Taylorism

In the early 20th century, an engineer named Fredrick Winslow Taylor had an idea that became a phenomenon. This idea, which came to be known as “scientific management” or “Taylorism” was that you could break work down into discrete tasks, and then analyze each task to figure out the one best way to do it. There was a best shovel, a most efficient load for that shovel, an optimum direction to turn while using it, and so on. 

It’s hard to overstate how influential this worldview was at the time. Harvard University offered one of the first business management degrees in 1908, and its entire first year curriculum was Taylorism. (Lepore, 2009) Film, a technology in its infancy, became incredibly useful for “Motion Studies,” a technique for capturing these movements so they could be analyzed and understood in terms of the time they took.  Everything, in scientific management, could be timed, choreographed, and done better.

References

Lepore, J. (2009, October 5). Not So Fast. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast