"In the Taylorized world, something has been lost and, until it’s found, adding a few case studies to the curriculum at Harvard Business School probably isn’t enough. Neither unions nor businesses have lived up to Brandeis’s optimism. “If the fruits of Scientific Management are directed into the proper channels,” he wrote, “the workingman will get not only a fair share, but a very large share, of the industrial profits arising from improved industry.” Lately, that share has been going to shareholders and C.E.O.s. Home and work, separated since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, have been growing back together again: BlackBerry on the nightstand, toaster in the photocopy room. Efficiency was meant to lead to a shorter workday, but, in the final two decades of the twentieth century, the average American added a hundred and sixty-four hours of work in the course of a year; that’s a whole extra month’s time, but not, typically, a month’s worth of either happiness minutes or civic participation. Eating dinner standing up while nursing a baby, making a phone call to the office, and supervising a third grader’s homework is not, I don’t think, the hope of democracy."

— Jill Lepore, Not so Fast

8:50 am  •  12 October 2009