White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

The institutions in which modern work is organized have come about by drift-many little schemes adding up to unexpected results-and by plan-efforts paying off as expected. The alienation of the individual from the product and the process of his work came about, in the first instance, as a result of the drift of modern capitalism. Then, Frederick Taylor, and other scientific managers, raised the division of labor to the level of planful management. By centralizing plans, as well as introducing further divisions of skill, they further routinized work; by consciously building upon the drift, in factory and in office, they have carried further certain of its efficient features.

Twenty years ago, H. Dubreuil, a foreign observer of U. S. industry, could write that Taylor's ‘insufficiency' shows up when he comes to approach ‘the inner forces contained in the worker's soul. ' That is no longer true. The new (social) scientific management begins precisely where Taylor left off or was incomplete; students of ‘human relations in industry' have studied not lighting and clean toilets, but social cliques and good morale. For in so far as human factors are involved in efficient and untroubled production, the managerial demiurge must bring them under control. So, in factory and in office, the world to be managed increasingly includes the social setting, the human affairs, and the personality of man as a worker.