The animating principle of all such work investigations is the view
of human beings in machine terms. Since management is not interested
in the person of the worker, but in the worker as he or she is used in
office, factory, warehouse, store, or transport process, this view is form
the management point of view not only eminently rational but the basis
of all calculation. The human being is here regarded as a mechanism
articulated by hinges, ball-and-socket joints etc….In this we see not merely
the terms of a machine analogy used for experimental purposes, nor merely
a teaching metaphor or didactic device, but in the context of the capitalist
mode of production the operating theory by which people of one class set
into motion people of another class. It is the reductive formula
that expresses both how capital employs labor and what it makes of humanity
(124).