by Nikil Saval
Had Taylor been the only one bitten with the efficiency bug in his time, his system might have died as a peculiar monomania. After the Watertown Arsenal strike, workers and labor unions were on the lookout for white shirts, and as a result may have ultimately prevented the purest form of scientific management from taking hold on the shop floor. But Taylorism was only one—and the most famous and influential—school attempting to systematize the workplace. The Pennsylvania Railroad had introduced a piece-rate system well before Taylor rationalized it, and efficiency had become a watchword as soon as American industry began to fall into its Gilded Age chaos and lassitude. In 1900, a group of efficiency-obsessed managers seized the spirit of the age and started a magazine, called—inevitably, perhaps—System. Subtitled A Monthly Magazine for the Man of Affairs, each volume had articles proposing new models for the minutiae of office life, whether a new system of filing or a more efficient mode of envelope licking. In the section “Successful Through System,” quotations from successful, whiskered, and white-haired executives confirmed the importance and necessity of systems in business organization. “A technical knowledge of and training in systematic methods and organization is the prime requisite in the education of the modern business man,” claimed Thomas Phillips, president of the Federal Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago; meanwhile, Edward Lacey, president of the Bankers’ National Bank, affirmed that business had changed such that systems were now vital to the functioning of business: “While the business world was a mass of smaller units, the necessity for system was not so apparent, but as business units increased in size, necessity soon brought about the adoption of systematic principles and methods.”34 The relationship of systematic thinking to the office was also made explicit. Each issue of System contained a special section of photographs, titled “Battlefields of Business,” where various methods and forms of office layout were held up as examples to emulate. (System’s popularity ballooned in the Roaring Twenties, and in 1929 it was changed to a weekly and relaunched under the name it carried until 2009—BusinessWeek.)
In the spirit of the master, Taylor’s associates and acolytes soon began systematizing everything they saw: medicine, bricklaying, sports—you name it, the Taylorists tried to make it more efficient. A husband-and-wife team, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, became famous for Taylorizing their own large family of twelve children—portrayed in the popular book and film Cheaper by the Dozen. After Frank’s death, Lillian carried on the mission, bringing the principles of scientific management into the hiring and firing of employees. Lillian believed strongly that Taylor’s version of scientific management neglected the “human element,” attempted to force itself on workers without ensuring that the workers consented to the imposition. Developing personality and psychological testing for the hiring of employees, her “personnel management” system soon became as famous and popular as scientific management. Supposedly a more humanizing version of Taylor’s system, it in fact performed exactly what workers had sarcastically joked about before: it was an apparatus for getting inside the minds of the workers and ensuring that they submit docilely to management’s demands. The department of personnel management has been one of scientific management’s most lasting achievements, having come down to us under a different but familiar name: human resources.
With this flurry of activity surrounding the office, it was only a matter of time, of course, before the office itself—where scientific management was being fomented—became the object of systematization. In the introduction to Frank Gilbreth’s treatise on reducing inefficient body movements, Motion Study, the author Robert Thurston Kent notes how, inspired by Gilbreth’s descriptions of faster bricklaying, he began to scrutinize the circulation of outgoing mail in the office of his trade engineering publication. Applying motion study to the stamping of envelopes, he notes, began to improve the speed of output, to 100–120 envelopes a minute. It took only a minute’s reflection to recognize that the office could stand to be much more systematized.35
Taylor’s disciple W. H. Leffingwell conducted the most far-reaching experiments in organizing offices, publishing his first findings in System, later organizing his research into two long-winded and sententious books, Scientific Office Management (1917) and the eight-hundred-page textbook Office Management (1925). Like the Taylorist works on the factory (there were also pamphlets for housewives on home management), Scientific Office Management touts the importance of individual observation and the results of time and motion study: only rather than pulleys and lathes, the means of production to be rationalized in the office are pens and envelopes, typewriters and receipt forms, file cabinets and desks. In an inimitable tone, at once loftily knowing and completely oblivious, Leffingwell details the horrors of the inefficient, underobserved office:
There are millions of unnecessary motions, and when one begins to investigate an office with an eye for these alone, one comes to believe that most of them are in the office. Watch a girl jogging paper or cards. Long after the work is done she goes on calmly patting them here and there. Watch a clerk rushing through his work, throwing the papers in a disorderly heap as he goes and then when he has finished, watch him spend a few minutes straightening things up. It never occurs to him to pile them in an orderly manner in the beginning. Watch him when there are a few letters to be sealed or stamped. First he carefully moistens the gummed end, then presses it down, then pounds each stamp with his fist. Watch clerks enclosing printed matter in envelopes. A trained expert will do as much as four or more untrained workers, yet only half of the difference is in the speed, the other half being in the elimination of waste motions.36
