ABSTRACT
Despite the varied roles of work in human history and the pervasiveness of the need to perform it, serious study of work behavior is a comparatively recent phenomenon. During the nineteenth century in England, three great sets of inventions radically transformed the nature of human work, namely, the development of the technology to use coal instead of charcoal for the production of iron; the invention and development of power-driven machinery for the production of cotton cloth; the invention and development of the steam engine. If the first Industrial Revolution made labor a public enterprise and led to the serious study of the motivation to work, the second Industrial Revolution has brought a host of new problems in its wake. One of the important, although unintended, outcomes of industrial engineering has been the recognition that human work cannot be easily reduced to so many quanta of mental and muscular energy.
