Kerry Etheridge: Week 1 Application Assignment

For this week's application assignment, I chose to summarize an article that I read while researching the group report on management scholar. As part of the summarization, I will attempt to apply the techniques in They Say/I Say.

In "Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor" (2003), author Sharon Corwin draws a comparison between industrial and artistic production in the pursuit of efficiency in the early twentieth century. She cites the work of engineering consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, creators of the One Best Way, as being representative of the industrial efforts, and the Precisionist project, an art group of American modernists that included Georgia O'Keefe and Morton Schamberg among others, for the artistic counterpoint.

At first glance, it might seem odd to compare two such diametrically opposed professions as factory workers and artists. But when comparing the Gilbreths' method of using early motion picture techniques to determine the optimal way of performing tasks with the least number of wasted motions to "the clean lines, standardized geometries, and simplified facture of the Precisionist canvas," the similarities between the two as producers of labor becomes striking.

Consider, if you will, that the Gilbreths' time-motion studies provided a visual roadmap as to how laborers went about their tasks. Once a task was mapped, it became possible to determine where shortcuts (or efficiencies) might occur to minimize the effort required on the part of the laborer. When compared with the precise style and minimal brushwork of the Precisionists, it can be seen that both methods are driven by their pursuit of efficiency and a reduction of excess motion.

The ironic thing about these two disparate quests for efficiency were, at times, anything but simple. For example, the Gilbreths' method of photographically recording workers repeatedly performing a task involved placing small lights on their hands so that their movements were recorded as lines of light through the camera's time exposure. These recordings were then used to create wire models intended to demonstrate what the Gilbreths called the "paths of least waste."

As with the Gilbreth method, perfecting the minimal efficiencies of Precisionism also required a great deal of time and effort in order to achieved the desired "formal language of standardization and exactitude. Corwin contends that the overarching goal of both the Gilbreths and Precisionists was to make labor invisible to the outside observer.