Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany

5. The New Managerial Rationality and the Racialization of Industrial Work

chapter 5 The New Managerial Rationality and the Racialization of Industrial Work The fundamental reconstitution of Saar public life and the intensifying contestation over the meanings and boundaries of Öffentlichkeit initiated a process of ideological rearticulation that fundamentally transformed the managerial discourses of Saar employers after 1900. The structural interconnections between company paternalism and public authority meant that efforts to expand the conditions of Öffentlichkeit in the Saar necessarily , if indirectly, undermined the foundations of the paternalist factory regime. But the formation of working-class counterpublics and new spaces of opposition also enabled direct critiques of paternalist workplace organization after 1900. In response to Social Democratic, liberal reformist, and Christian-national challenges to paternalism, Saar employers began publicly and systematically to (re)de‹ne the nature of work and the relations between workers and employers in heavy industry. Abandoning or reaccenting the central coordinates of paternalist labor policy, they formulated a new rationality of workplace management, centered on the regulation of workers’ bodies and the bioracial capacities of workers and their families, which sought to improve labor “performance” (Leistung) and overall productive ef‹ciencies in the racial and economic “struggle” between nations and peoples. This new rationality was partially institutionalized and materialized in the architecture of Saar factories and in the labor relations and social policies of Saar heavy industry after 1900. These new technocratic schemes of “rational” workplace management , which sought to discover and direct the allegedly natural laws immanent to human behavior and organizational forms, were part of a 141 general American and European phenomenon within large-scale industry in the new era of mass production and global markets at the turn of the century.1 They are usually grouped together under the label “scienti‹c management” and associated with “Taylorism,” or the ideas of Frederick Taylor, an American engineer whose theory of management based on the systematic study of work tasks and the creation of optimal workplace conditions and incentives for labor productivity were discussed widely among European engineers and industrialists.2 But these schemes emerged from the writings of a broad array of engineers, employers and their representatives , social reformers, trade unionists, psychologists, sociologists, and physiologists across North America and Europe and from a wider set of concerns related to new divisions of labor and skill, the invention of new wage systems and incentives, the bureaucratic reorganization of managerial hierarchies, the introduction of new technologies and mechanized infrastructure, the reorganization of production processes, and the changing structures of the business enterprise as a “vertically” and “horizontally ” integrated corporate structure after 1890.3 In this context, new technically trained managers undertook efforts to organize the industrial workplace and the production process according to “impersonal” technical imperatives and to comprehend worker attitudes toward and physical capacities for work on the basis of scienti‹c-technocratic considerations— efforts that were visible before the First World War, to very different degrees, in the U.S. electrical, chemical, and automobile industries; the British engineering and metallurgical industries; the French mining and automobile industries; and the German iron and steel, chemical, electrical, and automobile industries. Nevertheless, the new scienti‹c-technocratic orientation of industrial management took many forms and cannot be reduced to one general, ineluctable trend of “corporate” management in the modern industrial era. In Germany, it evolved out of two distinctive bodies of formalized knowledge: the “science of the factory” (Fabrikbetriebslehre or Fabrikbetriebskunde ), or the production process; and the “science of work” (Arbeitswissenschaft), focused on individual worker attitudes and capacities . It also evolved in the context of speci‹c political-ideological struggles over the organization of work in the large-scale factory. These struggles were shaped by the relatively greater concentration of German capital and the strength of German employer organizations and their newly established research institutes or “think tanks,” in relation to organized labor; the higher levels of state involvement in social welfare institutions for 142 Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany industrial workers, especially after 1900; the increasing in›uence of reform organizations and the parties in the Reichstag (the Center, the left liberals, and the Young Liberal wing of the National Liberal Party), which could in›uence industrial legislation; and, above all, the presence of Europe’s largest and most well-organized socialist party, the SPD, and its af‹liated unions. In their immediate con›ict after 1900 with the class languages of socialism and, to a lesser extent...