Frederick Winslow Taylor

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made them? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives?

And more on how the first "Big Men on Campus," Herbert Hoover, and friends, kept charge in the university, in the workplace, and on the national stage.

Lillian Gilbreth, who died just over fifty years ago, saw that the worker could not be understood as a cog in the machine.

When factories created a population of tired workers, a new frontier in fatigue studies was born.

How a relentless speedup is reshaping the working class.

The connections between the two systems of labor have been persistently neglected in mainstream business history.

Jeff Bezos is stealing from a 19th-century playbook.

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

The measure of thermal energy expended by exercise was adapted from the study of explosives and engines.

Slaveholding plantations of the 19th century used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than factories.