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decisions that are made in the course of work. Since, in the case of pig-iron handling, the only decisions to be made were those having to do with a time sequence, Taylor simply dictated that timing and the results at the end of the day added up to his planned day-task. As to the use of money as motivation, while this element has a usefulness in the first stages of a new mode of work, employers do not, when they have once found a way to compel a more rapid pace of work, continue to pay a 60 percent differential for common labor, or for any other job. Taylor was to discover (and to complain) that management treated his “scientific incentives" like any other piece rate, cutting them mercilessly so long as the labor market permitted, so that workers pushed to the Taylorian intensity found themselves getting little, or nothing, more than the going rate for the area, while other employers—under pressure of this competitive threat—forced their own workers to the higher intensities of labor.\*

Taylor liked to pretend that his work standards were not beyond human capabilities exercised without undue strain, but as he himself made clear, this pretense could be maintained only on the understanding that unusual physical specimens were selected for each of his jobs:

instead of twelve and a half tons of pig iron a day. Every detail of the man's job was specified: the size of the shovel, the bite into the pile, the weight of the scoop, the distance to walk, the arc of the swing, and the rest periods that Schmidt should take. By systematically varying each factor, Taylor got the optimum amount of barrow load.21 In the face of so much circumstantial detail, one hesitates to inquire whether Professor Bell can imagine handling a 92-pound pig of iron on a shovel, let alone what sort of an “arc of the swing" one could manage, or how a "barrow" would handle a whole “scoop"” of them. The point here is not that anyone may be tripped up by the use of secondary sources, or get his stories mixed, or have never seen a pig of iron; the point is that sociologists, with few exceptions, deem it proper to write about occupations, work, skills, etc. without even bare familiarity. The result is what one would get from a school ofliterary critics who never read the novels, plays, poems they write about, but construct their theories entirely on the basis of responses to questionnaires put to “scientifically selected samples" of readers. Bell's error is only the grandfather of a long line of such misapprehensions, which become truly extraordinary as more complex forms of work are dealt with. In this situation, management canand gleefully does—tell academics anything it pleases about the evolution of work, skills, etc.

As to the scientific selection of the men, it is a fact that in this gang of 75 pig-iron handlers only about one man in eight was physically capable of handling 47½/ tons per day. With the very best of intentions, the other seven out of eight men were physically unable to work at this pace. Now the one man in eight who was able to do this work was in no sense superior to the other men who were working on the gang. He merely happened to be a man of the type of the ox,—no rare specimen of humanity, difficult to find and therefore very highly prized. On the contrary, he was a man so stupid that he was unfitted to do most kinds of laboring work, even. The selection of the man, then, does not involve finding some extraordinary individual, but merely picking out from among very ordinary men the few who are especially suited to this type of work. Although in this particular gang only one man in eight was suited to doing the work, we had not the slightest difficulty in getting all the men who were neededsome of them from inside the works and others from the neighboring country—who were exactly suited to the job.23 \*

Taylor spent his lifetime in expounding the principles of control enunciated here, and in applying them directly to many other tasks: shoveling loose materials, lumbering, inspecting ball bearings, etc., but particularly to the machinist's trade. He believed that the forms of control he advocated could be applied not only to simple labor, but to labor in its most complex forms, without exception, and in fact it was in machine shops, bricklaying, and other such sites for the practice of well-developed crafts that he and his immediate successors achieved their most striking results.

From earliest times to the Industrial Revolution the craft or skilled trade was the basic unit, the elementary cell of the labor process. In each craft, the worker was presumed to be the master of a body of traditional knowledge, and methods and procedures were left to his or her discretion. In each such worker reposed the accumulated knowledge of materials and processes by which production was accomplished in the craft. The potter, tanner, smith, weaver, carpenter, baker, miller, glassmaker, cobbler, etc., each representing a branch of the social division of labor, was a repository of human technique for the labor processes of that branch. The worker combined, in mind and body, the concepts and physical dexterities of the specialty: technique, understood in this way, is, as has often been observed, the predecessor and progenitor of science. The most important and widespread of all crafts was, and throughout the world remains to this day, that of farmer. The farming family combines its craft with the rude practice of a number of others, including those of the smith, mason, carpenter, butcher, miller, and baker, etc. The apprenticeships required in traditional crafts ranged from three to seven years, and for the farmer of course extends beyond this to include most of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. In view of the knowledge to be assimilated, the dexterities to be gained, and the fact that the craftsman, like the professional, was required to master a specialty and become the best judge of the manner of its application to specific production problems, the years of apprenticeship were generally needed and were employed in a learning process that extended well into the journeyman decades. Of these trades, that of the machinist was in Taylor's day among the most recent, and certainly the most important to modern industry.

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\* In his classic study of scientific management undertaken in 1915 for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Robert F. Hoxie pointed out that most rate cutting in shops which had installed a formal system of scientific management took place indirectly, by creating new job classifications at lower rates, etc. He concludes that under scientific management “what amounts to rate cutting seems to be almost of ,, 22 necessity an essential part of its very nature.

