How the Digital Revolution Revitalised Taylorism
Taylorism is not dead. On the contrary, this management method has been revitalised and extended to service sector jobs with the help of tools provided by the Digital Revolution, leading to a “Digital Taylorism”.
In developed countries, Taylorism seems nowadays to be a finished era of contemporay History, linked to the previous century. Often (wrongly) seen as the instigator of assembly line work, the term is often used to refer to a management method to be applied to specialized workers. With the rise of automation and the relocation of factories in developing countries, which has led to the progressive disappearance of such workers in developed countries, Taylorism seems now to be outdated. In other words, it is regarded as a management method linked to an economy where the secondary sector is predominant, therefore not applicable anymore in our current tertiary economy.
If it were true, this could be considered as a great achievement in terms of human dignity. Taylorist methods of management were indeed severely criticized during the 20th century as the paroxysm of alienation at work, notably in some major cinematographic masterpieces such as Metropolis by Fritz Land in 1927 or more comically in Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin in 1936.
In reality, Taylorism has adaptated to the tertiary economy and is now widely spread among service workers. This rise of a new form of Taylorism applied to the tertiary sector of economy has only been made possible with the help of the Digital Revolution. It is the reason why it is now called “Digital Taylorism”.
In comparison with assembly line workers, employees of the service sector seem to be more autonomous regarding their activities, which leave them room to a certain extent to be creative in the way they do their job. Then, this allows them to define (at least partially) by themselves the best way to do their job. This is a major difference compared to specialized workers in taylorist factories, where they are deprived of any possibility of personal initiative and therefore, alienated. This distinction is now becoming less and less true. The Digital Revolution is currently giving new tools to managers which are transforming service workers into mere performers, seeing their possibilities to propose and innovate progressively abolished.
Before describing how the service sector is being “taylorized”, we need to understand why it is happening through the Digital Revolution. In order to do so, let’s first go back to the very definition of Taylorism. Developed in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), the management theory of American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor stands for a clear and absolute distinction between those who design the tasks (“white collars”) and those who perform them (“blue collars”). In Taylor’s theory, complex tasks have to be divided into simple ones which have to be organized in the most effective way by the “scientific” study (which explains the expression of “scientific management”) of every aspect of them. This leads to the idea that every action of the worker needs to be measured. Finally, from these measurements, the bests are rewarded by bonuses in terms of salary and the worsts fired.
The creation of measurements and their constant use is then crucial in Taylorsim. It is precisely why it is coming back nowadays in the service sector: the Digital Revolution has lead to the appearance of a wide set of tools making possible the measurement of various aspects of tertiary jobs which were non measurable beforehand and allowing them to be fractionated. Today, the “quantified worker” is not only a specialized worker anymore.
The examples of the spread of these new digital tools in the life of those working in the service sector are numerous. For instance, nowadays, in various fields (logistics, transports, maintenance, commercials, customer service, services to individuals…) workers are equipped with “trackers” giving them real time data and information about the completion of their tasks, instructions and assesment messages, comparing their performances to a pre-established target or to their colleagues, leading to rewards and sanctions based on these measurements. Technology does not stop here and this could only be a step toward much deeper forms of measurements and assessments of workers. The invention of the “sociometer”, a badge worn around the neck that can measure very closely almost any action of the person wearing it such as the inclination to listen or to talk or even the tone of the voice, by Alex Pentland from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is an illustration among many others of this growing trend.
If this new form of Taylorism is motivated by a search for efficiency, it extends the control over workers to a new level raising concerns about welfare at work in the current digital economy. In 2001, investigative journalist Christian Parenti in an article eloquently entitled “Big Brother’s Corporate Cousin” published in American left-wing newspaper The Nation was already pointing out this new management method based on the Digital Revolution where “computers, databases and high-speed networks are pushing social relations on the job toward a new digital Taylorism, where every motion is watched, studied and controlled by and for the boss”, leaving us with the philosophical question of the link between technology and freedom.
Bibliography:
Bienaymé, Alain “La nature de la firme à l’ère du numérique”, Revue Française de Gestion, 06/2016, Vol. 42, Num. 258
Hutton, Will “New technology has not just set people free but has had the capacity to enforce, to de-skill and monitor”, Human Resources, 05/2010
Moore, Phoebe; Robinson, Andrew “The quantified self-What counts in the neoliberal place”, New Media & Society, 12/2016, Vol. 18, Num. 11
O’Neil, Christopher “Taylorism, the European Science of Work, and the Quantified Self at Work”, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 07/2017, Vol. 42, Num. 4
Parenti, Christian “Big Brother’s Corporate Cousin”, The Nation, 08/2001
