Scientific management
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Search complete. 64 mentions across 24 episodes found for "Scientific management".
Sep 10, 2026
Cory DoctorowGUEST
And if they've added a footstool to kind of keep one leg up and tilt their pelvis in a certain way, that's because their boss doesn't know that they're being injured by working at that spot.
Cory DoctorowGUEST
Taylorists went in and under this guise of science, they called it scientific management or scientific Taylorism.
Cory DoctorowGUEST
This is the first ever management consultants, Frederick Taylor.
Cory DoctorowGUEST
What they did was they created this pantomime where you like the workers would have to literally like kind of act out a choreography of how they were going to work irrespective of the consequences for their physical bodies.
speaker_0HOST
Right.
speaker_0HOST
The American model was Taylorism, literally executives with stopwatches dictating every single movement from the top down.
speaker_1HOST
Yeah.
speaker_1HOST
But Toyota took a completely different approach under a visionary engineer named Taichi Ono.
26 MINS LATER
speaker_1HOST
Precisely.
speaker_1HOST
They build the 1% advantages directly into the physical workspace, the software architecture, and the unalterable daily systems so that the compounding occurs automatically regardless of how motivated the staff feels that day.
speaker_0HOST
The Lightspeed DMS source gives us a brilliantly granular look at this kind of corporate Taylorism applied to the modern day.
speaker_1HOST
Yeah, they provide software for power sports, marine, and RV dealerships.
Eric RiesGUEST
She was a contemporary of Taylor.
Eric RiesGUEST
And whereas Taylorism preached rigid conformity to hierarchy and basically treating workers like automatons, he would have loved generative AI, let me tell you.
Eric RiesGUEST
Follett, her ideas were so far ahead of their time that I'm going to tell you a couple of them right now.
Eric RiesGUEST
And for each one, I want you to think, if you saw that on TikTok, Like, you know, it's like an aphorism with a cool video behind it.
Chris de PloegGUEST
Probably it's not even your own direct boss, it's some subsidiary and you're working indirectly, you know, through a whole chain of hierarchies for somebody.
Chris de PloegGUEST
And we know, obviously, by the whole kind of, Taylorism, how everything is being made as mechanic and road as possible, basically turning us into kind of machines.
Chris de PloegGUEST
And we know from the education system that this had to be really, really kind of beaten into people.
Chris de PloegGUEST
This was not something natural that people wanted to accept.
PatrickHOST
Because I
ChadHOST
explicitly say that the fundamentals of our profession, the sort of scientific management, Taylorism, Wilsonism, is fundamentally an incorrect way of looking at cities.
ChadHOST
I mean, you explicitly teach a
PatrickHOST
class on that in the MP program, right? So, I mean, I just...
speaker_2HOST
The Audi is essentially acting as a parasitic god, keeping this secondary consciousness trapped in a maze just to collect a paycheck.
speaker_3HOST
It's Taylorism pushed to its absolute horrifying logical conclusion.
speaker_2HOST
Wait.
speaker_2HOST
Taylorism.
speaker_3HOST
Yeah.
speaker_3HOST
Frederick Taylor's theories of scientific management in the early 20th century.
23 MINS LATER
speaker_2HOST
Okay, we need to take a massive breath and pull the camera all the way back.
speaker_2HOST
Look at the intellectual journey we have just charted.
Alex HannaHOST
But I mean, it also is this kind of world where the vision is one in such that actions are so specialized.
Alex HannaHOST
I mean, going back to Taylorism, and they're so atomized.
Alex HannaHOST
And they're so de-skilled that there's no wiggle room for messing it up.
Alex HannaHOST
I mean, this is kind of a vision of people who manage data work platforms.
Stephen FisherHOST
But for what it looks like for people that got it right, I think there's going to be not just the upper middle class, lower class, I think there's going to be a layer of people that will, instead of the bullshit jobs, people that have real value in society, I think that's what's going to be different.
Stephen FisherHOST
I think there's going to be real ways that people will communicate their value instead of just replicating the Fordism or the Taylorism, the factory models.
Stephen FisherHOST
I think that's what's going to change the most is the way we work, how we think of work, how we think of recreation, how we think of...
Stephen FisherHOST
I'm optimistic that it changes our relationship.
Dylan GottliebHOST
But what if that's wrong, or at the very least, incomplete? Today's guest, Devin Kennedy, argues that the 20th century history of computing is marked just as much by continuity as change, even between eras like Fordism and post-Fordism that we usually separate with a bright line.
Dylan GottliebHOST
I promise you, it's the only book you'll read this year that'll take you all the way from Taylorism up to the 2010 Wall Street flash crash.
Dylan GottliebHOST
Listen on to learn more.
Jessica LevyHOST
I'm Jessica Levy.
6 MINS LATER
Devin KennedyGUEST
And I think it's the exigencies of the early Cold War economy and the close relationships between industrialists and the state that give these businesses early access to these powerful devices.
Dylan GottliebHOST
Let's go inside those firms that are employing these computers, especially on the shop floor where they come to, as you say, track, surveil, control, plan for workers.
Dylan GottliebHOST
I love this sort of digital update to Taylorism that you explain in this era.
Dylan GottliebHOST
How does this change the relationship, particularly of management to workers? And how does it change what factories are actually producing as they're turning out data as much as products?
14 more episodes mention Scientific management.
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