In broad retrospect the march of technological change has appeared as a series of successive revolutionary innovations, at first affecting mechanical equipment itself, more recently transforming the arrangements by which such equipment is utilized.¹  In the inventory of more significant technological changes the following should be listed: (1) increased use of electric power, (2) installation of automatic machinery, (3) achievement of continuous flow production through serialization of labor processes, (4) instrument control of machines. The progressive shift from steam to electrodynamic production has liberated both machines and workmen from the older inflexible matrix of belts and overhead drive-shafts, permitting by the adjunction of individual electric motors to machines their more logical arrangement in terms of the larger plant configuration. This has imparted more and more organic qualities to the productive process and sharpened the imperative of comprehensive adjustments.
   Automatic machinery carries with it a large initial capital investment, correlated with high fixed costs of interest, rent, and insurance. The recovery of these prior claims on production, at the same time keeping unit costs low, requires a speeding up of the entire process and has etched in sharp relief the element of time-dependency in the articulation of industrial processes. Time is replacing labor and materials as the chief basis for computing costs. The social as well as pecuniary costs of such a technology hinges upon the ability of society to maintain its inherent rhythms.
   The latest devices which research has contributed to our technological repertoire have further accelerated the momentums in industry. For example, in the field of machine construction the use of carboloy tools of great hardness has imparted more speed to operations. Roller instead of friction bearings have upped rates of production even further. Improvements in paints, varnishes, and lacquers, particularly the perfecting of cellulose lacquers, have cut down time required to finish a motor car (through reducing drying time to 25 minutes) to a few hours, with attendant savings on inventories and storage space.²
   Savings in any area of industry, whether they ensue from technical devices or managerial inventions, may be returned as consumption power to investors or to workers, or they may be used for plant expansion and the creation of new industries such as television, panoramas, aviation, and air conditioning. To the extent that the latter occurs, these savings are translated into new costs which can be met only by maintaining the industrial pace which originally produced them. Otherwise, technological change becomes a meaningless waste of labor and materials.
   While these developments have rapidly displaced thousands of workers, at the same time they have tremendously enhanced the technical importance of individual and units of workers who remain employed. Failure of workers to perform allotted functions with appropriate simultaneity, succession, and duration becomes a cumulative loss transmitted throughout the system, which applies to workers in cocatenated industries as well as to those within a single plant. Under such conditions, withheld effort on the part of the worker and/or failure to sustain effort are effectually commensurate with sabotage.
   In the last few years industrial changes have taken a bent which would seem to modify this worker dependence, since they have been less revolutionary and more in the nature of perfecting existing machinery. The main transformation has been the installation of large-capacity equipment and "topping" devices, with smaller capital costs per unit capacity. Some additional saving has been achieved by the "drive right" principle, the discovery that a single electric motor suffices to drive a multiple machine unit. While this may mitigate the exigencies of overhead costs, it simultaneously amplifies rather than curtails the salient importance of individual workers by multiplying the deleterious consequences of their defections and increasing breakdown costs. Where speeds are high and standards of accuracy are measured in thousandths of inches, the use of larger capacity units may multiply losses accruing through miscalculation in setting machinery, from hundreds to thousands of units in an hour's time.
   Accompanying the utilization of many-unit capacity machines is found an increasing reliance upon instrument measuring and control of machinery in place of the older manual control. This involves the multiple and co-ordinate use of gauges and levers. Strength, stamina, and endurance lose their relevance to such production methods, while sustained attention, correct perception, quick reaction, and general intelligence assume prime significance in the stock of traits required of labor. The omnipotence of the worker at these junctions in the industrial process at once is obvious; throwing a lever a fraction of a minute  too early or late may ruin thousands of dollars' worth of material; "reving up" a new turbine beyond its load capacity can quickly put it out of commission, failure to make appropriate adjustments in the automatic lubricating systems of power machinery may entail loss of thoesands of dollars.
   The logic of these trends converges in incontrovertible demonstration of the hypervulnerability of modern technology to sabotage both passive and active. Damage to machines and materials is accomplished with ease and in many cases absolutely defies detection. The distinction between technical errors and deliberate sabotage is a blurred one, and both are equally costly. The psychological concomitants mediating the worker's overt performance more than ever before must receive the attention of those seeking to preserve industrial discipline and maintain technological advances.
   The application of coercive social controls such as arbitrary commands, reprimands, fines, discharge, and threats of these recourses to the achievement of industrial conformities is fraught with the greatest dangers. Covert aggression associated with forced conformity is too easily transmuted into lowered productivity, breakage, and spoilage. Organized resistances can be detected and handled by management, but under the newer technonology resistance need not take an organized form in order to exert a crippling effect.³ The costs of more aggressive action in the form of strikes is too well known to document here.
   The spell of Taylor and scientific management has been strong in American industry. His conception of labor control is epitomized in his famous injunctions to a putative steel worker named Schmidt:

... you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning till night. When he tells you to pick up a pug and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that straight through the day. And what's more, no back talk. Now a high-priced man does just what he is told to do and no back talk. Do you understand that?⁴

