Hulick Blogged Critique "The Rise of the Reengineers"

Blogged Critique on Simon Heads “The Rise of the Reengineers”

During the late 1900’s, there were many people who strongly opposed our modern economy. Simon Head, the author of The New Ruthless Economy (2003), believes we should be coming up with alternatives to the cruel American economy. “The Rise of the New Reengineers”, a chapter from Simon Heads book, describes disparities between management and workers in an office space, and information technologies role in the growing disparities between management and lower level workers. The New Ruthless Economy was written at a time when the average American wage was growing at a miniscule rate, while management position wages soared in comparison.   Head recollects the work of William Henry Leffingwell, a man who used the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor in order to substantially increase productivity in the workplace. He did this by taking away the allowance for unreliability of the “human element” and taking away their independent decision-making.

The accomplishments of Leffingwell are his innovations in applying scientific management to service industries in the early 1900’s. Leffingwell’s ambitions were to run an office much like a Ford factory, with progressive assembly practices he learned from Taylor; practices still in use in today’s economy to make production as efficient as possible. The processes of Leffingwell became extremely specific, replacing evaporation inkwells with non-evaporating, teaching “how to best open an envelope”, reducing the necessary motions of opening mail from thirteen to 6, overall increasing the hourly output of mail from 100 to 200 pieces. His actions and successes’ as a scientific manager were much more than that, he could work with a company and instruct them on how to best fulfill and satisfy a customers order. Leffingwell obsession to detail set him apart from Taylor, in a way that allowed his processes to adapt to the different and unexpected tasks required by customers, still ensuring the companies success, and ensured his popularity among major corporations.

Much of Leffingwell’s success came from setting apart management and workers. The term “reengineering” refers to the improvement of management, and in Leffingwells eyes, it refers to a white-collar assembly line. Modern day reengineering looks at the relationship between management and workers in terms of monitoring and surveillance. He wanted to put “exclusive concentration of power in the hands of management” therefore leaving “independent decision making by employees reduced to a minimum.” An idea that rose many years, ago, but continues to fuel long hours at low pay, being able to work at a job with little knowledge or effort but still being productive under effective management.

Head refers to this unfair work as the ruthless economy, an economy that Americans need to stray from. In lecture, we watched a clip from Modern Times, a satire on the job of the president at a major company. The president simply did puzzles as he monitored the workers via video, and would repeatedly tell them to work harder, the advances in Information Technology has dramatically affected this office relationship. Managerial processes are becoming more and more significant as greater technology improves the difficulty of workers jobs. Head recounts three chief aspects of the use of information technology as a reengineering tool, first in terms of the changing skills needed of workers, in terms of structure of the workplace, and in the monitoring and surveillance. Over the years as the use of reengineers and information technology has grown faster and become more prominent, it has dramatically undermines the security and importance of low skill workers globally.

Nicole Hulick