The Construction of the Efficient Office: Scientific Management, Accountability, and the Neo‐Liberal State
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The office has been a central site of organizational planning, accountability, and control since the 19th century. Yet it has been the subject of relatively little accounting research. Through the dual theoretical lenses of Foucaultian and Labour Process theories, this study employs historical photo‐elicitation methodology to investigate the implementation of management control and accountability in the scientifically managed office which emerged in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Our analysis reveals the manner in which accounting records created new modes of disciplinary control and surveillance within the office and how accounting tasks were de‐skilled in a gradually feminized and mechanized office environment. We also witness the role of accounting in the physical structuring of office space through the assembly line arrangement of office furniture to facilitate paper flows and the installation of record‐keeping systems of surveillance. In addition, our visually derived historical account of these transformations in office administration allows us to reflect on some contemporary issues. The production‐line design and efficiency so promoted by scientific management served as a forerunner to today's open‐plan office, as well as influencing contemporary office management philosophies such as Activity‐Based Working. Furthermore, we seek to inform current debates on the role of accounting in contemporary neo‐liberal society. In the history of the scientific office, we gain an early glimpse of the subsequent role that accounting comes to play within a neo‐liberal agenda as a powerful technology of micro‐measurement and micro‐management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".