The doctrine of scientific management rested upon assumptions that production control could be attained by the atomistic segregation, timing, and standardizing of overt movements made by machine operators. It neither postulated nor attempted to compute organizational aspects of human behavior. Social control in the Taylor system was called functional foremanship, with power vested in the shop foreman, who held paternalistic or tyrannical sway over robotlike workers. Not only did he combine the functions of administration, specific technical guidance, and personnel arbitration in his own person, but he also perpetuated all the bombastic traditions of the gang boss who drove coolie and immigrant labor across the plains.
   The ghost of Taylor still stalks in American industry, but it is growing apparent that this management orientation is a flagrant anomaly in power-age technology. Today management is beginning to talk softly to worker Scmidt, which cannot be ascribed entirely to malefic designs of New Deal personalities. The demands for new methods of social control to enlist the loyalties of labor emanate from too many varied sources, in some cases from nanagement itself, to give this trend the complexion of political high jinks. It is better related to a direct or symbolic recognition that worker Schmidt is no longer an automaton but that he is a complex creature full of crea tive touch-springs who in the new technological setting cannot be manipulated to the ends of management by the simple administration of pain and pleasure in varying amounts.⁵
   There is no indication of any noteworthy abatement in the swift pace of technological change in our culture. The proliferation of research laboratories in the United States from 300 in 1920 to 2,200 in 1938, together with a 700 percent increase in annual expenditures for the developments of new products and processes during the same period, bears ample testimony to this fact.⁶ The generalized societal reaction to this technological dynamic has been similar to the adjustments occurring within industry. Our cultural arrangements have lost much of their specificity, rendering it exceedingly difficult to define them in terms of the attributes of folkways, mores, and institutions, i.e, uniformity, formality, and persistence.⁷ They have acquired extreme flexibility and in determinism in the face of day-to-day changes and wide occupational and geographic diversity. Correspondingly, while generalized policy tends to emanate from centralized authority, control at the point of contact between the policy and local areas has been delegated to administrators and leaders enjoying extensive discretionary powers. This is best seen in the growth of administrative law.⁸
   The restricted subjectivism which is the prerogative of administrators and social specialists, as in the case of the industrial worker, can pay societal dividends only when complemented by general intelligence, persistent effort, and loyalty. Here, too, is raised the question as to the efficacy of coercive control of such personnel, since there can be no evaluation of their success or failure in terms of precedent or catalogues of rules.
   At the same time, the deposition of specialists and administrators as rule makers has placed a great strain upon the lines of responsibility between them and general policy-forming agencies. They are even more remotely removed from the masses to whom they ultimately owe allegiance. One of the most outstanding needs crystallized by technological trends is for a system of agencies to control the abuse of these amplified powers and to provide redress for individuals injured as a consequence of their illegal use.
 
 

¹ No narrow technological determinism is intended; the writer's methodological viewpoint can be briefly stated in terms of a theory of limitations. Instead of postulating high or one-to-one correlations between technology and other aspects of culture, the former is conceived as imposing limits upon emergent and functioning societal mechanisms. This means that ranges are set by technology beyond which political, religious, familial, and legal variations destroy the integrative potentialities of the existing type of technology. See R. Thurnwald, "Spell of Limited Possibilities," American Sociological Review, 2:195-203, 1937; same , author Black and Whitc in East Africa, London, 1935, Ch. VII; A. Goldenweiser, History, Psychology and Culture, New York, 1933, Part II; W. Firey, "Delimited Variability in the Organization of Customary Behavior," Sociology and Social Research, 25:140 -49, 1940.
 
² David Weintraub, Technology and Capitol Formation, National Research Project, W.P.A., 1939, pp. 10 ff.

³Sabotage has been a continuous problem in Russian industry since the inception of the Soviet regime. There is little accurate evidence that it has been organized. For disinterested observation, attesting to sabotage on projects which he engineered, see John Littlepage, Red Gold, New York, 1938, Ch. X. Evidence gathered by American investigators pointed to the presence sabotage in Soviet industry but excluded the possibility of its being organized; John Dewey, et al., Not Guilty, New York, 1938, Ch. XXIII.  For an excellent informal account of the growing reliance of international espionage organizations upon a decentralized  type of sabotage, see Jan Valtin, Out of the Night (New York: Alliance Press 1940)

⁴ F.W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), p. 46.

⁶ See Report on Economic Significance of Technological Progress, Committee of Society of Industrial Engineers, New York, 1933; Walter Polakov, The Power Age, New York, 1933, Ch. IX; Henderson, Economic Consequences of Power,New York, 1931, Ch. III, M. Cooke and P. Murray, Organized Labor and Production, New York, 1940, Ch. VI; address by William Green before Taylor Society and Management Division of the American Society of Engineers, New York, Dec.3, 1925.

⁶ David Weintraub, op. cit., p. 17; see also William Hamor's reports on research, issued by tbe Mellon Institute for 1938 and 1940.

⁷ Howard Odum, "Notes on the Technicways in Contemporary Society, American Sociological Review, Vol. II, June, 1937; Alice Davis, "Time and the Technicways," Social Forces, Vol. XIX December, 1940, George Day, "Folkways and Stateways in Soviet Russia," Sociology and Social Research, 23: 334-44, 1939.

⁸ A. B. Wolfe, "Will and Reason in Economic Life," Journal of Social Philosophy, 1936; Milton Konvitz, "Administrative Law and Democracy," ibid., 1938.