Value struggles in digital Taylorism: Scientific management and social mediation

Abstract

In the famous mantra of McKinsey, ‘what gets measured gets managed’. Drawing on previous work (Pitts 2021, 2022a, 2022b), the point of this chapter is to suggest that what gets measured gets mediated, too, and that labour in an age of ‘digital Taylorism’ is and can be a site where this is worked out. Digital Taylorism is used in the literature to describe the process by which information and communication technologies make possible the standardisation of knowledge work (Avis, 2016; Cole et al., 2021; Lauder et al., 2017). As Altenreid (2019: 122) writes, the concept captures how a variety of forms and combinations of software and hardware as a whole allow for new modes of standardisation, decomposition, quantification and surveillance of labour – often through forms of (semi-)automated management and control….digital technology allows for the rise of classical elements of Taylorism such as rationalisation, standardisation, decomposition and deskilling, as well as the precise surveillance and measurement of the labour process in often novel and unexpected ways. Rather than reinventing the wheel, in these ways, ‘digital technology is often merely extending and radicalising logics that have been at work for centuries’ (Altenreid, 2019: 122). This chapter contends that the concept of value helps understand these logics, being crucial for understanding precisely how what gets measured gets managed and mediated, articulating the intersection between what goes on at the level of the workplace and what goes on at the level of the market. It is especially important to restate the importance of value as a means of social mediation and articulation in the context of the claims of some scholars that digital transformation calls into question conventional forms of measurement and valorisation redundant (Hardt and Negri, 2017).