\* Georges Friedmann reports that in 1927 a German physiologist, reviewing the Schmidt experience, calculated that the level of output set by Taylor could not be accepted as a standard because “most workers will succumb under the pressure of these labors.24 Yet Taylor persisted in calling it “a pace under which men become happier and thrive."25 We should also note that although Taylor called Schmidt “a man of the type of the ox," and Schmidt's stupidity has become part of the folklore of industrial sociology, Taylor himself reported that Schmidt was building his own house, presumably without anyone to tell him when to stand and when to squat. But a belief in the original stupidity of the worker is a necessity for management; otherwise it would have to admit that it is engaged in a wholesale enterprise of prizing and fostering stupidity.

As I have already pointed out, Taylor was not primarily concerned with the advance of technology (which, as we shall see, offers other means for direct control over the labor process). He did make significant contributions to the technical knowledge of machine-shop practice (high-speed tool steel, in particular), but these were chiefly by-products of his effort to study this practice with an eye to systematizing and classifying it. His concern was with the control of labor at any given level of technology, and he tackled his own trade with a boldness and energy which astonished his contemporaries and set the pattern for industrial engineers, work designers, and office managers from that day on. And in tackling machine-shop work, he had set himself a prodigious task.

The machinist of Taylor's day started with the shop drawing, and turned, milled, bored, drilled, planed, shaped, ground, filed, and otherwise machineand hand-processed the proper stock to the desired shape as specified in the drawing. The range of decisions to be made in the course of the process is—unlike the case of a simple job, such as the handling of pig iron—by its very nature enormous. Even for the lathe alone, disregarding all collateral tasks such as the choice of stock, handling, centering and chucking the work, layout and measuring, order of cuts, and considering only the operation of turning itself, the range of possibilities is huge. Taylor himself worked with twelve variables, including the hardness of the metal, the material of the cutting tool, the thickness of the shaving, the shape of the cutting tool, the use of a coolant during cutting, the depth of the cut, the frequency of regrinding cutting tools as they became dulled, the lip and clearance angles of the tool, the smoothness of cutting or absence of chatter, the diameter of the stock being turned, the pressure of the chip or shaving on the cutting surface of the tool, and the speeds, feeds, and pulling power of the machine.26 Each of these variables is subject to broad choice, ranging from a few possibilities in the selection and use of a coolant, to a very great number of effective choices in all matters having to do with thickness, shape, depth, duration, speed, etc. Twelve variables, each subject to a large number of choices, will yield in their possible combinations and permutations astronomical figures, as Taylor soon realized. But upon these decisions of the machinist depended not just the accuracy and finish of the product, but also the pace of production. Nothing daunted, Taylor set out to gather into management's hands all the basic information bearing on these processes. He began a series of experiments at the Midvale Steel Company, in the fall of 1880, which lasted twenty-six years, recording the results of between 30,000 and 50,000 tests, and cutting up more than 800,000 pounds of iron and steel on ten different machine tools reserved for his experimental use.\* His greatest difficulty, he reported, was not testing the many variations, but holding eleven variables constant while altering the conditions of the twelfth. The data were systematized, correlated, and reduced to practical form in the shape of what he called a “slide rule" which would determine the optimum combination of choices for each step in the machining process.28 His machinists thenceforth were required to work in accordance with instructions derived from these experimental data, rather than from their own knowledge, experience, or tradition. This was the Taylor approach in its first systematic application to a complex labor process. Since the principles upon which it is based are fundamental to all advanced work design or industrial engineering today, it is important to examine them in detail. And since Taylor has been virtually alone in giving clear expression to principles which are seldom now publicly acknowledged, it is best to examine them with the aid of Taylor's own forthright formulations.

First Principle

“The managers assume .. . the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae. . . ." 29 We have seen the illustrations of this in the cases of the lathe machinist and the pig-iron handler. The great disparity between these activities, and the different orders of knowledge that may be collected about them, illustrate that for Tayloras for managers todayno task is either so simple or so complex that it may not be studied with the object of collecting in the hands of management at least as much information as is known by the worker who performs it regularly, and very likely more. This brings to an end the situation in which “Employers derive their knowledge of how much of a given class of work can be done in a day from either their own experience, which has frequently grown hazy with age, from casual and unsystematic observation of their men, or at best from records which are kept, showing the quickest time in which each job has been done." 3º It enables management to discover and enforce those speedier methods and shortcuts which workers themselves, in the practice of their trades or tasks, learn or improvise, and use at their own discretion only. Such an experimental approach also brings into being new methods such as can be devised only through the means of systematic study.

