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 economy of a machine to its widespread application to personal behaviors like chewing habits, spending choices, and shop floor movements to its controversial use as a measure of the business success of American slavery — she argues that beneath efficiency's seemingly endless variety lies a common theme: the pursuit of mastery through techniques of surveillance, discipline, and control.

Six historical case studies — two from Britain, one each from France and Germany, and two from the United States — illustrate the concept's fascinating development and provide context for the meanings of, and uses for, efficiency today and in the future.

Efficiency is taken for granted today as indispensable to the continuation to a well-ordered society. Alexander (history of science, department of mechanical engineering, University of Minnesota) takes a closer look at the concept as it has been expressed since the Industrial Revolution. She begins with the first studies of efficiency in machines that resulted in increased output. She then moves to the main thrust of the book; how the "mantra of efficiency" has come to mean an efficient human machine as well. She illustrates this through the attempts in Weimar Germany to save its economy through greater industrial efficiency and with examples from early American assembly lines. But there is a dark side to efficiency. Alexander shows that many of the most efficient workplaces were (and are) the most repressive, not interested in the well-being of the people doing the work. Her conclusions suggest a revaluation of the sociological uses of the term, especially in the light of a world changed through computer-based technology. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)