CONCEPT
Algorithmic Management
The contemporary descendant of Taylor's system — the use of software to monitor, measure, evaluate, and direct human work at computational scale, applying the worker-as-system ontology to knowledge labor the original framework could not reach.
Algorithmic management is scientific management updated for the digital age. Where Taylor used a stopwatch, organizations now use software — systems that track keystrokes, time active hours, score performance, allocate tasks, and discipline deviation through automated feedback. The 2023 systematic literature review in Management Review Quarterly covering 172 articles found a pattern Taylor would have recognized: standardization of tasks, decomposition of complex work into measurable components, surveillance of worker behavior through digital monitoring, evaluation of performance through algorithmic scoring, direction of work allocation through automated systems. Amazon's warehouses are the paradigmatic case in physical labor. Increasingly sophisticated productivity-monitoring tools are the case in knowledge work. The information asymmetry Taylor sought — management knows the one best way, the worker does not — has been perfected by the algorithm, which holds a model of optimal performance no human worker can fully see or challenge.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The genealogy is direct. Taylor's time-and-motion studies became Hawthorne