Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy - Softcover

Gregg, Melissa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478000902 ISBN 13: 9781478000907

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

As online distractions increasingly colonize our time, why has productivity become such a vital demonstration of personal and professional competence? When corporate profits are soaring but worker salaries remain stagnant, how does technology exacerbate the demand for ever greater productivity? In Counterproductive Melissa Gregg explores how productivity emerged as a way of thinking about job performance at the turn of the last century and why it remains prominent in the different work worlds of today. Examining historical and archival material alongside popular self-help genres-from housekeeping manuals to bootstrapping business gurus, and the growing interest in productivity and mindfulness software-Gregg shows how a focus on productivity isolates workers from one another and erases their collective efforts to define work limits. Questioning our faith in productivity as the ultimate measure of success, Gregg's novel analysis conveys the futility, pointlessness, and danger of seeking time management as a salve for the always-on workplace.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melissa Gregg is Principal Engineer and Research Director, Client Computing Group, Intel; coeditor of The Affect Theory Reader, also published by Duke University Press; and author of Work's Intimacy.

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Counterproductive

Time Management in the Knowledge Economy

By Melissa Gregg

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4780-0090-7

Contents

PREFACE, 
I THEORY, 
Introduction: The Productivity Imperative, 
1 A Brief History of Time Management, 
II PRACTICE, 
2 Executive Athleticism: Time Management and the Quest for Organization, 
3 The Aesthetics of Activity: Productivity and the Order of Things, 
III ANTHROPOTECHNICS, 
4 Mindful Labor, 
Conclusion: From Careers to Atmospheres, 
Postscript: A Belated Processing, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of Time Management

THE FIRST MANAGERS

This history of time management begins with the experience of women in the home prior to industrialization. As is the case for many disciplines, the origins of scientific management are typically attributed to great men, in particular, the Taylorites auditing the assembly lines of capitalist industry. But considering the homes these men left behind every day is one way to appreciate the popular purchase of productivity methods as they emerged in tandem with formal business registers. This chapter unseats the commanding position of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the mythology of workplace timekeeping, offering a feminist account of the milieu that contributed to the enshrining of productivity principles in management lore. While Taylor is often regarded as the figurehead of scientific management, each section of this chapter will highlight women's vital role in the variations of efficiency engineering. The point of this exercise is not simply to correct the historical record; it is also to show that the commercialization of intimate space is not a recent phenomenon. My analysis illustrates that productivity practices have hardly changed in a century of application in the domestic realm. What has changed, albeit slowly, is the conception of work, whereby some tasks have become more important and worthy of measure in the market economy. The recent uptick in services that have long been concentrated or delegated within the household shows the permeability of this boundary. Airbnb, TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, and Etsy are just the most recent examples of the diverse assets and human resources that constitute domestic enterprise.

Time-management principles became mainstream in the home at the same time that they entered the factory not least because the men and women discussing the ideas in forums such as Manhattan's Efficiency Society socialized in private settings as much as at salubrious downtown hotels. From the beginning, scientific management was a front advanced jointly in the public and private spheres. This is the lasting influence of time-and- motion experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the married couple who epitomized their trade by adopting Gantt charts to run a household of twelve children. Contemporary theories of work often imply that market logic only recently came to intrude on the sanctity of the family. Turning to history, we can see that this is a nostalgic view. Following the evidence presented in this chapter, we may even observe that it is women's experiences as homemakers at the turn of the twentieth century that anticipate many of the issues afflicting today's distributed workplaces in the quest for greater productivity.

Guidebooks for nineteenth-century housewives addressed a range of time-management problems, including how to cope with constant interruption and distraction, the neediness of others — whether husbands, children, or staff — and the challenge of juggling competing tasks. The diversity of women's household labor and its untrammeled reach across time and space led to the debilitating effects of what we now call "context switch," where reactive responses and constant "firefighting" wither the day away. In domestic handbooks, authors such as Catharine Beecher accorded structure to repetitive duties, touting incentive schemes and time-based competitions typical of today's gamification techniques. Given the relative absence of women from the paid work world at the time of management theory's establishment, these formative productivity practices rarely grace business school curricula. Active discrimination and moral surveillance erased women's intellectual contribution to productivity theory in keeping with the broader social imperative to confine their work to particular industries and domestic settings.

The expanding interest in scientific management and efficiency principles in the early 1900s included a significant agenda for organizing women's work in the home. The efficiency proselytizers Harrington Emerson and Frank Gilbreth each provide an epigraph for the domestic science celebrity Christine Frederick's Household Engineering (1915), acknowledging housewifery as demanding the highest acumen and skill. "Housekeeping is not only the oldest, most fundamental and complex of all professions," writes Emerson, "but modern success in it is more difficult to attain than success in factory, warehouse, transportation or shop, because it must be attained by women working alone, and with many purposes." Gilbreth is similarly effusive: "Nothing is more worth while than bringing efficiency into the home. When housekeeping becomes a science, as well as an art, when it is based on measurement — then it becomes worthy of the best brains and highest endeavor."

Middle-class women such as Frederick and Frank Gilbreth's wife and collaborator, Lillian, mixed progressivist principles, professional ambition, and patriotic duty in appealing to readers who were otherwise being tempted by new kinds of market-based employment. To encourage more women to remain in charge of the home front, Frederick and Gilbreth addressed U.S. homemakers as expert managers. In addition to the capacities they enumerated and encouraged in homemakers themselves, time-management techniques and delegation skills became part of a suite of strategies designed to formalize domestic service and attract a better quality of candidate for routine labors. As we will see, over the course of subsequent decades, the employment of time for specific duties gave middle-class women a sense of agency within, if not freedom from, home-based work. The solution to productivity pressures within the home often rested on outsourcing trivial tasks to others. This advice reflected the personal lives of Frederick and Gilbreth, who each employed secretaries to maintain their writing output. In Gilbreth's case, a cadre of support staff helped raise her large family even before the untimely death of husband Frank.

DOMESTIC SCIENCE: MANAGING THE HOME ENTERPRISE

Home economics began as a civic movement prior to its transformation to a state-sanctioned science suited to formal instruction in schools. Its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with a series of social changes that included the growing recognition of women's right to education, the reformist spirit of progressivism, and the rise of scientific authority. The pioneer of home economics, Ellen Richards, was a trained chemist and the first female graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her technical acumen, evident in works such as The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882), found suitable application in domestic settings that were coming to be understood in terms of health and hygiene. Richards's preferred term for home economics was "euthenics," which she envisaged as a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1478000902
• ISBN 13: 9781478000907
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 212
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland