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
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.
SOURCE
Trapped in
the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization
Published by Princeton University Press
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