Control Science:How Management Made the Modern World

A thrilling intellectual and economic history of workplace control from the birth of capitalism to the modern tech giants.

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made these rules? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives? From Caribbean plantations in the 17th century to Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers– and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control they perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and global economy.

Seventeenth-century intellectuals like William Petty and John Locke argued human beings were selfish machines who have to be controlled for our own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison workshop. When 19th-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they developed new theories of political control to justify using them. After World War II, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country by training an actor: future President Ronald Reagan. Billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses to every part of our world and lives.

Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature were fabricated– not discovered– in order to help us challenge them now.