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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on January 13, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(1):216-218; doi:10.1093/es/khn113
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Jennifer Karns Alexander. The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control

Jennifer Karns Alexander. The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xvii + 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-8018-8693-5, $49.95 (cloth).

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Efficiency is a key concept of modernity, and one previously explored in its managerial context by historians like Samuel P. Hays, Samuel Haber, and Robert Kanigel. In this book, Jennifer Alexander widens the lens to trace efficiency's intellectual history from its origins as a measure of machines to its contemporary status as a personal and professional virtue.

Alexander embarks on six chronological case studies: two from Britain, two from the United States, and one each from France and Germany. First, Alexander compares the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Eric S. Hintz

University of Pennsylvania


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