Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

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Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

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Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body

Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body

by Steffan Blayney
Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body
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Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body

Health and Efficiency: Fatigue, the Science of Work, and the Making of the Working-Class Body

by Steffan Blayney

Overview

A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health.

Under this new “science of work,” fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers’ capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781625346490
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date: 07/29/2022
Series: Activist Studies of Science & Technology
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

STEFFAN BLAYNEY is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Discovery of Fatigue 13

Chapter 2 Industrial Physiology and the Productive Body 45

Chapter 3 Industrial Psychology and the Human Factor 75

Chapter 4 The Market in Efficiency 107

Chapter 5 The Worker's Voice 138

Conclusion 179

Notes 187

Index 233

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