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\* Friedmann so far forgets this enormous machine-shop project at one point that he says: “This failure to appreciate the psychological factors in work is at least partially explained by the nature of the jobs to which Taylor exclusively confined his observations: handlers of pig iron, shovel-laborers, and navvies."27 He was led to this error by his marked tendency to side with the psychological and sociological schools of“human relations" and work adjustment which came after Taylor, and which he always attempts to counterpose to Taylorism, although, as we have pointed out, they operate on different levels. In general, Friedmann, with all his knowledge of work processes, suffers from a confusion of viewpoints, writing sometimes as a socialist concerned about the trends in capitalist work organization, but more often as though the various forms of capitalist management and personnel administration represent scrupulous efforts to find a universal answer to problems of work.

This first principle we may call the dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers. The labor process is to be rendered independent of craft, tradition, and the workers' knowledge. Henceforth it is to depend not at all upon the abilities of workers, but entirely upon the practices ofmanagement.

Second Principle

“All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department. . . ." 31 Since this is the key to scientific management, as Taylor well understood, he was especially emphatic on this point and it is important to examine the principle thoroughly.

In the human, as we have seen, the essential feature that makes for a labor capacity superior to that of the animal is the combination of execution with a conception of the thing to be done. But as human labor becomes a social rather than an individual phenomenon, it is possible—unlike in the instance of animals where the motive force, instinct, is inseparable from actionto divorce conception from execution. This dehumanization of the labor process, in which workers are reduced almost to the level of labor in its animal form, while purposeless and unthinkable in the case of the self-organized and self-motivated social labor of a community of producers, becomes crucial for the management of purchased labor. For if the workers' execution is guided by their own conception, it is not possible, as we have seen, to enforce upon them either the methodological efficiency or the working pace desired by capital. The capitalist therefore learns from the start to take advantage of this aspect of human labor power, and to break the unity of the labor process.

This should be called the principle of the separation of conception from execution, rather than by its more common name of the separation of mental and manual labor (even though it is similar to the latter, and in practice often identical). This is because mental labor, labor done primarily in the brain, is also subjected to the same principle of separation of conception from execution: mental labor is first separated from manual labor and, as we shall see, is then itself subdivided rigorously according to the same rule.

The first implication of this principle is that Taylor's “science of work" is never to be developed by the worker, always by management. This notion, apparently so “natural" and undebatable today, was in fact vigorously discussed in Taylor's day, a fact which shows how far we have traveled along the road of transforming all ideas about the labor process in less than a century, and how completely Taylor's hotly contested assumptions have entered into the conventional outlook within a short space of time. Taylor confronted this questionwhy must work be studied by the management and not by the worker himself; why not scientific workmanship rather than scientific management?—repeatedly, and employed all his ingenuity in devising answers to it, though not always with his customary frankness, In The Principles of Scientific Management, he pointed out that the “older system" of management

makes it necessary for each workman to bear almost the entire responsibility for the general plan as well as for each detail of his work, and in many cases for his implements as well. In addition to this he must do all of the actual physical labor. The development of a science, on the other hand, involves the establishment of many rules, laws, and formulae which replace the judgment of the individual workman and which can be effectively used only after having been systematically recorded, indexed, etc. The practical use of scientific data also calls for a room in which to keep the books, records, etc., and a desk for the planner to work at. Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workman, as a result of his personal experience, must of necessity under the new system be done by the management in accordance with the laws of the science; because even if the workman was well suited to the development and use of scientific data, it would be physically impossible for him to work at his machine and at a desk at the same time. It is also clear that in most cases one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work.32

The objections having to do with physical arrangements in the workplace are clearly of little importance, and represent the deliberate exaggeration of obstacles which, while they may exist as inconveniences, are hardly insuperable. To refer to the “different type” of worker needed for each job is worse than disingenuous, since these “different types" hardly existed until the division of labor created them. As Taylor well understood, the possession of craft knowledge made the worker the best starting point for the development of the science of work; systematization often means, at least at the outset, the gathering of knowledge which workers already possess. But Taylor, secure in his obsession with the immense reasonableness of his proposed arrangement, did not stop at this point. In his testimony before the Special Committee of the House of Representatives, pressed and on the defensive, he brought forth still other arguments:

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I want to make it clear, Mr. Chairman, that work of this kind undertaken by the management leads to the development of a science, while it is next to impossible for the workman to develop a science. There are many workmen who are intellectually just as capable of developing a science, who have plenty of brains, and are just as capable of developing a science as those on the managing side. But the science of doing work of any kind cannot be developed by the workman. Why? Because he has neither the time nor the money to do it. The development of the science of doing any kind of work always required the work of two men, one man who actually does the work which is to be studied and another man who observes closely the first man while he works and studies the time problems and the motion problems connected with this work. No workman has either the time or the money to burn in making experiments of this sort. If he is working for himself no one will pay him while he studies the motions of some one else. The management must and ought to pay for all such work. So that for the workman, the development of a science becomes impossible, not because the workman is not intellectually capable of developing it, but he has neither the time nor the money to do it and he realizes that 33 this is a question for the management to handle.

