Conclusion: Taylor and the Information Society


Industrial and scientific revolutions are close brothers. It is normal that industrial capitalism , since its beginning, arranged both technologies and strategies to turn production a lot more scientific and, therefore, reliable. This inevitably included also turning workers and their bodies into technological systems that should also be optimised to ensure better production. Rejection of Taylor and Ford s view on how to arrange the workplace, based on their alienating effects, are as old as the system itself. For example, as stated in Dunn (1929), The task of the worker requires simply speed, dexterity, alertness, and nervous endurance to carry the ˜robot through dull, monotonous, fatiguing, relentlessly automatic operations.

Nevertheless, Jean-Paul de Gaudemar s (1979) approach can be considered the first systematic approach to understanding the social and political effects that taylorisation has in the workplace. Using a Marxist analysis framework, Gaudemar divided capitalism into periods, using the way people ” the workforce ” are mobilised towards obtaining surplus . According to Gaudemar, during the 19 th century, the absolute mobilisation, based on explicit disciplination, was transformed into a relative mobilisation where technology is used to develop tacit and internalised disciplinary systems. Without the economics approach, Foucault (1977) developed a similar analysis.

Other authors have traced this mechanisation of the body a lot before in history. For example, Rabinbach (1990) defines this tendency as turning bodies into human motors, and, as a matter of fact, traces back this tendency to early Christian times, presenting mortification of the body as a key strategy towards this internalisation of discipline that we also find in Gaudemar and Foucault. However, according to Rabinbach, these internalisations of discipline become more necessary in modern times, as before the industrial revolution, the brand new workers were not used to the specific work shifts, which we now associate with modern work ; they were used to the cyclical patterns of the seasons of agriculture. It is in those times that the concept of fatigue associated with work appears, and scientists start to conduct research to implement higher productivity with the grail of creating a body without fatigue. It is also important to indicate that the tendency towards human motors is not only present in the capitalist ideology; Marxism also defended the scientific study of workers and how their bodies relate to the working space in order to search for their empowerment, as can be seen in the strategies towards adapting workers to improve production adopted by Lenin and further developed under Stalin s government (Gray, 2002). Given that ICT was in those days quite new, it is not surprising that they did not mention it in their own essays . However, as we move deeper and deeper into what Daniel Bell called the post-industrial society (Bell, 1976), more and more references appear, until we ascribe to Zuboff (1988) the invention of the term informating to describe the process of taylorization within ICT companies. As a matter of fact, industry has continuously used the new developments in computers and telecommunications to improve workers output and, therefore, technical and economic production. The next step in taylorization was the introduction of more and more automatic production, with complicated machines that need smarter workers. This produces a new type of job ” the knowledge worker ” to take care of the information issues of a company. And that leads to the idea of informating as using computerisation to leverage all aspects of a firm s data. Zuboff quotes as key factors better control of markets, quality and efficiency. Informating also implies managing workers activities in detail and integrating them better into the production process.

Besides the terminology, informating shares the basic mechanisms of Fordism. According to Robins and Webster (1988), these are the main components of Fordism in a social system:a.

  1. The consumerist way of life. The progressive intrusion into the sphere of reproduction ” leisure, family, and everyday life ” by capitalist social relations. Companies make employees more and more dependent on them, either economically (e.g., using stock options) and/or by mixing their life styles with the corporate culture, creating sports and leisure activities and centres and including subsidized education or free marriage counselling.

  2. Increasing state intervention in the management of society. Following Fordist dictates towards improving production, traditional forms of social integration get eroded, and society becomes more complexly interrelated, interdependent, and increasingly susceptible to fragmentation and disintegration. That makes the State the only warrant towards social integration and cohesion, taking care of tasks such as economic planning, fiscal policies, or scientific and economic development.

  3. Annexation of time and space by capitalism. Fordism extends and deepens the process through which capital has sought to impose its rhythm and tempo upon time and time-consciousness. The most relevant characteristic for us is the third one: how time and space is being annexed by capitalist practices. It explains how this informating of the workplace cannot be viewed , as some judges defend, as mere conflict of basic rights.

One can understand that basic human rights, like privacy, can be neglected when another basic right is at stake. So it is understandable that a judge may order to wiretap the telephone of a suspected criminal, as long as the police are able to present evidence. Because it may become difficult to decide whether the evidence is good enough, or to establish whether the menace is so big as to warrant the wiretapping, it is normal that we want this decision to be assumed by a judge. That said, it is nonsense to attribute to the employer the powers of a judge to decide whether privacy rights of workers can be sacrificed.

There are several reasons for that. First, what is at stake is not a basic right of the employer, but a less important one such as to ensure an accurate accomplishment of a contract. Second, the Internet is a social phenomenon , and prohibiting personal use during working hours is as weird as to prohibit casual conversations between partners at the office. Third, there is a clear way to measure the accurate accomplishment of a worker s contract: his or her performance. If it goes clearly beyond what is established, the employer has a right to discharge the worker without needing to taylorize his or her use of the computer. Fourth, as the E.G.G. case shows, the employer is an interested party in the discussions and may have its own plans when monitoring a worker, such as avoiding a mobbing accusation, so the final decision on the monitoring should be made by a judge. Once conflict of rights is ruled out, what we finally have is the ideology of the total mechanisation of work: to turn the human body and mind into a machine ” the concept of the human motor, as already quoted in Rabinbach (1990). Since the beginning of the 19 th century, philosophers , physicians, and engineers have studied the human body as a machine, trying to find cures for fatigue that results from industrial work. Recently, we have seen how this ideology is being pushed forward to information society. This time it is not the body, but the mind that needs to be mechanised, and digital monitoring of the workplace is a key strategy by which to do so.

The results are quite alienating for workers. As Gray (2002) claims, companies have created dozens of schizophrenic practices to monitor workers minds, including drug testing, psychological profiling, and computer and phone monitoring. In a very paradoxical situation, workers have more control over what they produce, but less and less control over their own lives. By searching for better systems to analyse and improve production, companies tend to analyse and micromanage the workers time in the office, turning them into another work element not so different from the word processor or the heating system in the office.

As a final conclusion, I would like to identify two major reasons to be against monitoring the use of e-mail or the World Wide Web in the workplace. The first, as we have explained earlier, is the very fact that the right to privacy can never be sold in search of a more productive office. The less obvious, but probably more crucial, fact is that this movement towards monitoring is not an end per se , but just a step in a complex procedure towards the taylorization of the information society. Reading workers e- mails is only one of the possible actions towards a more and more mechanised office where the worker is viewed as another instrument, not very different from the computer he or she uses. Rational management of computer work is fine, but not at the price of taking dignity away from workers.




Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace. Controversies and Solutions
Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions
ISBN: 1591404568
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 161

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