Control Science

What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made them? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives?

Sweeps across centuries of history to show the entanglement of knowledge production and exploitation. With great breadth, it reveals how the capitalist workplace has always been a laboratory

A brilliant intellectual history that lays bare that the ideology of the free market in reality relies on control and domination. Snow shows us how the chains were forged and perhaps helps us imagine how to break them.

It's hard to think of a book more painfully relevant than this...Henry Snow traces the history of management, from William Petty's 'political arithmetic' to Amazon's exploitation machine. A lucid, expansive intellectual history which will leave you both better informed and angrier.

An expansive intellectual history that demonstrates the authoritarian core of management. Plotting a course that spans continents and centuries, Snow shows how experiments in calculation and coercion have produced an ideology that turns exploitation into a science. If you want to understand the deep roots of the claims to authority made by bosses, politicians, and cops, read this

A compelling and richly detailed history of how systems of workplace control have shaped so much of our everyday lives, from early capitalism to today's tech giants. It's also yet another well-researched reminder that our current status quo is a construct - one which can be reconfigured along thoroughly different lines

A panoramic and engrossing intellectual history of liberalism's guilty secret: that capitalism is only possible if workers can be brought to heel.

Powerful ... Snow contrasts capitalism's villains with heroic figures from the labour movement, on whom he pins the hope of replacing control science and pure market competition with democracy and equality at work.

While practical aspects of work are constantly changing, the conflict between the managers and the workers - the controlling and the controlled - remains. It may seem eternal; yet Snow's analysis helps to show us ... another way.

Henry Snow is a labor historian who has taught at Colby College and the University of Connecticut. They publish the newsletter Another Way.