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Angels of Efficiency
A Media History of Consulting
by Florian Hoof
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Book Presentation:
Angels of Efficiency traces the invention of film and the parallel rise of management consulting, telling the story of how these together brought about new forms of information visualization and visual management. The period from 1880 to 1930, author Florian Hoof argues, saw the genesis of a form of visual knowledge that provided a novel means to intervene in management processes. Visual management largely superseded oral and written forms of communication and decision-making, instituting a strategy for overcoming the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of control and resulting in a media-based form of rationality. Focusing largely on early corporate consulting in America by tracing the careers of Frank Gilbreth and his wife and business partner, Lillian Gilbreth, Hoof examines the rise and lasting effects of corporate consulting as a visual form.
Framing consulting as a cultural technique that is characterized by media processes in which the boundaries of economic logic and legitimacy emerge, Angels of Efficiency forges a new approach to the history of consulting. In addition to pioneering a new field of film and media studies, Hoof contributes original research to American cultural and economic history, such as archival findings concerning Gilbreth's consulting efforts for the German Army during WWI. With this distinct and innovative interdisciplinary approach, Hoof has marshalled cinema and media studies, business history, and science and technology studies to make sense of the rise of consulting practices and their remarkable stability to this day.
About the Author:
Florian Hoof is Research Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study on the Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, University of Lü¼neburg.
Press Reviews:
"...splendid concluding chapter..." -- Nuria Puig, Universidad Complutensede Madrid., Technology and Culture, Volume 63, Number 1
"Angels of Efficiency makes a fantastic contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the role played by film and visual media in modern systems of knowledge, governance and control. The book is far more than just a study of the Gilbreths or even of consulting films more widely. It offers a compelling case for the agency of visual media in shaping forms of knowledge, while showing how techniques of visualisation developed around 1900 anticipated the cybernetic turn of the post-WWII period." -- Michael Cowan, University of St. Andrews
"This incisive volume demonstrates how the business of consulting harks back to the audiovisual motion studies of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth. Hoof unfolds a media history from ergonomics, proto-cybernetics, and control interfaces to the flip charts, graphs, and slide decks of roving advisors today" -- Peter Krapp, University of California - Irvine
"Charting the reciprocal emergence of corporate consulting and a series of visualization techniques-including graphs, charts, tables, photographs, and motion pictures-between 1880 and 1920, Hoof definitively demonstrates how these visual media were not merely new forms of communication, but new forms of knowledge that actively shaped corporate strategy and practice. Angels of Efficiency provides an insightful portrait of modernity's visual culture of useful images, but it also brilliantly fuses film and media studies with economic history to make a powerful argument for the mutually constitutive relationship between media and discipline." -- Scott Curtis, Northwestern University
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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