Images of Efficiency

From 1912 to his death in 1924, Frank B. Gilbreth – a disciple of Frederick W. Taylor and, with his wife, Lillian, one of the most prolific popularizers of scientific management – made hundreds of films designed to document, analyze, and correct worker movements in a “quest for the one best way” to do any given job. ¹ Scientific management, of course, swept through the American workplace at the turn of the 20th century as Progressive ideals of reform and uplift joined forces with industrial trends toward increased specialization and rationalization of labor. ² Reformers and industrialists alike could agree that “efficiency” and the elimination of “waste” (economic for the industrialist, social for the reformer) were vitally important to the moral and productive longevity of the nation. ³ This social and economic agenda attempted to assuage or solve bitter struggles between management and labor, especially as workers protested – by forming unions, among other tactics – the increased centralization of power in the hands of managers. ⁴ Taylor’s management system appropriated the rhetoric of scientific objectivity and neutrality while regulating worker productivity. His method of regulation, which he dubbed “time study” (essentially measuring worker efficiency with a stopwatch), often drew protests from both workers and managers for its inaccuracy and reliance on the “subjective” skills of whoever happened to be holding the stopwatch. ⁵ Designed to be an improvement on Taylor’s methods and thus to garner cooperation from worker and manager alike, Gilbreth’s method of “motion study” via motion pictures and other visual technologies promised an even more thoroughly “scientific” and “objective” solution. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth succeeded in promoting motion study to industry as an essential tool for designing and measuring work. Together, time and motion studies are still used today as a means of finding the “methods of greatest economy and for measuring labor accomplishment.” ⁶