Efficiency Movement - Germany

Germany

In Germany the efficiency movement was called "rationalization" and it was a powerful social and economic force before 1933. In part it looked explicitly at American models, especially Fordism. The Bedaux system was widely adopted in the rubber and tire industry, despite strong resistance in the socialist labor movement to the Bedaux system. Continental AG, the leading rubber company in Germany, adopted the system and profited heavily from it, thus surviving the Great Depression relatively undamaged and improving its competitive capabilities. However most German businessmen preferred the home-grown REFA system which focused on the standardization of working conditions, tools, and machinery.

"Rationalization" meant higher productivity and greater efficiency, promising science would bring prosperity. More generally it promised a new level of modernity and was applied to economic production and consumption as well as public administration. Various versions of rationalization were promoted by industrialists and Social Democrats, by engineers and architects, by educators and academics, by middle class feminists and social workers, by government officials and politicians of many parties. It was ridiculed by the extremists in the Nazi and Communist movements. As ideology and practice, rationalization challenged and transformed not only machines, factories, and vast business enterprises but also the lives of middle-class and working-class Germans.