Industrial efficiency

“ America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the heritage which industrial evolution has given the world. ”

“ In the course of this inquiry it has appeared that out of the profitable engrossing of the community's industrial efficiency through control of the material equipment there arises the practice of investment, which has further consequences that merit more detailed attention. ”

“ As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace. ”

“ Under these circumstances, and in proportion as these technological exigencies take effect in one branch of industry and another, the usufruct of the industrial community’s current productive efficiency comes to vest effectually in those who own the material means of industry. Their effectual exploitation of the community’s industrial efficiency will extend to such industries, and with such a degree of thoroughness and security, as the state of the industrial arts may decide. ”

“ The experimental method is certainly not the only one which can contribute to reforms in industrial life and the reinforcement of industrial efficiency, but all signs indicate that the future will find it the most productive and most reliable. ”

“ The items of the equipment (plant, materials, and in a measure even good-will) in which any industrial enterprise invests, and by the use of which the business men in industry turn out their output of vendible goods, are themselves products of the machine industry. Machine processes, ever increasing in efficiency, turn out the mechanical appliances and materials with which the processes are carried on, at an ever decreasing cost; so that at each successive step the result is a process having a higher efficiency at a lower cost. ”

“ The need of conspicuous waste, therefore, stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods, after the most elementary physical wants have been provided for. ”

“ We must not forget that the increase of industrial efficiency by future psychological adaptation and by improvement of the psychophysical conditions is not only in the interest of the employers, but still more of the employees; their working time can be reduced, their wages increased, their level of life raised. ”

“ Greater output, increased efficiency, a bigger and better return of wealth from industrial and agricultural energy, can well come out of a better working system, a better rearrangement of combined effort, a more extensive use of machinery, a more satisfactory sub-division of labour, a wider employment of the personal experience and technical skill of our industrial classes, a higher state of administrative efficiency and management in the workshops, the creation of a better and more humane atmosphere in the workshops. ”

“ Indirectly they have a beneficial aggregate effect upon industry by inducing an employment of the fill productive efficiency of the industrial apparatus; so that in a very short time, it is at least conceivable, the aggregate net output of the industrial process may be as large and serviceable as before the wasteful expenditures were entered upon, even with the destruction of that portion of the product which goes to maintain the wasteful expenditures. ”

“ When weaving dissociates from spinning, both the number of looms in each business and the number of spindles in each business tend to increase; more division of labour is therefore secured, and lower costs of production are reached, and there is a further gain because producers concentrate their attention upon a smaller range of work. Again when producers are freed entirely, or to some extent, from commercial worries, they can attain a higher level of efficiency at the industrial task of mill organization, and a more perfect accommodation of capacity to function will be brought about. ”

“ It has already been spoken of above that the processes of industry are bound in a comprehensive system of give and take, in such a manner that no considerable fraction of this industrial system functions independently of the rest. The industrial system at large may be conceived353 as a comprehensive machine process, the several sub-processes of which technologically inosculate and ramify in what may be conceived as a network of elements working in a moving equilibrium, none of which can go on at its full productive efficiency except in duly balanced correlation with all the rest. ”

“ The complex of technological ways and means grows by increments that come into the scheme by way of improvements, innovations, expedients designed to facilitate, abridge or enhance the work to be done. Any such innovation that fits workably into the technological scheme, and that in any appreciable degree accelerates the pace of that scheme at any point, will presently make its way into general and imperative use, regardless of whether its net ulterior effect is an increase or a diminution of material comfort or industrial efficiency. ”

“ Such business control of industry, as has just been remarked above, is exercised with a view to pecuniary gain; but pecuniary gain in these premises comes from changes, and apprehended changes, in the efficiency of the various industrial processes that are touched by such control, rather than from the workday functioning of the several items of equipment involved. The changes which so bring gain to these larger businessmen may be favourable to the effective working of industry, but they may also be unfavourable ”

“ The problem of attention, indeed, seems to stand quite in the centre of the field of industrial efficiency. This conviction has grown upon me in my observation of industrial life. The peculiar kind of attention decides more than any mental trait for which economic activity the individual is adapted. ”

“ Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) 349 the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. ”

“ By ancient habit, handed down from the days of handicraft and petty trade, this pecuniary management is conventionally conceived to be directed to the production of goods and services, and the businessman is still conventionally rated as a producer and his gains accepted as a measure of his productive efficiency. ”

“ The idea of scientific management must be extended from the industrial concerns to the commercial establishments. The questioning and answering, the showing and replacing of the goods, the demonstrating and suggesting by the salesmen, must be brought into an economic system which saves time and energy, as has been tried with the laborer in the factory. Wherever economic processes are carried out with superfluous, haphazard movements, the national resources have to suffer a loss. The single individual can never find the ideal form of motion and the ideal process by mere instinct. ”

