Incentivization As a Material Modality of Power
The behaviour of industrial workers was a protracted problem for late nineteenth century factory owners. With frequent instances of absenteeism, systematic soldiering and collective agitation, the performance of machine operators seemed to increasingly lag behind the potential of the machines they had to operate. How could one realign the demands of labor with those of capital in an era of industrial unrest? From the 1880s onward, American mechanical engineers began to develop and advocate their own answers to that question. As a professional group, the engineers had become more prominent in the preceding decades for their ability to tinker at malfunctioning machines. Now, they presented themselves as experts on management who offered the (monetary) incentivization of industrial workers as solution to the labor question. The market devices they designed were material and moral at the very same time.
They were moralbecause the engineer conceived of industrial conflicts as at root a problem of finding a suitable work ethic for industrial society. The ethic of subordinating leisure to the virtues of industrious life was subtly transformed in the middle of the nineteenth century in the sense that work was now equally considered a creative act by which an individual could increase its status and reach the objective of independency and self-employment. At that period of time, however, work itself was radically transformed from the world of handicraft, farms and artisan shops to the strong division of labor characteristic of large factories. The idea of wage labor as a temporary phase in a trajectory towards independence became more and more difficult to sustain. In light of that difficulty, the engineers were, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned with the value of work and the workers’ motivation to engage in it. Clearly, they were not high-minded moralists but they did struggle to re-introduce moral notions of creativity, merit, individuality and mobility into mass factory labor.
These market devices were simultaneously materialbecause the engineers embedded the moral notions listed above in tangible managerial techniques. For only material changes at the shop floor level – not profound social transformation or radical political action – could bring peace to American industry. Hence, they began to experiment with the instruments that managers could employ to enhance worker performance: systems of cost accounting to determine the actual contribution of the workers to a more efficient running of the factory and offer them a fair share of the gains in return; time tickets that were handed over to the individual worker to transmit managerial expectations with regard to the task at hand and determine the premium bonus once it was accomplished; instruction cards that told machine operators how best to achieve their task and served as a benchmark to determine who should be paid according to high piece rates and who according to low ones; performance charts that traced the output of workers over time and vis-à-vis one another and were communicated back to them as a stimulus to further exertion. Whatever the exact form of these devices, the shared purpose of the incentives offered to workers was to enhance their performance, decrease malcontent and inhibit collective strategies.
In this paper, I focus on the strategies of engineers to secure the interest and initiative of the workers in which material and moral issues were very much entangled. Historically, I trace the emergence of incentivization as a new modality of power from the piece rate methods of Frederick Halsey and Henry Towne, via Taylor’s system of scientific management to the charting of human performance by Henry Gant and Robert B. Wolf. Theoretically, I derive the concept of a ‘modality of power’ from Michel Foucault’s work on disciplinary practices and use it to highlight the differences and commonalities between discipline and incentivization as rival ways to steer human behavior in different directions. More in particular, set against earlier disciplinary strategies to restrict the bodily movements of individuals and increase their docility and utility, I argue that incentivization should be understood as a technique of enticement that targets the individual’s willingness to act and demarcates ‘incentivizable man’ as a new human figure.