FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

BREAKING THE CODE

Working as a railway postal clerk in the late 1860’s, Vail had noticed that no two letters necessarily went to their destinations via the same route. Sacks of mail traveled back and forth, often taking weeks or months to reach their destinations. Vail introduced the idea of standardized routing—all letters going to the same place would go the same way—and helped revolutionize the post office. When he later formed AT&T, he set out to place an identical telephone in every American home.

Vail standardized not only the telephone handset and all its components but AT&Ts business procedures and administration as well. In a 1908 advertisement he justified his swallowing up small telephone companies by arguing for “a clearing-house of standardization” that would ensure economy in “construction of equipment, lines and conduits, as well as hi operating methods and legal work,” not to mention “a uniform system of operating and accounting.” What Vail recognized is that to succeed in the Second Wave environment, “software”—i.e., procedures and administrative routines—had to be standardized along with hardware.

Vail was only one of the Great Standardizes who shaped industrial society. Another was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a machinist turned crusader, who believed that work could be made scientific by standardizing the steps each worker performed. In the early decades of this century Taylor decided that there was one best (standard) way to perform each job, one best (standard) tool to perform it with, and a stipulated (standard) tune hi which to complete it.

Armed with this philosophy, he became the world’s leading management guru. In his time, and later, he was compared with Freud, Marx, and Franklin. Nor were capitalist employers, eager to squeeze the last ounce of productivity from their workers, alone in their admiration for Taylorism, with its efficiency experts, piece-work schemes, and rate-busters. Communists shared their enthusiasm.Indeed, Lenin urged that Taylor’s methods be adapted for use in socialist production. An industrializer first and a Communist second, Lenin, too, was a zealous believer hi standardization.

In Second Wave societies, hiring procedures as well as work were increasingly standardized. Standardized tests were used to identify and weed out the supposedly unfit, especially in the civil service. Pay scales were Standardized throughout whole industries, along with fringe benefits, lunch hours, holidays, and grievance procedures. To prepare youth for the job