Efficiency and the Productive Body

This presentation 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 as representative of new ideas about efficiency and productivity emergent at this time.

It contextualises their studies, called chronocyclegraphs, as the product of two key cultural developments that took place at the start of the twentieth century: firstly, new practises of measuring and assessing productivity in the context of workplace management; and secondly, the use of new technologies for visualising the body, which brought with them new aesthetics and visual conventions for representing bodies in motion. Their 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.

This presentation examines the managerial imaginary visualised in the Gilbreths’ photographic motion studies, and how its productivity imperative is extended from the workplace into everyday life through the work of Lillian Gilbreth, which promised that the reward for increased productivity was a greater quantity of 'happiness minutes'.

About the speaker:

Elizabeth Stephens is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, where she was previously an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2022). Her publications include the books Normality: A Critical Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle, and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present. Her Future Fellowship project examines the history of experimentation as a shared practice between the arts and sciences.