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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - The Visual Turn in Business Management: Film, Graphical Devices and the Consulting Industry
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2009-10-01
2022-12-16
2009-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Florian Hoof
2009/10/01
Ruhr – Universität Bochum
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Ph.D. Thesis Project - The Visual Turn in Business Management: Film, Graphical Devices and the Consulting Industry
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THE VISUAL TURN IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT:
FILM, GRAPHICAL DEVICES AND THE CONSULTING INDUSTRY
Florian Hoof / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
Ruhr – Universität Bochum




   This project analyses how visual devices such as film, photography and graphical calculation
applications affected the sedimentation process of modern management theory and practice
between 1880 and 1930. It is argued that a visual turn took place in business communications,
which not only enhanced the capacity of industrial management but also altered the very struc-
ture of managerial practices. It changed the configuration of time and space within procedures of
business planning and control and thus the very basis of business knowledge itself.
   Beginning in the 1880s, a fundamental shift occurred in industrial management. In the after-
math of the so-called crisis of control2 existing practices of industrial management came under
pressure. Prevailing modes of management and control could no longer cope with the new com-
plexity of business unleashed by the industrial revolution. The industry itself, academic disci-
plines such as applied engineering, psychology or cameralism as well as new players and institu-
tions including business schools and the evolving consulting industry tried to come up with bet-
ter ways to operate business in a stable and predictable way. Consequently, business management
was characterized for many years by innovations, experiments, failures and doubts. At the same
time, media technologies evolved, primarily film, photography and graphical visualization tools
including charting-systems and nomography. They provided new options to visualize, store and
process business knowledge, thereby promising a technological advanced way to solve the man-
agerial problems, which had occurred due to the crisis of control. Because of the precarious situ-
ation in industrial management, these media technologies became crucial for business. Already at
the end of the 1920s most executive boards of large-scale corporations solely relied on visualiza-
tion practices to keep industrial production manageable. These changes will be the topic of two
case studies in order to exemplify specific patterns associated with the usage of media technolo-
gy in the sphere of industrial production and business.
   The first case focuses on Frank B. Gilbreth, a film pioneer and at the same time engineering
consultant for industrial rationalization. He extensively utilized film and photography to analyze
and document the working cycles on the factory floor. I suggest that he predominantly utilized
film to establish a unique selling proposition for his engineering consulting enterprises. Film was
part of a branding strategy to establish his “original method” as the one best way in engineering
consultancy. He thereby popularized a management approach that was heavily based on central-
ized corporate structures such as planning departments, “betterman-rooms” and motion study lab-
oratories. This demonstrates that media technology was not only utilized as a scientific offspring
of physiology but also worked as a focal point for modern management theory and practice.
Media technology in this respect set the epistemological framework for implementing and popu-
larizing the concept of modern business management.

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. IX, no. 13, Fall 2009                                                       113
FLORIAN HOOF

  The second case study takes a more general view of the growing numbers of visual devices used
in scientific disciplines closely associated with business enterprises, such as material and mechan-
ical engineering. The personnel of pre-modern management mainly consisted of engineers. Along
with the growth of industrial corporations, they were confronted with organizational issues
including knowledge transfer and shop control concerns that had nothing to do with their origi-
nal profession. In this situation, they began to rely on new devices to simplify communication
between factory departments and to foster control on the level of the factory floors. Visualization
devices such as “nomography” and “charting-systems” facilitated access to in-house knowledge
and helped them to create a sphere of communication between different factory departments. It
created knowledge that was easily accessible and thus crucial for the new management person-
nel, which was no longer specialized in distinct disciplines but trained to make general steering
decisions without having the skills to understand every detail of the manufacturing process.
  Both cases are part of an epistemological approach to analyze the combination of media devices
and managerial practice in conjunction with a newly developed rationality and visibility in man-
agement theory. By excluding the practical abilities of the workers as well as the specific knowl-
edge of diverse scientific disciplines from this new form of visual in-house operations, the basis
for a self-contained epistemic system of management knowledge was established. Moreover the
whole idea of controlling industrial production changed: traditional and implicit schemes were
substituted by new methods and categories adopted from scientific and medial procedures. I am
going to suggest that the visual turn set the stage for two fundamental shifts in industrial leader-
ship. It provided the medial conditions to establish management theory both as an external and
intervening cultural practice; a concept that stood in sharp contrast to the preceding approach
deeply embedded in the manufacturing process.




1     Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger. Co-Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Dirk Baecker, Zeppelin University.
2     James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1986.




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