Control Science — a one-sided case against managers

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":6.25,"text":"At the centre of Henry Snow’s book stands Jeremy Bentham’s proposed prison-rotunda, the Panopticon."}],[{"start":12.9,"text":"Snow reminds us that the idea of a building designed round a central inspection tower “was a workplace before it was a prison”, the brainchild of the philosopher’s mechanically minded younger brother, Samuel. Fascinated by shipbuilding, Samuel undertook a high-level apprenticeship in the late 18th century that equipped him with “both a tradesman’s knowledge and bourgeois European science”. "}],[{"start":35.85,"text":"By his twenties, he was employed by imperial Russia as a sort of roving consultant charged with making shipyards more efficient. His innovations included a brutal StairMaster-like treadmill to speed up pile-driving and, in the words of his widow and biographer Mary, “a building so contrived as that the whole of the operations carried on in it should be under observation from its centre”. "}],[{"start":59.45,"text":"Snow, a US labour and economic historian, traces this thread of top-down managerial control from the slave plantations of the Caribbean (“a laboratory for capitalism”), via the Benthams, to the digital panopticons of Amazon’s present-day “fulfilment centres”. Here, centralised data architecture does the same job that Samuel and Jeremy sought to design into shipyards and prisons: “Through scanners and its logistics system, the company surveils workers’ time down to the minute.”"}],[{"start":90.15,"text":"Control Science builds a powerful if one-sided case that wealthy elites, including factory-owners, philosophers, economists and ideologues, have over centuries conspired with their managers to suggest that “there is no alternative” to market fundamentalism. “This is a lie,” Snow underlines in his introduction."}],[{"start":110,"text":"The book sacrifices plenty of capitalist icons in nailing the untruth. It gives a good kicking to Alfred Sloan, architect of General Motors’ mid-20th century success, and Jack Welch, chief executive of General Electric until 2001. But Snow also has it in for pioneering potteries factory-owner Josiah Wedgwood; co-author of Freakonomics Steven Levitt (a work of “sneering amorality”, in his view); and even anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce."}],[{"start":139.5,"text":"By the end of the book, when Snow suggests, with increasing stridency, that “we should abhor authoritarian company ‘presidents’ and company boards the way we do dictatorship and monarchy”, the targets of his argument could not be clearer."}],[{"start":155.6,"text":"There is justice in some of his attacks. The reputations of Sloan and, even more so, Welch have been radically revised since they were in their managerial pomp. Attempts to apply rigid mathematical or scientific frameworks to human workers have generally misfired, or worse. "}],[{"start":175.04999999999998,"text":"Snow details early consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor’s obsession with the principles of “scientific management”, which were all the rage in the early 1900s. Taylor ran time-and-motion studies of worker productivity but the supposedly empirically proven benefits of his work were largely a sham. The model hard-working pig-iron loader Taylor called “Schmidt” was a caricature of a real human being, Henry Noll, who eventually succumbed to exhaustion, poverty and alcoholism."}],[{"start":202.95,"text":"The author is also good at pointing out, with examples from the rapid industrialisation of late 19th-century Japan, that there were alternatives to the “survival of the fittest” approach that inspired Victorian competitive capitalism. Japanese intellectuals took a more pragmatic approach to economic matters “by prioritising what actually worked, rather than pre-existing practice and norms”. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":226.14999999999998,"text":"Not acknowledged, though, is a more nuanced vision of how to run business that has found a place in modern management practice. Companies outperform when they provide self-motivated staff with better pay, greater autonomy and more training, overseen by managers who listen to and engage with their teams rather than simply executing orders from above. "}],[{"start":247.89999999999998,"text":"But there is no room in Control Science for managers who are neither martinets nor dupes of profit-seeking capitalists. Benevolent ownership is dismissed as hypocrisy or self-interest. Wedgwood, whom a former FT editor once described as “the Steve Jobs of his day — but with a lot more humanity”, wished “to use artisans like machines rather than negotiate with them as people”, Snow writes. Wilberforce, lauded recently by the historian Rutger Bregman, no friend of capital, for his attempts to “make goodness fashionable”, turns out to have been an ardent fan of the Benthams’ Panopticon. "}],[{"start":283.75,"text":"Snow contrasts capitalism’s villains with heroic figures from the labour movement, on whom he pins the hope of replacing control science and pure market competition with democracy and equality at work. “Together we can suspend this game, refuse to fight, decide what is too much, pull the red handle,” he writes. When it comes to enacting this revolution, however, he may find he needs the help of a few enlightened leaders to run it. "}],[{"start":310.8,"text":"Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World by Henry Snow Verso £22/$29.95, 352 pages"}],[{"start":321.05,"text":"Andrew Hill is the FT’s senior business writer"}],[{"start":324.55,"text":"Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X"}],[{"start":340.6,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1777945195_3060.mp3"}