By Jennifer Karns Alexander
ISBN-10: 0801886937
ISBN-13: 9780801886935
Efficiency—associated with person self-discipline, improved administration, and elevated gains or productivity—often counts as one of many maximum virtues in Western tradition. yet what does it suggest, precisely, to be effective? How did this idea evolve from a way for comparing easy machines to the chant of growth and a prerequisite for success?
In this provocative and bold research, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the transforming into energy of potency within the post-industrial West. interpreting the methods the idea that has seemed in sleek history—from a benign degree of the thermal economic system of a computing device to its common software to non-public behaviors like chewing conduct, spending offerings, and store ground events to its arguable use as a degree of the enterprise good fortune of yank slavery—she argues that underneath efficiency's possible never-ending style lies a typical subject matter: the pursuit of mastery via concepts of surveillance, self-discipline, and keep an eye on.
Six historic case studies—two from Britain, one every one from France and Germany, and from the United States—illustrate the concept's attention-grabbing improvement and supply context for the meanings of, and makes use of for, potency this day and within the future.
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The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control by Jennifer Karns Alexander
by Donald
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