Photograph captions indicate how the scientifically managed office earns savings of 20 percent in envelope stuffing, through the elimination of useless motions and the deployment of more salubrious furniture. “This ‘motion-studied’ mail opening table made possible a 20% increase in the output,” Leffingwell writes in one caption. “This girl takes out money and letters and pins and sorts them at the rate of 310 an hour. Note the sunken baskets and the footrest.”37 Observation also reduces fatigue and inefficiency in typing: “A typist who could write very rapidly had the habit of continually twisting her head to read the copy, often as many as four or five times for each sentence. It was only a habit, since there was nothing the matter with her memory, as was proved by asking her to repeat a sentence of the copy which she had only read once. When it was pointed out to her that she was twisting her head eight or ten times a minute, over 500 times an hour, the habit was stopped, resulting in an immediate increase of speed and a decrease in fatigue.”38 At the same time, Leffingwell notes the difficulty of instituting time study and management techniques on the office floor and suggests manipulative forms of games to encourage workers to participate in the study: “One manager who has had considerable success in introducing the use of the stop watch in his office, casually remarks to his subject: ‘I wonder how long it takes you to do that job?’ After two or three employees have been timed and nothing has happened, the rest of the office force is usually not only willing but anxious to be ‘time studied.’ ”39
Yet for the most part, besides demonstrating the mania of the Taylorists for infinite subdivision of tasks and time study, Leffingwell’s treatise unconsciously reveals the sheer novelty of office life itself—the fact that managers were mostly unsure of how to organize and run offices. When not discussing time and motion study, Leffingwell covers fundamentals in office life in a superficial, basic way. “In many offices little attention is given to the selection of pencils,” he writes, alarmed. “In some kinds of work a soft lead pencil is required, in others a medium, and in still others a hard lead. Sometimes an eraser is necessary.”40 Discussing lighting in an office, Leffingwell writes, in a mixed tone of discovery and authoritativeness, that “some kinds of work require much better light than others—see that those workers who require the most light get their preference.”41 As for office layout, his “scientific” inclination is to reproduce the
assembly-line model of the factory floor. He suggests that departments which depend on each other be placed near each other. And his recommendation on water fountains, with its exceedingly precise calculations, can read like a satire on Taylorism itself: “The average person should drink water at least five or six times a day. If each of one hundred clerks in an office were compelled to walk fifty feet to, and fifty feet from, the fountain, five times a day, each one would walk five hundred feet a day. Multiplied by one hundred clerks the distance traveled would be fifty thousand feet, or nearly ten miles! Multiplied by three hundred working days, the clerks would be walking three thousand miles for water in a year.”42 Elsewhere in his book, Leffingwell emphasized the importance of what was called “welfare work”—which today we would class as the amenities offered by a particular office (recreational facilities, adequately potable coffee, the occasional leftover bagel from a breakfast meeting). In the mechanized world of the Taylorist office, the amenities were different: a “rest room,” where women could lie down on couches or congregate around a phonograph to dance, or one where men could retreat during fifteen-minute breaks to smoke.
All these were the signs of an office world that was only just coming into its own; the notion of “the office” itself, as a separate world, with its own rules and atmosphere and culture, was being justified under the rubric of management. The office was no longer merely an administrative holding tank, parasitic on the “real work” done in factories and fields, but the place where the real work was in fact getting done. Lee Galloway, another Taylor disciple, addressed this very misconception in the opening to his manual, Office Management: “When it is seen that the activities of production and distribution are made possible only through the operations covered by the term ‘office work,’ then we approach the truer appraisal of the office as a necessary economic factor. The office managers and employees cease to be passive agents in the promotion of business and their labor is no longer charged to a non-productive account. They at once rise to the dignity of active forces which furnish constructive ideas, and co-ordinate the activities of the business into smoothly working units of enormous size and power.”43 The office, in other words, was becoming the real workplace, and scientific management attempted to view it as the site of a potential utopia: where buzzing managers proliferated like cicadas in summer, where impeccably ordered rows of desks receded into the vanishing point of the horizon, where American business became inexorable, honed, and proud.
It’s worth dwelling on what Taylorism and other contemporary theories of efficiency must have done to the world of the office worker. The effects were no doubt felt unequally among generations. Much like contemporary office workers who witnessed the last throes of the typewriter and the Dictaphone and learned to embrace the personal computer and the photocopier, office workers in the twenty years following the turn of the century experienced a profound shift in the pace, nature, and volume of work. Offices with only a few clerks suddenly had hundreds; bosses who were once as near to you as the length of your arm were suddenly insulated in posh executive suites. The small merchants’ offices had metastasized into a paperwork empire, spanning not only dense cities but entire continents. Offices were segregated into departments, and the departments split hierarchically into managers and clerks. Work had, for most people, gotten more specialized and less interesting. Blessed be drudgery!
