AC103 -- 2/24/00

Questions to Consider:

1) How influential was Taylorism in the early twentieth century? How important was Taylor to the Efficiency Movement?

2) According to Tichi, what were the imaginative consequences of Taylorism? Were its effects restricted to the arena of industry and commerce? If not, then how far did they extend beyond those realms?

3) Tichi includes several documents that illustrate the efficiency craze of the 1910s. (See pages 82-86.) What are your reactions to these images?

4) How is Taylor's work related to that of Muybridge? Of Chaplin?

5) In Principles of Scientific Management, how does Taylor understand the relationship between man and machinery? In Taylor's view, is mechanization a good thing for mankind? Why or why not?

6) What are your reactions to Taylor's description of Schmidt, the pig iron handler? (See pages 44-47.) How does Taylor characterize the average industrial worker under ordinary management? In general, does Taylor seem to have the best interest of machine workers at heart?

7) Taylor visualizes a critical role for scientific managers in his new scheme of industrial organization. Do you find his views on the importance of scientific management persuasive?

FROM CECELIA TICHI, SHIFTING GEARS (1987):

In the earlier twentieth century, in fact, the machine became a perceptual model, and efficiency accordingly was the standard by which physical and intellectual activity was measured. . . Like waste, efficiency offered an opportunity to realize new levels of abundance, for it promised to amplify space and multiply time and thus led to a new valuation of speed. Ultimately the aesthetic implications of efficiency brought formal changes to American fiction and poetry. . . (75)

Frederick Winslow Taylor . . . became known as the father of the Efficiency Movement, other wise called Scientific Management or Taylorism. His influence on industrial life was enormous, both in America and abroad . . . and he was hailed by disciples as a scientific intellect comparable to Darwin. (76)

As a shop foreman he was troubled by managers' indifference to workmen's motivation, to their work habits and to their various body types which he felt ought to fit them for different tasks. He was especially irked by workers' "loafing" or "soldiering," their marking time.

Taylor's remedy for these problems owed much to the contemporary interest in the visualization of motion in space. Essentially Taylor saw in industry the opportunities that sequential stop-motion photographs were providing the visual experimenters Thomas Eakins, Etienne Marey, and Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s and 1890s. They captured phases of motion in sequential photographs which led to the development of motion pictures . . . . (77)

The qualities of Taylorist thought . . . . signaled a change in certain American values and therefore in the imaginative forms that express them. In certain ways Taylorism presented new opportunities for writers in search of innovative form. . .

. . . In the waning of the crafts era, it provided a new self-identification for the artist. One could now be a designer-engineer. For the intellectual center of Taylorism was not the worker, but the mastermind. It was not the rank and file but the engineer whose formulations would prevail and endure. (79)

Efficiency societies were formed, and hundreds of books and articles began to appear in the mid-1910s with such titles as Efficiency in High Schools, Efficiency in Home Making, Efficient Composition, Intellectual Efficiency, and Efficiency in Religious Work. (79)

Taylor himself became an evangelist of the movement, for he linked morality and well-being to his scientific management. He prophesied that his methods would extend "to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the businesses of our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions, our universities, and our government departments" . . . (81)

It seems that in t he 1910s "efficiency" became . . . virtually a buzz-word in its own time. . . (81; see ads on 80, 82-86)

Taylor has been seen as the instigator (and the scapegoat) of the Efficiency Movement, but the issues he distilled were in the air. If Taylor had not been there, someone would have invented him. (87)

When Taylor recognized that the input-output ratio of machine efficiency could be applied to workers and their activities, he enlarged the concept of machine technology to include human action and its organization. From there he was just a step away from the "Taylorization," which is to say the machine-based systematic design of virtually all human activity, personal and social, private and institutional.

And literary -- for Taylorist thought offered writers new opportunities for style and structure. It provided perceptual paradoxes because it promised to multiply time and space by dividing them. Its ethos of synchronized design, abundance, and functionalism, its kinetics, its utilitarian motivation and method of spatial and temporal reformulation all came to have a significant impact on American literature in the twentieth century. (90)