“ It is a price system, i. e., the competition runs in terms of money, and the money unit is the standard measure of efficiency and achievement; hence competition and efficiency are subject to a rigorous accountancy in terms of a (putatively) stable money unit, which is in all business traffic assumed to be invariable. (c) Technologically this situation is dominated by the mechanical industries; so much so that even the arts of husbandry have latterly taken on much of the character of the mechanic arts. Hence a somewhat thoroughgoing standardisation of processes and products in mechanical terms ”

“ It is the testimony of these efficiency engineers that relatively few pecuniary captains in command of industrial enterprises have a sufficient comprehension of the technological facts to understand and accept the findings of the technological experts who so argue for the elimination of preventable wastes, even when the issue is presented statistically in terms of price. ”

“ And it is all the more ineffectual for the purposes of workmanship as distinct from the businessmen’s gains. So, a professional class of “efficiency engineers” is coming into action, whose duty it is to take invoice of the preventable wastes and inefficiencies due to the business management of industry and to present the case in such concrete and obvious terms of price and percentage as the businessmen in charge will be able to comprehend. These men, in a way, take over the functions assigned in economic theory223 to the “entrepreneur;” ”

“ Since the wage is the means ordinarily employed to awaken in workers the three instincts

of self-preservation, of social distinction, and of hoarding, it is not strange that an industrial age should regard it as the chief means of increasing efficiency. ”

“ A manufacturer who sells an improved pan or mixing-spoon or broom expects success if he brings to the market something the merits of which are evident and make the housewife anticipate a decrease of work or a simplification of work, but the development of scientific management has shown clearly that the most important improvements are just those which are deduced from scientific researches, without at first giving satisfaction to the laborers themselves, until a new habit has been formed. ”

“ Every change which made it possible for the workingman to secure equal effects with smaller effort or to secure greater or better effects with equal effort counted as an economic gain, which was welcome to the market. For instance, throughout the history of industry we find the fundamental tendency to transpose all activities from the great muscles to the small muscles. ”

“ I refer to the problem of monotony of labor.
In the discourses of our time on the lights and shades of our modern industrial life, all seem to agree that the monotony of industrial labor ought to be entered on the debit side of the ledger of civilization. Since the days when factories began to spring up, the accusation that through the process of division of labor the industrial workingman no longer has any chance to see a whole product, but that he has to devote himself to the minutest part of a part, has remained one of the matter-of-course arguments. ”

“ There is, as is well known, in every industry following its successful launching, a period of demand and rapid growth, with creation of thousands of new jobs, a settling down with the efficiency engineer working to increase production and decrease costs by mechanizing and stabilizing the processes of manufacture. ”

“ Today manufacturing productivity is rising strongly-some rate us as the most competitive nation for manufacturing costs in the industrial world-and we're again the world's leader in developing new technology. ”

“ They sometimes covered the ground from the simplest activity to the subtlest and most difficult economic tasks, and this, not only with reference to the functions of the laborer, but also even with reference to the function of the industrial manager. The outsider can see these psychological requirements of the particular occupation only in crude outlines. The subtler nuances of differences between tasks can be gained only by an intimate knowledge of the industry. Again I may give an illustration. ”

“ If allowed to expand for 18 years without diversion to production, the factory output could exponentiate to more than 4 X 109 tons per year, roughly the entire annual industrial output of all human civilization. ”

“ In mining, railway transportation and building we have positive evidence of diminished efficiency of labor, which in the aggregate is not offset by the improvements of management, or but barely. There remains but manufacturing as the other great branch of producing industry, apart from agriculture. ”

“ Economical Loads—With the effect of capacity on economy in mind, the question arises as to what constitutes the economical load to be carried. In figuring on the economical load for an individual plant, the broader economy is to be considered, that in which, against the boiler efficiency, there is to be weighed the plant first cost, returns on such investment, fuel cost, labor, capacity, etc., etc. ”

“ The engineers of scientific management recognized, at least, that no part of the industrial process is indifferent, even the apparently most trivial activity, the slightest movement of arm or hand or leg, became the object of their exact measurement. ”

“ Nevertheless the fundamental fact, after all, is that any talking during the labor, so far as it is not necessary for the work itself, surely involves a distraction of attention. Here, too, the individual is not conscious of the effect. He feels certain that he can perform his task just as well, and even the piece-worker, who is anxious to earn as much as possible, is convinced that he does not retard himself by conversation. But the experiments which have been carried on in establishments with scientific management speak decidedly against such a supposition. ”

“ To the creative workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his work. ”