Office workers were forced to become aware of their bodies and their motions in time beyond anything that they had known before. Taylorism, whether applied in its most ruthless form or not, ensured constant supervision. Pictures of offices from the time show foreman-like workers pacing the floors over sitting clerks with their heads bowed—no one seeming to make light conversation, no one daring to turn their eyes from their work. In many offices, the wrong motion would earn demerits. Thanks to the spread of Taylorism, managers believed almost dogmatically that slight shifts in office arrangements could change behavior as well as allegiances and work habits. And in fact they were right. The early management theorist R. H. Goodell described an example where clerical workers were constantly disrupted by visitors passing in a corridor. He decided to turn the desks away from the door, and also from their supervisor’s desk. This meant that they were no longer disrupted but also no longer saw their supervisor observing them—even though they knew he was constantly watching.44 In other words, it was easier for workers to continue working if they internalized the watchful eye of their boss. No doubt, still other offices observed the more casual nature of the old countinghouses, but these were usually smaller firms. The unscripted practices of the old offices would remain, but as a kind of subterfuge: in the future, a leisurely pace wouldn’t be the norm; time would not be given, but stolen.
Taylorism succeeded not just because of the force of its founder’s personality; it also harmonized with a broader cultural shift toward anatomizing the movements of people’s bodies in time. From Cubist painters like Braque and Picasso to photographers like Eadweard Muybridge, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an obsession with breaking down objects, moments, and bodies—one that corresponded to a breaking down of the features of the mind itself. The strict movements of classical ballet were giving way to the seemingly more free but no less planned motions of modern dance. And finally, the birth of the cinema meant that motion could be captured in a continuous stream and then slowed down—viewed in its component parts. Among the most fervent moviegoers, of course, were clerks themselves. The workers who labored under Taylorism saw themselves as swept up in a tremendous current in which hitherto unacknowledged aspects of their lives were being scrutinized.45
The sense of being watched was part of a larger change in the process of work, in which segments of the office workforce felt themselves turned into objects rather than agents of capitalism. Until the turn of the century, it was easier to draw distinctions along what has only half jokingly been called the “collar line,” the separation between manual and nonmanual labor that made most clerks feel that they belonged naturally to the upper stratum of society. Indeed, the very phrase “white-collar” to designate a certain kind of worker was coined when the socialist writer Upton Sinclair deployed it in his polemic against the mainstream press, The Brass Check (1920), to describe conservative journalists who looked down on the industrial working class. “Because they are allowed to wear a white collar,” he sneered, “[they] regard themselves as members of the capitalist class.”46 Cartoon images of the Taylor system depicted snooty, pale, vested men directing begrimed and sweaty industrial workers: here was the office taking precedence over the factory, the white collar over the blue, and the skilled, knowledgeable worker over the drone he has forcibly de-skilled.
But this image of superiority was no longer the experience of many workers. Even the office had been fractured by the forceful separation of ownership from management and the construction of a new, elaborate system of hierarchies in the modern American corporation. “The clerical employee is no longer as intimate as he used to be,” BusinessWeek (née System) noted in 1929. “He is anybody at all, a worker, almost a number, like a mill hand.”47 There was no longer the easy correlation to be made between clean labor and being middle-class. The connection that a man like Edward Tailer once drew between his low position as a clerk and that of his boss became separated by a gulf. By separating knowledge from the basic work process (“the separation of conception from execution,” as Harry Braverman once put it), in the factory as well as in the office, the ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work. Somewhat more dangerously, this division put into serious doubt the notion that office workers were, as a whole, on the way up. Some of them were closer in income, status, and life chances to the grimy manual workers they were supposed to be directing. It became increasingly clear from the shape of the offices themselves, and from the dist
ance between the top and the bottom rungs of the “ladder,” that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck. How they would react to these changes would shape the course of the office for generations to come.
Trade union responses to Taylorism often emphasized the division between genteel white-collar managers and the work they forcibly (mis)directed. Smithsonian institution
In 1906, some years before Taylor had achieved his fame, an office building appeared whose concerted, unified conception of architecture, layout, design, and management seemed to anticipate and solve all the problems of management and office labor. On the outside, the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York, designed by the young Frank Lloyd Wright for the Larkin Soap Company, looked heavy and undistinguished: a stern pile of brick piers, guarded at the corners by pylon-like stair towers, seemingly at one with the smoke-ringed, snow-walled surroundings of turn-of-the-century upstate New York. But visitors entering the building were astounded by the airiness and light of the interior court, where under a lofty ceiling orderly rows of clerks diligently handled the piles of correspondence pouring into the building with implacable speed. Unusual for any office building was the coolness of the air, maintained at a temperate level even as the midsummer heat asphyxiated Buffalo’s residents outside. The lives of all the workers were at once supervised and organized, with Larkin offering lunchrooms, a bathhouse, hospital clinics, safety training, a gym, thrift clubs, benefit funds, picnics, weekly concerts, and a profit-sharing plan.48 Striving at once to be the acme of a progressive company and the model office, Larkin anticipated the familial and all-enveloping nature of many corporations to come.