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Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World
A thrilling intellectual and economic history of workplace control from the birth of capitalism to the modern tech giants.
What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made these rules? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives? From Caribbean plantations in the 17th century to Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers– and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control they perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and global economy.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals like William Petty and John Locke argued human beings were selfish machines who have to be controlled for our own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison workshop. When 19th-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they developed new theories of political control to justify using them. After World War II, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country by training an future President Ronald Reagan. Billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses to every part of our world and lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature were fabricated– not discovered– in order to help us challenge them now.
What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made these rules? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives? From Caribbean plantations in the 17th century to Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers– and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control they perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and global economy.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals like William Petty and John Locke argued human beings were selfish machines who have to be controlled for our own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison workshop. When 19th-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they developed new theories of political control to justify using them. After World War II, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country by training an future President Ronald Reagan. Billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses to every part of our world and lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature were fabricated– not discovered– in order to help us challenge them now.
351 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 12, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 9, 2026
A fascinating history through a range of eras and characters, ranging from sugar plantation slavers, John Locke and the Benthams, Charles Koch, Frederick Taylor, Jeff Bezos and Alfred Sloan. And Herbert Spencer.
The book focuses on the science of control, how management practitioners and economists worked to.exert control over the workplace and particularly how they conspired to keep down the working class.
The book is well researched and led me to add at least four works into my reading queue. The writing, particularly in the second half, is insightful and occasionally humorous in a trenchant way.
The book focuses on the science of control, how management practitioners and economists worked to.exert control over the workplace and particularly how they conspired to keep down the working class.
The book is well researched and led me to add at least four works into my reading queue. The writing, particularly in the second half, is insightful and occasionally humorous in a trenchant way.
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May 5, 2026'A powerful if one-sided case that wealthy elites have over centuries conspired with their managers to suggest that “there is no alternative” to market fundamentalism.' My FT review (free to read) https://as.ft.com/r/8c299730-5200-42a...
May 18, 2026
Very good, if a bit one sided
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews