Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World

Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World

Snow, Henry

Hardcover

LaborGeneral World HistorySocial Movements

Publisher Price: $29.95

ISBN10: 1804293202
ISBN13: 9781804293201
Publisher: Verso
Published: May 12 2026
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.19 Width: 6.07 Depth: 9.46
Language: English
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 intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japa­nese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an in­ternal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Ex­tending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon ware­houses into every corner of our lives.

Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of his­tory. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged.

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