A boisterous elementary school lunch hour (it was hot dog day!) gave way not to scholarly study but to an exuberant noisy classroom of kids with bums steadfastly resistant to remaining seated in their plastic chairs. Not flustered, our teacher with his metre stick gave a loud rap on the chalkboard. “Kids” he announced, “we’re disturbing the class next door with all this noise. I’m excited to get out of here for the weekend as much as you are but the Law says we have to keep you until the final bell. So we have two options. Either we all work quietly on whatever suits our pleasure or” he paused, a glimmer in his eye—the same gleam that led him on many an afternoon to hand out lyric sheets and strum his guitar so we could all gleefully chorus the lyrics to anti-work songs like Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm, “I can assign some busywork.” His pronunciation of the B Word, resonant in our inchoate brains as a hallmark of incoming toil and drudgery the likes of which our little pencil fingers found achingly mindless in a manner that would make a Dickensian child factory worker blush, shut us up faster than an invitation to volunteer for garbage duty.
We’d have rather be poked in the eye with the poky garbage picker claw that many of us had been saddled with for pranks like releasing the class Tarantula (to the tune of “borrnnnn freeee” or pouring water on the teacher’s plush office chair during April Fool’s shenanigans) than sit quietly with some mindless spreadsheet. So, the invitation to work on what we each most enjoyed was the ultimate motivational tool; like the method of avoiding procrastination by thinking of something you want to do next, only in reverse, this stick side economy of time management worked every time to keep heinies in place and decibel level below that of a dull roar. It can’t all be carrots, but a carrot is always in mind. So, the afternoon passed in peace and the moment of the teacher’s binary democratic offer stuck with me right through to when I entered undergrad sociology and learned about the all-too modern notion of Scientific Management in the workforce.
The need to balance productivity with the requirement that one avoid a rebellion or sit-down strike (or an unruly classroom) has been with us ever since society turned its wandering eye toward the belief that being inside was the way to get things done.
Fast forward, or backward.
In 1911 a Quaker born to abolitionist parents named F.W. Taylor was part of an incipient ruling class of industrial bureaucrats who liked to get their hands dirty. Behind their tinkering and inventions, Taylor saw in economic life one goal above all else: the possibility of making more products faster and cheaper. Contrary to Karl Marx, who was known at the time for his core value that all labour is at bottom a social relation, Taylor was exclusively about (imagine a Beavis and/or Butthead voiceover from their 1994 soundtrack album) gettin’ the job done. Efficiency, productivity, and innovation in theory combined into a lithe labor-relations success story at lathe and loom. Who wouldn’t, Taylor assumed, want to get as much work done in as little possible time?
The assurance that a hard day’s work yielded universal and unproblematic rewards in Taylor’s mind went unchallenged. Yet, in reality, he found himself in conflict everywhere he went. Even as profits soared, workers chaffed at his precise calculations, and thus expectations, and managers rebuffed his inhumanity towards their men. Ironically, even as he sought to get the most out of his charges, Taylor didn’t accept that many workers felt their lives to be on a spectrum with slaves, the sort his family sought to abolish, rather than valorous participants in the creation of a new industrial utopia.
To be fair, Taylor began with a noble concept familiar to us today: the need to conserve our resources that our planet might not become withered, haggard, and barren.
“We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of” national efficiency,” are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated.”
In other words, we don’t only not know what we have till it’s gone—we also lack understanding of our true productive potential.
Waste barrels were slow to arrive on city streets so Taylor’s notion that much dross was being cast aside, and much time wasted in just standing around and watching the world go by, appeared a doable sell. Where the facial shaving shortcomings visible on a man who had failed to dutifully utilize his strop sharpener was a mark, a stigma, carried throughout the man’s day, Taylor didn’t stop at the aesthetic realm of looking productive, or playing the part of worker ready to pony up his efforts. What irked Taylor ran deeper than the whole dressed for success motif so common in our visual digital culture. His theme that results were all that mattered was a long time evolving: starting with Protestant thinkers, like John Calvin, who were desperate to see signs of God’s Grace in personal life (given that mere acts of confession and repentance were no longer seen as sufficient), the notion that lost potential was an irredeemable sin had been building since the Reformation began in the early 16th Century.
“We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them.” To discover diligence of character, given the ephemeral nature of results, or lack thereof, when potential remained hidden, was too big an ask. Taylor was a man of action, though.
To get the most out of workers, Taylor believed that a system of training, akin to preparing a prized fighter or an avid wet nurse, was called for. “No great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.” Such a system, naturally dispensed in mandatory fashion by owners of this or that industrial operation, was for Taylor better than leaving workers to their own devices. “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first” was his mantra. What was going on was a steady evaporation of individual initiative for the majority of workers—a reality that had begun as soon as the doors of the first factories slammed shut with their occupants, like dairy cattle hooked up to suction tubes, to do as they were told. One might think here of the Matrix films, where one realizes one’s submission and bondage only upon waking up from one’s condition of external and coercive control that had all the while been masquerading as a dreamland of fulfilled desires and fantasy dalliances.
What was happening during the early 20th Century was a concurrent tightening of the noose of control around worker’s necks (the ten hour and, much later, eight-hour work day was a long, hard-won, struggle—sixteen hour days certainly seemed more productive) combined with a deepening cultural sensation that only concentrated vigor carried true valor. It’s a realm familiar nowadays as we ponder the exertions so championed by legions of sweating and fainting and swimming-with-turds-in-the-Seine Olympians. Clearly, swimming as we do in a digital soup of distractions, our ability to succeed at our studies depends most perspicaciously on our being the best of all office or factory managers: the maker of our own destiny, rather than the methodical maker of profits and ideas for others. Academia is not, after all, immune from the production expectations of industrial life—even though, as history shows, the greatest ideas often bend back the nails on a chalkboard of hitherto unquestioned belief systems.
