Information Studies Colloquium: Frank Gilbreth, Fatigue Elimination, and Consuming and Producing “Information” Systematically (1892-1924) with Jimein Tina Wei Ph.D. candidate

Please join us for our next IS Colloquium on February 27, 2:00-4:00 p.m. in the Reading Room, 3340 Moore Hall. There will be refreshments to follow. 

Bio

Jiemin Tina Wei is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science, where she is completing her dissertation on the history of fatigue in the workplace. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Prior to graduate school, she worked at Google, Stanford University, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Abstract

In the 1910s, an “efficiency craze” swept the United States, as debates erupted over the veracity and ethical, social, and economic consequences of a new system of managing human labor newly coined as “Scientific Management.” As these dramas raged over the theories of the consultant Frederick Winslow Taylor and his colleagues, bricklayer-turned-franchise-owner Frank Gilbreth had been tinkering away on alternative solutions to the “labor problem.” Contracted to implement efficiency improvements at the New England Butt Company in 1912 and 1913, he used this testing ground to introduce his new method for finding “the One Best Way to do work.” Armed with photography assistants, he sought to transition the focus in his field of Scientific Management from “time studies” of the stopwatch to “motion studies” of the camera. Both Taylor and Gilbreth aimed at efficiency, but Gilbreth’s motion study approached efficiency through a different plane of analysis: space, not time. For Frank and his wife Lillian Gilbreth, one achieved work efficiency by manipulating the lines and shapes of the body. Although generated in a seemingly top-down context—by an efficiency engineer creating systematized and objective knowledge about workers’ bodies—Frank Gilbreth’s photographs and their paraphernalia captured how workers both resisted and collaborated with the sometimes-bumbling Gilbreth and his obsessive, eccentric methods. The Gilbreths’ pursuit of “fatigue elimination” through the motions of the human body involved gathering, storing, and generating vast stores of what they called research “information.” To contain, sort, and selectively retrieve this torrent of “information” with efficiency, the Gilbreths had to apply their own methods of “fatigue elimination” to their own work as researchers.