What is Digital Taylorism?

Taylorism is named after Frederick Taylor, who is recognized as the founder of scientific management. Scientific management is an approach which attempts to maximize labour productivity by treating employees as if they were cogs in a machine and can be positioned in exactly the right position. Scientific management aims to control every single movement of every single employee at every single moment of the day, thereby minimizing waste and maximizing output. This can be seen most easily in the McDonald’s fast food restaurants, in which the workers move in very small spaces in prescribed manners so as to produce the food as quickly as possible.

Owing to its nature, Taylorism is generally considered to be suitable primarily for people working in factories or similar workplaces where the movements required by their jobs can be observed, classified and written into specific codes of action. Generally, white-collar workers and professionals have been spared the need to work under the duress of scientific management, which is unpopular in action. However, improvements in information technology and reduction in the costs of equipment using it have greatly extended the ability of managers to oversee in great detail what their employees are doing. It is quite clear, for example, that people working in call centres are trained to stick to a pre-written script in dealing with the public as much as possible. These days, the same approach might also be forced upon bank tellers and people in a wide range of service industries.

For the sake of improving customer satisfaction and reducing the chance of litigation, medical personnel, teachers and police officers are also finding that many of their interactions with ‘customers’ are becoming formalized by external forces. There are, of course, some negative factors associated with this digital Taylorism: first, it greatly reduces job satisfaction among most of those on whom the strictures are placed. Teachers, for example, by and large end up in the classroom because they want to interact with young people and help them to learn and develop as individuals – not as pre-scripted characters. Second, the level of service also suffers when an individual wishes to have some sort of interaction beyond the very routine. My father, years ago, was a postman – his regular route brought him into contact with a range of people in what was then a semi-rural area. In addition to delivering the post (or mail, if you prefer), he acted as a kind of link to the rest of the world and provided a kind of social service by checking on the elderly residents and helping keep them in contact with humanity. That approach to work disappeared as the squeeze on public services turned to talk about efficiency and savings under the threat of privatization and the attendant reduction of wages and decline in service levels. Under digital Taylorism, he would not have been allowed to communicate as a person with people on his round even if he had had time to speak to them.