Article Critique: Head

Simon Head’s article, “The rise of the reengineers”, fits the theme of this week’s lecture perfectly. The article discussed the views of two historically significant businessmen, Fredrick Winslow Taylor and William Henry Leffingwell, and how they utilized scientific management in the business world. Scientific management is a method of managing a business through analyzing each individual part of the process of a company, and then improving the productivity of each part to increase the efficiency of the company as a whole. Even in today’s world, scientific management is still alive and well, but it now goes by the term “reengineering”.  Head’s article is an excerpt from his book The New Ruthless Economy, which was confusing at first, because in the beginning of the article it sounded like he was supporting this new progress. But as the article goes on, Head discusses how this progress comes at a cost. The employees of these businesses that are reengineering themselves aren’t viewed as people as often as they are viewed as pieces of a machine that can be tweaked, improved, and thrown out as needed. As Head began talking about the new information technologies, the idea of “compression of tasks” kept popping up. As technology advances, tasks that used to be accomplished by teams of people can now be the responsibility of a single person. Pair this with the fact that companies now have such intricate surveillance structures in place to monitor employees, and the question of the role of a supervisor comes up. What are the roles of people in these businesses going to look like in the future with this progression towards more effectiveness at the cost of humanity?

This article was published in 2003, as a chapter in The New Ruthless Economy, as mentioned before. During the 1990’s, the wage separation between people at the top of companies and the employees below them grew exponentially, and Head believes that this was due largely in part to the boom in information technology. Many people during this time were convinced that all of the new technology would help bring everyone to a more level playing field, but Head wrote this book to convince them of the opposite. He believed this technology would further push the classes apart, because with all of the added control in the work environment, employees were being devalued and made to work in unnecessarily harsh environments.

Before writing this book, Head spent ten years researching his theories by visiting a wide variety of work environments around the country. He’s seen first-hand the impact that information technology is having on today’s society in a variety of different industries, making him a reliable source in regards to his outlooks on where we could be headed next. Judging by the reviews of his book, it appears that Head’s book was accepted quite well by those who read it. The only complaint that seems to keep popping up is that he offers no “call to action” as to what people should do about changing our “new ruthless economy”

For further reading, check out some of these:

• ·         Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Fell About What They Do, by Studs Terkel
• ·         Working in America: Continuity, Conflict, and Change, by Amy S Wharton
• ·         The Working Class Marjority: America’s Best Kept Secret, by Michael Zweig