Taylor here argues that the systematic study of work and the fruits of this study belong to management for the very same reason that machines, factory buildings, etc., belong to them; that is, because it costs labor time to conduct such a study, and only the possessors of capital can afford labor time. The possessors of labor time cannot themselves afford to do anything with it but sell it for their means of subsistence. It is true that this is the rule in capitalist relations of production, and Taylor's use of the argument in this case shows with great clarity where the sway of capital leads: Not only is capital the property of the capitalist, but labor itself has become part of capital. Not only do the workers lose control over their instruments of production, but they must now lose control over their own labor and the manner of its performance. This control now falls to those who can “afford" to study it in order to know it better than the workers themselves know their own life activity.

But Taylor has not yet completed his argument: “Furthermore," he told the Committee, “if any workman were to find a new and quicker way of doing work, or if he were to develop a new method, you can see at once it becomes to his interest to keep that development to himself, not to teach the other workmen the quickermethod. It is to his interest to do what workmen have done in all times, to keep their trade secrets for themselves and their friends. That is the old idea oftrade secrets. The workman kept his knowledge to himselfinstead ofdevelopinga science andteaching itto others andmaking it public property."34Behind this hearkening back to old ideas of “guild secrets" is Taylor's persistent and fundamental notion that the improvement of work methods by workers brings few benefits to management. Elsewhere in his testimony, in discussing the work of his associate, Frank Gilbreth, who spent many years studying bricklaying methods, he candidly admits that not only could the “science of bricklaying" be developed by workers, but that it undoubtedly had been: "Now, I have not the slightest doubt that during the last 4,000 years all the methods that Mr. Gilbreth developed have many, many times suggested themselves to the minds of bricklayers." But because knowledge possessed by workers is not useful to capital, Taylor begins his list of the desiderata of scientific management: "First. The development—by the management, not the workmen—of the science of bricklaying."35 Workers, he explains, are not going to put into execution any system or any method which harms them and their workmates: "Would they be likely," he says, referring to the pig-iron job, “to get rid of seven men out of eight from their own gang and retain only the eighth man? No!"36

Finally, Taylor understood the Babbage principle better than anyone of his time, and it was always uppermost in his calculations. The purpose of work study was never, in his mind, to enhance the ability of the worker, to concentrate in the worker a greater share of scientific knowledge, to ensure that as technique rose, the worker would rise with it. Rather, the purpose was to cheapen the worker by decreasing his training and enlarging his output. In his early book, Shop Management, he said frankly that the “full possibilities" of his system “will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller calibre and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system."37

Therefore, both in order to ensure management control and to cheapen the worker, conception and execution must be rendered separate spheres of work and for this purpose the study of work processes must be reserved to management and kept from the workers, to whom its results are communicated only in the form of simplified job tasks governed by simplified instructions which it is thenceforth their duty to follow unthinkingly and without comprehension of the underlying technical reasoning or data.

Third Principle

The essential idea of“the ordinary types of management," Taylor said, “is that each workman has become more skilled in his own trade than it is possible for

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any one in the management to be, and that, therefore, the details of how the work shall best be done must be left to him." But, by contrast: "Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. . . . This task specifies not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. .. . Scientific management consists very largely in preparing for and carrying out these tasks."38

In this principle it is not the written instruction card that is important.\* Taylor had no need for such a card with Schmidt, nor did he use one in many other instances. Rather, the essential element is the systematic pre-planning and pre-calculation of all elements of the labor process, which now no longer exists as a process in the imagination of the worker but only as a process in the imagination of a special management staff. Thus, if the first principle is the gathering and development of knowledge of labor processes, and the second is the concentration of this knowledge as the exclusive province of management—together with its essential converse, the absence of such knowledge among the workers—then the third is the use of this monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process and its mode of execution.

As capitalist industrial, office, and market practices developed in accordance with this principle, it eventually became part of accepted routine and custom, all the more so as the increasingly scientific character of most processes, which grew in complexity while the worker was not allowed to partake of this growth, made it ever more difficult for the workers to understand the processes in which they functioned. But in the beginning, as Taylor well understood, an abrupt psychological wrench was required.\* We have seen in the simple Schmidt case the means employed, both in the selection of a single worker as a starting point and in the way in which he was reoriented to the new conditions of work. In the more complex conditions of the machine shop, Taylor gave this part of the responsibility to the foremen. It is essential, he said of the gang bosses, to “nerve and brace them up to the point of insisting that the workmen shall carry out the orders exactly as specified on the instruction cards. This is a difficult task at first, as the workmen have been accustomed for years to do the details of the work to suit themselves, and many of them are intimate friends of the bosses and believe they know quite as much about their business as the latter."41

Modern management came into being on the basis of these principles. It arose as theoretical construct and as systematic practice, moreover, in the very period during which the transformation of labor from processes based on skill to processes based upon science was attaining its most rapid tempo. Its role was to render conscious and systematic, the formerly unconscious tendency of capitalist production. It was to ensure that as craft declined, the worker would sink to the level of general and undifferentiated labor power, adaptable to a large range of simple tasks, while as science grew, it would be concentrated in the hands of management.

