Nicholas Carr writes that the principles of ‘scientific management’ as counseled by Taylor have gone from being applicable to manufacturing workers to the office workers, & steadfastly resulting in narrowing of the realm of human possibility:
One thing that Taylor’s system aided was the mechanization of factory work. Once you had turned the jobs of human workers into numbers, it turned out, you also had a good template for replacing those workers with machines. It seems that the new Taylorism might accomplish something similar for knowledge work. It provides the specs for software applications that can take over the jobs of even highly educated professionals.