{"id":62766,"date":"2023-08-12T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2023-08-12T05:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62766"},"modified":"2023-08-11T10:10:01","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T14:10:01","slug":"qotd-scientific-management-and-the-work-to-rule-reaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/08\/12\/qotd-scientific-management-and-the-work-to-rule-reaction\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Scientific management and the work-to-rule reaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Scientific management<\/a>, a.k.a. “Taylorism”, was all the rage around the turn of the 20th century. At its crudest (and I’m only exaggerating a little), you’ve got some dork with a stopwatch and a camera standing behind you while you do your job, and after some observations and a little math, the dork tells you you’re pulling the lever wrong. There’s a scientifically optimized way to pull that lever, one that shaves 0.6 seconds off each of your work “processes”, and henceforth you shall be required to do this exact sequence of steps, every time … and if you disagree, too bad, why do you hate science? Similar regulations follow, until the whole plant is “scientifically” optimized.<\/p>\n

And since this is the great age of “Progress”, you’ve got umpteen government regulations to deal with now, too. And then as now, the august personages in Congress wouldn’t dream of soiling even their shoes, let alone their hands, by going anywhere near anyplace labor is actually performed, so all these regulations have been promulgated ex cathedra<\/em>. Suddenly the straightforward, mindless job of lever-pulling \u2014 the one that was already so insulting to the human spirit, so “alienating”, as Marx put it, something to be endured because one has no choice \u2014 is bound up with reams of regulations, too. If you don’t like it, build your own factory.<\/p>\n

But in this, the workers saw opportunity. You’re going to tell me how to do my job? Fine, but you’d better tell me how to do all<\/em> of it. Is there anything the Policies and Procedures<\/em> manual leaves unexplained? Where to place my feet as I stand in front of the lever, for example? I’d better not do anything until the manager tells me exactly what to do, in writing<\/em>, in a fully-vetted update to the P&P, and have you run that by Compliance, sir? Perhaps the lawyers in the Environmental Division should take a gander, too, since who knows what might contribute to Global Warm … errrrr, whatever, you get the point. It turns out that even back then, when there was no such thing as OSHA or the EPA or the rest of the Federal alphabet soup, the “scientific managers”, let alone Congress, simply weren’t able to envision the nuances of everyone’s day-to-day job. Or, for that matter, the very basics of everyone’s job. Work ground to a halt because everyone was following the rules.<\/p>\n

Severian, “A History Lesson”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2021-01-14.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scientific management, a.k.a. “Taylorism”, was all the rage around the turn of the 20th century. At its crudest (and I’m only exaggerating a little), you’ve got some dork with a stopwatch and a camera standing behind you while you do your job, and after some observations and a little math, the dork tells you you’re […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,831,84,7,41,13],"tags":[95,39,261,661,1462],"class_list":["post-62766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-business","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-jobs","tag-junkscience","tag-management","tag-regulation","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gkm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62766"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":84188,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62766\/revisions\/84188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}