Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made them? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives?

Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seven­teenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers—and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, polit­ical rights, national policy, and the global economy.

Seventeenth-century intellec...