Efficiency Movement

The efficiency movement was a major movement in the United States, Britain and other industrial nations in the early 20th century that sought to identify and eliminate waste in all areas of the economy and society, and to develop and implement best practices. The concept covered mechanical, economic, social, and personal improvement. The quest for efficiency promised effective, dynamic management rewarded by growth.

As a result of the influence of an early proponent, it is more often known as Taylorism.

United States

The efficiency movement played a central role in the Progressive Era in the United States, where it flourished 1890–1932. Adherents argued that all aspects of the economy, society and government were riddled with waste and inefficiency. Everything would be better if experts identified the problems and fixed them. The result was strong support for building research universities and schools of business and engineering, municipal research agencies, as well as reform of hospitals and medical schools, and the practice of farming. Perhaps the best known leaders were engineers Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), who used a stopwatch to identify the smallest inefficiencies, and Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr. (1868–1924) who proclaimed there was always "one best way" to fix a problem.

Leaders including Herbert Croly, Charles R. van Hise, and Richard Ely sought to improve governmental performance by training experts in public service comparable to those in Germany, notably at the Universities of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Schools of business administration set up management programs oriented toward efficiency.

Municipal and state efficiency

Many cities set up "efficiency bureaus" to identify waste and apply the best practices. For example, Chicago created an Efficiency Division (1910–16) within the city government's Civil Service Commission, and private citizens organized the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency (1910–32). The former pioneered the study of "personal efficiency," measuring employees' performance through new scientific merit systems and efficiency movement

State governments were active as well. For example, Massachusetts set up its "Commission on Economy and Efficiency" in 1912. It made hundreds of recommendations.Commission on Economy and Efficiency, ''Annual report of the Commission on Economy and Efficiency'' (Boston, 1913), p 7
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Philanthropy

Leading philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller actively promoted the efficiency movement. In his many philanthropic pursuits, Rockefeller believed in supporting efficiency. He said,

To help an inefficient, ill-located, unnecessary school is a waste ...it is highly probable that enough money has been squandered on unwise educational projects to have built up a national system of higher education adequate to our needs, if the money had been properly directed to that end.

Conservation

The conservation movement regarding national resources came to prominence during the Progressive Era. According to historian Samuel P. Hays, the conservation movement was based on the "gospel of the efficiency".

The Massachusetts Commission on Economy and Efficiency reflected the new concern with conservation. It said in 1912:

President Roosevelt was the nation's foremost conservationist, putting the issue high on the national agenda by emphasizing the need to eliminate wasteful uses of limited natural resources. He worked with all the major figures of the movement, especially his chief advisor on the matter, Gifford Pinchot. Roosevelt was deeply committed to conserving natural resources, and is considered to be the nation's first conservation President.

In 1908, Roosevelt sponsored the Conference of Governors held in the White House, with a focus on natural resources and their most efficient use. Roosevelt delivered the opening address: "Conservation as a National Duty".

In contrast, environmentalist John Muir promulgated a very different view of conservation, rejecting the efficiency motivation. Muir instead preached that nature was sacred and humans are intruders who should look but not develop. Working through the Sierra Club he founded, Muir tried to minimize commercial use of water resources and forests. While Muir wanted nature preserved for the sake of pure beauty, Roosevelt subscribed to Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."

National politics

In U.S. national politics, the most prominent figure was Herbert Hoover, a trained engineer who played down politics and believed dispassionate, nonpolitical experts could solve the nation's great problems, such as ending poverty.

After 1929, Democrats blamed the Great Depression on Hoover and helped to somewhat discredit the movement.

Antitrust

Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) argued bigness conflicted with efficiency and added a new political dimension to the Efficiency Movement. For instance, while fighting against legalized price fixing, Brandeis launched an effort to influence congressional policymaking with the help of his friend Norman Hapgood, who was then the editor of ''Harper's Weekly''. He coordinated the publication of a series of articles (''Competition Kills'', ''Efficiency and the One-Price Article'', and ''How Europe deals with the one-price goods''), which were also distributed by the lobbying group American Fair Trade League to legislators, Supreme Court justices, governors, and twenty national magazines. For his works, he was asked to speak before a congressional committee considering the price-fixing bill he drafted. Here, he stated that "big business is not more efficient than little business" and that "it is a mistake to suppose that the department stores can do business cheaper than the little dealer." Brandeis ideas on which business is most efficient conflicted with Croly's positions, which favored efficiency driven by a kind of consolidation gained through large-scale economic operations.

As early as 1895 Brandeis had warned of the harm that giant corporations could do to competitors, customers, and their own workers. The growth of industrialization was creating mammoth companies which he felt threatened the well-being of millions of Americans. In ''The Curse of Bigness'' he argued, "Efficiency means greater production with less effort and at less cost, through the elimination of unnecessary waste, human and material. How else can we hope to attain our social ideals?" He also argued against an appeal to Congress by the state-regulated railroad industry in 1910 seeking an increase in rates. Brandeis explained that instead of passing along increased costs to the consumer, the railroads should pursue efficiency by reducing their overhead and streamlining their operations, initiatives that were unprecedented during the time.

Bedaux system

The Bedaux system, developed by Franco-American management consultant Charles Bedaux (1886–1944) built on the work of F. W. Taylor and Charles E. Knoeppel.Edward Francis Leopold Brech, ''Productivity in Perspective, 1914-1974'' (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002).Michael R. Weatherburn, 'Scientific Management at Work: the Bedaux System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British Industry, 1914-48' (Imperial College PhD thesis, 2014).

Its distinctive advancement beyond these earlier thinkers was the Bedaux Unit or ''B'', a universal measure for all manual work.Craig R. Littler, ''Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies: a Comparative Study of the Transformation of Work Organization in Britain, Japan and the USA'' (London: Heinemann, 1982
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The Bedaux System was influential in the United States in the 1920s and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Britain.Steven Kreis, 'Charles E. Bedaux' in ''American National Biography'
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/ref>Steven Kreis, 'The Diffusion of Scientific Management: the Bedaux Company in America and Britain, 1926-1945' in ''A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management Since Taylor'' (1992)

From the 1920s to the 1950s there were about one thousand companies in 21 countries worldwide that were run on the Bedaux System, including giants such as Swift's, Eastman Kodak, B.F. Goodrich, DuPont, Fiat, ICI and General Electric.'Christopher D. McKenna, ''The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century'' (Cambridge: CUP, 2010)
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Relation to other movements

Later movements had echoes of the Efficiency Movement and were more directly inspired by Taylor and Taylorism. Technocracy, for instance, and others flourished in the 1930s and 1940s.

Postmodern opponents of nuclear energy in the 1970s broadened their attack to try to discredit movements that saw salvation for human society in technical expertise alone, or which held that scientists or engineers had any special expertise to offer in the political realm.

Coming into usage in 1990, the Western term lean manufacturing (lean enterprise, lean production, or simply "lean") refers to a business idea that considered the expenditure of resources for anything other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Today the Lean concept is broadening to include a greater range of strategic goals, not just cost-cutting and efficiency.

Britain

In engineering, the concept of efficiency was developed in Britain in the mid-18th century by John Smeaton (1724–1792). Called the "father of civil engineering", he studied water wheels and steam engines. In the late 19th century there was much talk about improving the efficiency of the administration and economic performance of the British Empire.

National Efficiency was an attempt to discredit the old-fashioned habits, customs and institutions that put the British at a handicap in competition with the world, especially with Germany, which was seen as the epitome of efficiency. In the early 20th century, "National Efficiency" became a powerful demand — a movement supported by prominent figures across the political spectrum who disparaged sentimental humanitarianism and identified waste as a mistake that could no longer be tolerated. The movement took place in two waves; the first wave from 1899 to 1905 was made urgent by the inefficiencies and failures in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). ''Spectator'' magazine reported in 1902 there was "a universal outcry for efficiency in all departments of society, in all aspects of life". The two most important themes were technocratic efficiency and managerial efficiency. As White (1899) argued vigorously, the empire needed to be put on a business footing and administered to get better results. The looming threat of Germany, which was widely seen as a much more efficient nation, added urgency after 1902. Politically National Efficiency brought together modernizing Conservatives and Unionists, Liberals who wanted to modernize their party, and Fabians such as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells