Taylored Citizenship: State Institutions and Subjectivity. By Char Roone Miller. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001. 224p. $66.00.

Extract

Few political scientists would recognize the name Frederick Winslow Taylor. Yet by Char Roone Miller's analysis, Taylor's early-twentieth-century “scientific” reforms in management and administrative practices play out in a ubiquitous and subtle process that shapes citizenship in modern America. The application of Taylor-inspired techniques to the reform of the military in the mid-twentieth century and their curiously parallel application in educational reforms receive Miller's closest attention. Much in the spirit of Michel Foucault's (1975) Discipline and Punish, Miller is concerned with demonstrating that ostensibly progressive efforts at efficient organization effectively routinize the production of consciousness, desire, and even the body.