●Today, most people on this planet spend more than half of their waking hours working, including travelling between the workplace and home; and while asleep they recover from the fatigues of their work. Seen that way, the story of work is to a great extent the history of humankind. But what exactly do we mean by work?
The main problem with the countless definitions of work and labour is their one-sidedness. Generally, they emphasize some forms of work while neglecting others. For example, women’s work is often overlooked compared to men’s, work outside the factory walls compared to that going...
●HUMANS AT WORK, 700,000–12,000 YEARS AGO
Roughly 700,000 years ago, modern humans and Neanderthals went their separate ways. That is where this book starts – but not without considering the similarities and differences between the work of humans and of other living beings. For most of our history, work consisted of hunting and gathering; then, eventually, 45,000 years ago, the emergence of the specialization of a few artisans led to a greater variety of social relations according to gender and age.
The American pioneer of time and motion studies Frank Bunker Gilbreth * remarked, somewhat provocatively, in 1911: ‘a human being or a work animal is a power... [* NOTE . Construction History Vol. 9. 1993
Frank Bunker Gilbreth: Building Contractor, Inventor and Pioneer Industrial Engineer
MJ STEEL and D W CHEETHAM
Introduction
Innovation in methods of construction has occurred throughout history: methods of management, theories and principles have evolved since the industrial revolution. The Scientific Management movement had considerable political and social impact during the early years of the twentieth century. What is rarely appreciated is that one of the pioneers of Scientific Management, Frank Bunker Gilbreth had earlier achieved considerable success as a building contractor and inventor. His ideas of motion study and Scientific Management developed from his observations while a bricklaying apprentice and his subsequent experience as construction superintendent in the USA. He applied his ideas when running his own firms. wife, Lillian, a noted psychologist, became the first professor of management at Purdue University. This paper describes both his early career as a contractor and inventor, and his second career as a pioneer industrial engineer and management consultant. His changing relationship with F W Taylor is documented. The relevance of his work to present day construction management is considered.
Frontier Society to Industrial Power
The last two decades of the nineteenth century were socially and economically a turbulent and fast changing era of American history. The frontier had only recently been tamed and Frank Gilbreth was a schoolboy when George Armstrong Custer and his entire command were "wiped out by Indian tribes led by Crazy Horse" at the Battle of Little Big Horn during the Sioux Uprising of 1876. The rapid pace of change in America can be judged from the fact that Gilbreth's wife Lillian was born only two years later, yet lived to see a man walk on the moon. The United States was urbanising and industrialising at an unprecedented pace, and with all the hectic and undisciplined recklessness that one would expect with the opening of vast new territories, huge new markets and a super-abundance of untapped natural resources.
It was onto this nascent industrial structure that the exponents of Scientific Management attempted to impose order. As America strived to move from a frontier society to a modern industrial power there was an ideal opportunity to try new methods, new ideas, and make a fresh break from the industrial practice of the Old World. Frederick Taylor, the pioneer of Scientifica Management, defined it as "knowing exactly what you want men to do, and then seeing that they do it the best and cheapest way", and it was this definition that Gilbreth was to quote when started writing the subject himself. The aim was to get any given piece of work done as quickly, as cheaply, and as efficiently as possible, and so to increase the rate of pay the workers and the profit for employers.
Apprentice and Construction Superintendent
Gilbreth did not start out with the idea of becoming an efficiency expert as no such profession existed when he started work 1885 at the age of seventeen. Although he had passed the ...
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Frank Bunker Gilbreth (born July 7, 1868, Fairfield, Maine, U.S.—died June 14, 1924, Montclair, N.J.) was an American engineer who, with his wife, Lillian Gilbreth, developed the method of time-and-motion study, as applied to the work habits of industrial employees, to increase their efficiency and hence their output.
●FARMING AND DIVISION OF LABOUR, 10000–5000 BCE
The work of hunter-gatherers largely consisted of an extensive search for means of subsistence. When food became scarce, this pursuit moved further afield. The starting point for this search was Africa but, progressively, Homo sapiens spread throughout the Old World, south of the Great Northern Ice Sheet. At the same time, people were constantly having to adapt to different circumstances – climates, flora and fauna – and implement landscape management with the help of fire. Consequently, the daily diet varied enormously between Tasmania in the south-east and Ireland in the north-west, between South Africa in the south-west and Japan in the north-east;...
●EMERGING LABOUR RELATIONS, 5000–500 BCE
The agricultural revolution created the basic conditions for potential overproduction of food and thus for comprehensive division of labour and, sometimes, for unequal labour relations. In reality, in comparison to hunter-gatherers, little had changed other than that work units had become smaller and gendered divisions of tasks more pronounced. Opportunities for structural societal change remained limited before further improvements in agricultural productivity disrupted this status quo.
Until now, the world had been one large natural landscape in which hunter-gatherers tried to sustain a living. Settlements arose – first in the Fertile Crescent and northern China...
●WORKING FOR THE MARKET, 500 BCE–1500 CE
Labour relations as we know them today developed a few thousand years ago in the first cities and states in Mesopotamia. In addition to the original reciprocity within gangs of hunter-gatherers (Chapter 1) and the independent work of farming households, probably according to the same pattern (Chapters 2 and 3), we witness a rise in tributary redistribution in the oldest cities there (pp. 91–5), and, in the ensuing states, first slavery and gradually also small self-employed producers for the market. Then, from around 1000 BCE the first employers and employees emerged (pp. 96–112). Egypt, however, remained largely committed...
●GLOBALIZATION OF LABOUR RELATIONS, 1500–1800
Despite a convergence of labour relations within Eurasia in the centuries prior to 1500, there were significant differences globally in the ways in which people organized their work around this time, and these differences would only increase in subsequent centuries. While humanity had now colonized the whole world – with New Zealand the last to be settled, around 1200 – the interconnectedness of the different continents remained limited. Before Columbus, the Americas were completely aloof from the rest of the world and the connections between north and south were also weak. Admittedly, the Indian Ocean, the China Sea and the European seas...
●CONVERGING LABOUR RELATIONS, 1800 TO NOW
What makes this era special? Perhaps most of all the fact that it is a period of global convergence of labour relations, albeit in fits and starts. Never before have so many people arranged their work in a similar way. Never before have they attempted to such a degree to improve their labour relations and labour circumstances...
●THE CHANGING SIGNIFICANCE OF WORK, 1800 TO NOW
The crucial changes to labour relations in the last two centuries, described in the previous chapter, had a number of implications. These are related to the massive shift of work from within households to outside and, consequently, the increased need to publicly regulate work and labour relations. The three most important implications of this are: the changed meaning of work and free time in people’s lives (pp. 363–75); an entirely different self-organization of, in particular, the increasingly dominant group of wage workers (pp. 375–97); and the continuous amendment of labour legislation and regulations (pp. 398–421). These three...
●OUTLOOK
One of the questions that arises at the end of this deep history of work across time and space is whether it informs how work will be organized and undertaken henceforth. What does the historical record suggest about what needs to be done in order for us to better control our collective future? Certainly, general lines can be distinguished – in the last centuries, for example, as a result of watersheds like ‘The Great Transformation’ (the mechanization by steam power that led to the declining importance of agriculture in industrializing countries), ‘The Second Great Transformation’, in which, from around 1970, services...
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