Efficiency--associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity--often counts as one of the highest virtues in Western culture. But what does it mean, exactly, to be efficient? How did this concept evolve from a means for evaluating simple machines to the mantra of progress and a prerequisite for success?
In this provocative and ambitious study, Jennifer Karns Alexander explores the growing power of efficiency in the post-industrial West. Examining the ways the concept has appeared in modern history--from a benign measure of the thermal...
Efficiency--associated with individual discipline, superior management, and increased profits or productivity--often counts as one of the highest v...