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not so fast

Tuesday,  10/06/09  10:53 PM

The New Yorker has a fascinating story by Jill Lepore: Not So Fast.  "Scientific management started as a way to work.  How did it become a way of life?"

Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.”

I think the larger question answers the smaller one: "How did work become a way of life?"