Abstract

"Producing Quality Work: Scientific Management’s Struggle to Create a Working Life of Efficiency and Satisfaction"

Jiemin Tina Wei, Harvard University (jtwei@fiu.edu)

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, scientists, engineers, and doctors attempted to tackle the intractable problem of industrial fatigue through physiology, time and motion, and mind. One such group was the engineers championing the "efficiency craze" in the first and second decades of the twentieth century, who proposed that Scientific Management through time and motion study could tackle the dreaded condition of worker fatigue, an obstacle to efficiency and a marker of “waste” in an otherwise efficiently engineered system. This presentation examines the variant of Scientific Management espoused by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the parents from the famous, semi-autobiographical Cheaper by the Dozen. Trained in psychology, Lillian Gilbreth began writing, as early as 1911, her ideas about how a psychologized Scientific Management could affect a worker-employer rapprochement. Obscured, however, by the drama among Taylorites and by her husband’s renown, she would not emerge (in her colleagues’ eyes) as an independent thinker and researcher for decades. After her husband's death in 1924, she expanded the motion studies begun with her husband as part of their "fatigue elimination" project into domestic work, translating how the pursuit of producing "quality" products could lead the worker and "producer"—in this case, the woman homemaker—to a life of efficiency and satisfaction.