries and task specifications. These in turn were set by managers using superior knowledge and rational methods of analysis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including
photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for
reading and browsing via the World Wide Web.