Notes

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\* This despite the fact that for a time written instruction cards were a fetish among managers. The vogue for such cards passed as work tasks became so simplified and repetitious as to render the cards in most cases unnecessary. But the concept behind them remains: it is the concept of the direct action of management to determine the process, with the worker functioning as the mediating and closely governed instrument. This is the significance of Lillian Gilbreth's definition of the instruction card as “a self-producer of a predetermined product."39 The worker as producer is ignored; management becomes the producer, and its plans and instructions bring the product into existence. This same instruction card inspired in Alfred Marshall, however, the curious opinion that from it, workers could learn how production is carried on: such a card, “whenever it comes into the hands of a thoughtful man, may suggest to him something of the purposes and methods of those who have constructed it."40 The worker, in Marshall's notion, having given up technical knowledge of the craft, is now to pick up the far more complex technical knowledge of modern industry from his task card, as a paleontologist reconstructs the entire animal from a fragment of a bone!

1. Peter F. Drucker, "Work and Tools," in Melvin Kranzberg and William H. Davenport, eds., Technology and Culture (New York, 1972), pp. 192-93.

1. George Soule, Economic Forces in American History (New York, 1952), p. 241.

1. Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York, 1954), p. 280.

1. See Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 115-17; and Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management (1916; trans., London, 1949).

\* One must not suppose from this that such a psychological shift in relations between worker and manager is entirely a thing of the past. On the contrary, it is constantly being recapitulated in the evolution of new occupations as they are brought into being by the development of industry and trade, and are then routinized and subjugated to management control. As this tendency has attacked office, technical, and “educated" occupations, sociologists have spoken of it as “bureaucratization," an evasive and unfortunate use of Weberian terminology, a terminology which often reflects its users’ view that this form of government over work is endemic to “largescale" or “complex” enterprises, whereas it is better understood as the specific product of the capitalist organization of work, and reflects not primarily scale but social antagonisms.

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Chapter 5

The Primary Effects of Scientific Management

The generalized practice of scientific management, as has been noted, coincides with the scientific-technical revolution. It coincides as well with a number of fundamental changes in the structure and functioning of capitalism and in the composition of the working class. In this chapter, we will discuss, in a preliminary way, some of the effects of scientific management upon the working class; later chapters will return to this discussion after the necessary conditions for understanding it more fully have been established.

The separation of mental work from manual work reduces, at any given level of production, the need for workers engaged directly in production, since it divests them of time-consuming mental functions and assigns these functions elsewhere. This is true regardless of any increase in productivity resulting from the separation. Should productivity increase as well, the need for manual workers to produce a given output is further reduced.

A necessary consequence of the separation of conception and execution is that the labor process is now divided between separate sites and separate bodies of workers. In one location, the physical processes of production are executed. In another are concentrated the design, planning, calculation, and record-keeping. The preconception of the process before it is set in motion, the visualization of each worker's activities before they have actually begun, the definition of each function along with the manner of its performance and the time it will consume, the control and checking of the ongoing process once it is under way, and the assessment of results upon completion of each stage of the process—all of these aspects of production have been removed from the shop floor to the management office. The physical processes of production are now carried out more or less blindly, not only by the workers who perform them, but often by lower ranks of supervisory employees as well. The production units operate like a hand, watched, corrected, and controlled by a distant brain.

The concept of control adopted by modern management requires that every activity in production have its several parallel activities in the management center: each must be devised, precalculated, tested, laid out, assigned and ordered, checked and inspected, and recorded throughout its duration and upon completion. The result is that the process of production is replicated in paper form before, as, and after it takes place in physical form. Just as labor in human beings requires that the labor process take place in the brain of the worker as well as in the worker's physical activity, so now the image of the process, removed from production to a separate location and a separate group, controls the process itself. The novelty of this development during the past century lies not in the separate existence of hand and brain, conception and execution, but the rigor with which they are divided from one another, and then increasingly subdivided, so that conception is concentrated, insofar as possible, in ever more limited groups within management or closely associated with it. Thus, in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.

This paper replica of production, the shadow form which corresponds to the physical, calls into existence a variety of new occupations, the hallmark of which is that they are found not in the flow of things but in the flow of paper. Production has now been split in two and depends upon the activities of both groups. Inasmuch as the mode of production has been driven by capitalism to this divided condition, it has separated the two aspects oflabor; but both remain necessary to production, and in this the labor process retains its unity.

The separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step in the division of labor taken by the capitalist mode of production. It is inherent in that mode of production from its beginnings, and it develops, under capitalist management, throughout the history of capitalism, but it is only during the past century that the scale of production, the resources made available to the modern corporation by the rapid accumulation of capital, and the conceptual apparatus and trained personnel have become available to institutionalize this separation in a systematic and formal fashion.\*

The vast industrial engineering and record-keeping divisions of modern corporations have their origins in the planning, estimating, and layout departments, which grew in the wake of the scientific management movement. These early departments had to make their way against the fears of cost-conscious managers, whom Taylor sought to persuade with the following argument: “At first view, the running of a planning department, together with the other innovations, would appear to involve a large amount of additional work and expense, and the most natural question would be is [sic] whether the increased efficiency of the shop more than offsets this outlay? It must be borne in mind, however, that, with the exception of the study of unit times, there is hardly a single item of work done in the planning department which is not already being done in the shop. Establishing a planning department merely concentrates the planning and much other brainwork in a few men especially fitted for their task and trained in their especial lines, instead of having it done, as heretofore, in most cases by high priced mechanics, well fitted to work at their trades, but poorly trained for work more or less clerical in its nature." But to this he added the following caution: “There is no question that the cost of production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work as much as possible from the manual labor. Where this is done, however, it is evident that the brain workers must be given sufficient work to keep them fully busy all the time. They must not be allowed to stand around for a considerable part of their time waiting for their particular kind of work to come along, as is so frequently the case."3 This is by way of serving notice that no part of capitalist employment is exempt from the methods which were first applied on the shop floor.

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\* The Hammonds speak of Boulton, who in the eighteenth century conducted a large-scale machine-tool factory at Soho in England in association with James Watt, as an “adept in scientific management." But the very description they cite of his management method belies this notion, and highlights by contrast the methods of modern management; “While sitting in the midst of his factory, surrounded by the clang of hammers and the noise of engines, he could usually detect when any stoppage occurred, or when the machinery was going too fast or too slow, and issue his orders accordingly."l Boulton did, however, have a well-developed supervisory line organization.

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At first glance, the organization of labor according to simplified tasks, conceived and controlled elsewhere, in place of the previous craft forms of labor, have a clearly degrading effect upon the technical capacity of the worker. In its effects upon the working population as a whole, however, this matter is complicated by the rapid growth of specialized administrative and technical staff work, as well as by the rapid growth of production and the shifting of masses to new industries and within industrial processes to new occupations.

In the discussion of this issue in Taylor's day, a pattern was set which has been followed since. “There are many people who will disapprove of the whole scheme of a planning department to do the thinking for the men,\* as well as a number of foremen to assist and lead each man in his work, on the ground that this does not tend to promote independence, self-reliance, and originality in the individual," he wrote in Shop Management. “Those holding this view, however, must take exception to the whole trend of modern industrial development." And in The Principles of Scientific Management: "Now, when through all of this teaching and this minute instruction the work is apparently made so smooth and easy for the workman, the first impression is that this all tends to make him a mere automaton, a wooden man. As the workmen frequently say when they first come under this system, Why, I am not allowed to think or move without someone interfering or doing it for me!’ The same criticism and objection, however, can be raised against all other modern subdivision of labor."5

These responses, however, clearly did not satisfy Taylor, particularly since they seemed to throw the blame on his own beloved “modern subdivision of labor." And so in both books he went on to further arguments, which in Shop Management took this form:

It is true, for instance, that the planning room, and functional foremanship render it possible for an intelligent laborer or helper in time to do much of the work now done by a machinist. Is not this a good thing for the laborer and helper? He is given a higher class of work, which tends to develop him and gives him better wages. In the sympathy for the machinist the case of the laborer is overlooked. This sympathy for the machinist is, however, wasted, since the machinist, with the aid of the new system, will rise to a higher class of work which he was unable to do in the past, and in addition, divided or functional foremanship will call for a larger number of men in this class, so that men, who must otherwise have remained machinists all their lives, will have the opportunity of rising to a foremanship.

The demand for men of originality and brains was never so great as it is now, and the modern subdivision of labor, instead of dwarfing men, enables them all along the line to rise to a higher plane of efficiency, involving at the same time more brain work and less monotony. The type of man who was formerly a day laborer and digging dirt is now for instance making shoes in a shoe factory. The dirt handling is done by Italians or Hungarians.' 6

This argument gains force in a period of growth, of the rapid accumulation of capital through production on an ever larger scale, and of the constant opening of new fields of capital accumulation in new industries or the conquest of pre-capitalist production forms by capital. In this context, new drafts of workers are brought into jobs that have already been degraded in comparison with the craft processes of before; but inasmuch as they come from outside the existing working class, chiefly from ruined and dispersed farming and peasant populations, they enter a process unknown to them from previous experience and they take the organization of work as given. Meanwhile, opportunities open up for the advancement of some workers into planning, layout, estimating, or drafting departments, or into foremanships (especially two or three generations ago, when such jobs were customarily still staffed from the shop floors). In this manner, short-term trends opening the way for the advancement of some workers in rapidly growing industries, together with the ever lower skill requirements characteristic at the entry level where large masses of workers are being put to work in industrial, office, and marketing processes for the first time, simply mask the secular trend toward the incessant lowering of the working class as a whole below its previous conditions of skill and labor. As this continues over several generations, the very standards by which the trend is judged become imperceptibly altered, and the meaning of‘skill" itself becomes degraded.

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\* I ask the reader, in passing, to note the bluntness of the phrase “a planning department to do the thinking for the men." The functions of planning departments have not changed, but in a more sophisticated age, and one in which debates rage about the organization of work, the managers are forewarned, and it is not thought necessary to speak so plainly.

Sociologists and economists, nevertheless, continue to repeat Taylor's argument in a world of labor that has become, for the largest portions of the working population, increasingly devoid of any content of either skill or scientific knowledge. Thus Michel Crozier, in The World of the Office Worker, concedes that as office work has become an immensely enlarged occupational field, its pay and status advantages over factory work have virtually disappeared: “A mass of unskilled employees assigned a series of simple unchanging operations." "It is this general pattern of evolution," he says, “anticipated by Marxist theoreticians, which constitutes the principal argument in favor of the thesis of proletarization of white-collar employees." His response, strikingly similar to Taylor's, differs from the latter only in that, in place of“Italians and Hungarians” he is pleased to use women as that category of the labor force for which any job is good enough: “The proletarization of white-collar employees does not have the same meaning at all if it is women, and not heads of family, who comprise the majority of the group."7 As he explains:

It is true of course, on the other hand, that the 900,000 French office workers of 1920 certainly had a more bourgeois status than the 1,920,000 white-collar employees of 1962. But to the 600,000 male employees of 1920 there now correspond probably 350,000 supervisors and 250,000 highly qualified employees whose status is at least equivalent to that of their predecessors of 1920. As for the 650,000 females newly entered into the profession, thirty years ago they were laborers, seamstresses, or maids. As deadening and as alienating as their assembly-line work may be, for them it may constitute a promotion.

product of well-developed technical skill in a given area of activity. Someone, some skilled worker, has in a reflective moment attempted to make explicit the assumptions that are implicit in the skill itself. . . . Science is rooted deep in skill and can only expand by the experimental and systematic development of an achieved skill. The successful sciences consequently are all of humble origin—the cautious development of lowly skills until the point of logical and experimental expansion is clearly gained."

The profession of engineering is a relatively recent development. Before the engineer, the conceptual and design functions were the province of craftsmanship, as were the functions of furthering the industrial arts through innovation. "The appearance of the modern engineer," Bernal says, "was a new social phenomenon. He is not the lineal descendant of the old military engineer but rather of the millwright and the metal-worker of the days of craftsmanship. Bramah (1748-1814), Maudslay (1771-1831), Muir (1806-1888), Whitworth (1803-1887), and the great George Stephenson (1781-1848) were all men of this type."10 Those even slightly familiar with the history of technology will recognize the importance of the names on this roster, to which can be added James Watt, whose trade was that of mathematical instrument maker; Samuel Crompton, who was himself a spinner from the age of fourteen and continued, in the absence of patent protection, to earn his living as a spinner even after his spinning mule was in widespread use; and many others.\* It should also be noted that up to 1824 it was illegal for a British mechanic to accept work abroad, a restriction inconceivable in our own day; the reasons for this were clear so long as the craftsman remained the repository of the technical knowledge of the production process.

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. . To be sure, the professions of white-collar employees and minor functionaries are, on the whole, considerably devalued compared to their status only fifty years ago. But this devaluation of the great mass of jobs has been accompanied, we have seen, by a much greater differentiation and a change in recruitment. The majority of white-collar tasks are less interesting, less prestigious, and bring lower remuneration, but they are carried out by women with 8 reduced aspirations. . . .

As craftsmanship is destroyed or increasingly emptied of its traditional content, the remaining ties, already tenuous and weakened, between the working population and science are more or less completely broken. This connection was, in the past, made chiefly through the craftsman or artisan section of the working class, and in the earliest periods of capitalism the connection was quite close. Before the assertion by management of its monopoly over science, craftsmanship was the chief repository of scientific production technique in its then existing form, and historical accounts emphasize the origins of science in craft technique.“Speaking historically," says Elton Mayo, "I think it can be asserted that a science has generally come into being as a

\* Despite the flood of mechanical invention in recent times, it would be impossible to construct such a list for this century. One can think of Frank Whittle, originally a rigger for metal aircraft, who played an important role in the invention of the jet engine, and John Harwood, a watchmaker and watch repairman who invented the self-winding wristwatch, patented in 1923. Hoxie reports that while he was preparing his study of scientific management, during the World War I period, he “saw in one shop an automatic machine invented by a workman which did the work of several hand workers. Did he receive any reward?’ was the question asked. Oh, yes,’ came the answer, his rate of pay was increased from 17 to 22 cents an hour.' Instances of this kind could be multiplied."! But in more recent times such cases are rare. A study of the occupational characteristics of a random sample of persons granted patents in the United States in 1953 showed that “about 60 percent were engineers, chemists, metallurgists, and directors of research and development, and that most of the rest were non-R.&D. executives; almost none were production workers."12 Here we may pause to give a decent burial to Adam Smith's third argument in favor of the technical division of labor: that the worker, with attention focused upon a single repeated operation, would devise machinery to facilitate that operation. Such truth as it once possessed has long since disappeared in the conditions of capitalist production in which the worker is neither encouraged nor permitted to understand his or her work.

