Efficiency and the Productive Body: The Gilbreths’ Photographic Motion Studies of Work

Abstract

This article examines the images of working bodies seen in the photographic motion studies of work undertaken by the management consultants Frank and Lillian Gilbreth in the 1910s and 1920s. It contextualises their studies, called chronocyclegraphs, as the product of two key cultural developments: first, new practices of measuring and assessing productivity in the context of workplace management and second, the use of new technologies for visualising the body, which brought with them new aesthetics and visual conventions for representing bodies in motion. The Gilbreths’ chronocyclegraphs provide a striking new vision of the working body in industrial capitalism, not as a thing of flesh and blood, but as a luminous field of energy or line of force. Taking these images as representative of new ideas about efficiency and productivity emergent at this time, this article examines their popularisation through the work of Lillian Gilbreth, who promised that the reward for increased productivity was a greater quantity of ‘happiness minutes’.