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developed countries, Taylorism seems now to be outdated.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