The working craftsman was tied to the technical and scientific knowledge of his time in the daily practice of his craft. Apprenticeship commonly included training in mathematics, including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, in the properties and provenance of the materials common to the craft, in the physical sciences, and in mechanical drawing. Well-administered apprenticeships provided subscriptions to the trade and technical journals affecting the craft so that apprentices could follow developments.\* But more important than formal or informal training was the fact that the craft provided a daily link between science and work, since the craftsman was constantly called upon to use rudimentary scientific knowledge, mathematics, drawing, etc., in his practice.\*\* Such craftsmen were an important part of the scientific public of their time, and as a rule exhibited an interest in science and culture beyond that connected directly to their work. The flourishing Mechanics Institutes of the mid-nineteenth century, which in Britain numbered some 1,200 and had a membership of over 200,000, were in large measure devoted to satisfying this interest through lectures and libraries.1⁵ The Royal Institution, which existed in England to further the progress of science and its application to industry, was forced, when it became a fashionable place to visit and wished to preserve its exclusivity, to brick up its back door to keep out the mechanics who stole into the gallery.16 Samuel Gompers, as a cigarmaker living in New York's dense working-class district on the Lower East Side in the 1860s, saw and experienced this same working-class interest:

Cooper Union provided opportunities for formal study courses as well as lectures every Saturday evening which were usually attended by from twentyfive hundred to three thousand. Nothing humanly possible ever kept me from attending those Saturday night lectures. I was fairly quivering in my intense desire to know. Mental hunger is just as painful as physical hunger. Every Saturday night some great scholar talked to an open meeting and gave most wonderfully illuminating results of experimentation and study. Sometimes Professor Proctor told us of the wonders of astronomyof what science had learned of time and distance, light, motion, etc. Truths gleaned in these lectures became a most vital part of me and gave the world marvelously inspiring meaning. Those lectures were treasured opportunities to hear authorities in science tell what they were doing and thinking. I attended these lectures and study classes over a period of twenty years.17

We may marvel still at the British silk weavers of Spitalfields, whom Mayhew found, in the middle of the nineteenth century, living in incredible poverty and degradation, and who, but a short time before, when the day of the skilled hand-loom weaver was not yet over, had made their district of London a center of science and culture:

The weavers were, formerly, almost the only botanists in the metropolis, and their love of flowers to this day is a strongly marked characteristic of the class. Some years back, we are told, they passed their leisure hours, and generally the whole family dined on Sundays, at the little gardens in the environs of London, now mostly built upon. Not very long ago there was an Entomological Society, and they were among the most diligent entomologists, in the kingdom. This taste, though far less general than formerly, still continues to be a type of the class. There was at one time a Floricultural Society, an Historical Society, and a Mathematical Society, all maintained by the operative silk-weavers; and the celebrated Dollond, the inventor of the achromatic telescope, was a weaver; so too were Simpson and Edwards, the mathematicians, before they were taken from the loom into the employ of Government, to teach mathematics to the cadets at Woolwich and Chatham.18

The same remarkable history characterized the weavers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, as E. P. Thompson notes: “Every weaving district had its weaverpoets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists. . . . There are northern museums and natural history societies which still possess records or collections of lepidoptera built up by weavers; while there are accounts of weavers in isolated villages who taught themselves geometry by chalking on their flagstones, and who were eager to discuss the differential calculus. ",19

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\* The effects of the decline of apprenticeship were felt as long ago as the time of the Hoxie report, which says: "It is evident, however, that the native efficiency of the working class must suffer from the neglect of apprenticeship, if no other means of industrial education is forthcoming. Scientific managers, themselves, have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsmen who applied for employment twenty years ago."13 These same scientific managers have not ceased to complain bitterly, as is their wont, of the characteristics of a working population which they themselves have shaped to suit their ends, but they have not yet found a way to produce workers who are at one and the same time degraded in their place in the labor process, and also conscientious and proud of their work.

\*\* In a discussion of the craftsmen of the Industrial Revolution, David Landes writes: “Even more striking is the theoretical knowledge of these men. They were not, on the whole, the unlettered tinkerers of historical mythology. Even the ordinary millwright, as Fairbairn notes, was usually a fair arithmetician, knew something of geometry, levelling, and mensuration, and in some cases possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mathematics. He could calculate the velocities, strength, and power of machines: could draw in plan and section. . . .’ Much of these ‘superior attainments and intellectual power’ reflected the abundant facilities for technical education in ‘villages’ like Manchester during this period, ranging from Dissenters academies and learned societies to local and visiting lecturers, ‘mathematical and commercial’ private schools with evening classes, and a wide circulation of practical ,,14 manuals, periodicals, and encyclopaedias.