:The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control
Larry Stewart · The American Historical Review · 2009
Concepts of efficiency have proved as expedient and as varied as the many, confusing, and barely grasped measures, like energy, power, momentum, work, and productivity, that have afflicted industrial society. Efficiency emerged as a mantra precisely because it was elusive, capable of translation and metamorphosis, adapted and adopted to fit any circumstance in our long industrial trajectory. As political commentator Janice Gross Stein once remarked, efficiency is now more like a cult. Its devotees thus claim objective worth of diverse measures, as in tracking patients discharged from hospitals, schools graduating students, banks providing mortgages, and brokerage houses producing high rates on investment. Efficiency has proved seductive indeed. It has served to idealize notions that once arose from early industrial machines, to converge with the biological analogues of nineteenth-century competition and laissez-faire economics, to the justifications of poverty, slavery, and even, in the twentieth century, extermination. It is therefore a deeply problematic idea, but one that, in our age of measures, has been accepted virtually without question, emerging as it did from Enlightenment claims of experimental objectivity. Jennifer Karns Alexander reveals the trajectory of efficiency, touching on moments when its variations were starkly displayed, in the long arc from waterwheels and steam engines and the tangents of new mechanical skills, to the competitive glories of Charles Darwin's natural selection, to debates over slavery and the efficacy of workstations in Weimar Germany, assembly lines at Ford Motor Company, and even rail timetables for trains to Auschwitz.