On Communication in the Modern Age: Taylorism and Beyond

Abstract

It is possible to see “the speaking machine”, as the telephone was often called in the contemporary press, as having formed a speaking machine of the whole society at the end of the nineteenth century. This is because it provided a pattern not only for electric communication in the modern age, but also for the social system viewed as a whole. The telephone can be seen as an intersection of powers in and through which both the modern communication and industrial order — which are not to be treated as separate from each other — assumed their shapes. It is my intention here to bring out the path of development through which communication, seen as both the object and means of political projects during the age of telephone's heyday, was given a pivotal position in the self‐descriptions of society.

Notes

1. See Pool 1977, 1983, Fischer 1992, on the spread of the telephone in the US, and the difficulties and contestations surrounding that.

2. By “communication” we understand a social activity, which became as a distinct theoretical and political concern during this period and became institutionalized into scientific research and administrative practice. It should thus be understood broadly as referring to a historically changing set of interrelationships between a concept, a social phenomenon, different technological systems and ultimately certain images of society.

3. As for technology in general, see Soule (1932, p. 269).

4. Despite some notable exceptions, such as John Dewey and Charles Cooley, it has been customary for contemporaries to consider communication through a rather consistent conceptual model, often derived from the rapidly improving technological systems which facilitated control and coordination. However, it was especially Dewey who understood communication in more ontological terms as the precondition of a community: he conceived community fundamentally as communication, existing in communication, not just by communication (see Dewey 1917), although he also believed in rational social management. A number of voices speaking up on behalf of democratic governance, as opposed to social control, were articulated during the first half of the twentieth century. For instance, Mary Parker Follet elaborated her concern with the democratic government in terms of managerial practice through her writings in the 1910s and 1920s (Miller and O'Leary 1989, pp. 257–8). Later on, Harold Laski of the London School of Economics and Frank Knight of the University of Chicago resisted the application of science to society in order to facilitate control, yet they failed to reorient the sentiment that was animated by the possibility of scientific social control (Jordan 1994, pp. 157–65). It was not until the 1940s that the rational planning model no longer served as the primary referent for modernized reform.

5. It is not our concern here to delve into the discussion of what was the exact contribution of a putative sole creator — in this case, Frederick Taylor — to a given theory or system and what were the roles of other people often ignored. It is our task here to investigate the conceptual displacements and the administrative practices these ideas provoked, especially from the point of view of communication, not to trace their assumed origins or to identify the right persons to be credited. Taylor suffices to identify the movement in question, although surely he was less the creator of scientific management than he claimed.

6. By stressing the engineering method as a model that could replace social contention, rational reform movement wanted to eliminate, among other things, the power of tradition, irrational beliefs, dumb luck, the existing relations of opposition and oppression, partisanship in appointments and “politics” in the practice of government, imprecise qualitative judgments, partisan infighting, favors and debts, empty rhetoric, the profit system, emotions, and a “wealth of discussion” (Jordan 1994, pp. 39, 40, 85, 114, 115, 120, 128).

7. He goes even so far as to propose it having been “a significant, perhaps a major, input to the sociopolitical realm of the United States” (Waldo 1984, p. xxxi). See also Wilson (1980, p. 26).

8. See Burlingame (1940, p. 118). This view was linked to the attempts to legitimate the concept of “natural monopoly”, in the light of which AT&T came to be conceived over decades.

9. The Transparent Society. Translated by David Webb. Polity Press, 1992.