Social Engineering

Formation of the concept

Around 1908 at the Vasileostrovskii Trolley Depot Gastev first conceived of a science for the social construction of enterprises, and he later worked as a metalworker in Paris and witnessed assembly-line production at Clément-Bayard and by 1912 at Citroën. He understood social engineering as a scientific-applied method solving the complex 'machine-human' problem, and held that in the social sphere too an era of precise measurements, formulas, drawings, control gauges and 'social normals' had to come. The program was set out in 'Our Tasks' in 1921. The Russian original is Социальная инженерия; in the West the term 'social engineering' appeared later, in 1922.

Per Selivanova, Gastev's social engineering was not a technology of control but a new science concerned with the laws governing the interaction between complexes of machines and 'complexes of individuals', developed as a research-pedagogical process. A School of Social-Engineering Sciences was envisioned in Kharkiv in 1919; later the Social-Engineering Laboratory of the Central Institute of Labour filled that role. On the same project Selivanova holds that the wider 'New Man' project sought both to empower workers through technical knowledge and collective organization and to systematize labour within a technocratic regime of discipline and rationalization, and has long been regarded as ambivalent.

Institutional history: the Central Institute of Labour

The Institute of Labour was organized in autumn 1920 on the initiative of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) and in 1921 was transformed into the Central Institute of Labour, with Gastev as its creator and head. The 1920 founding and the 1921 social-engineering program are distinct events. Beginning in 1920 with a few rooms in a former hotel and five employees, the institute moved into a large former bank building and eventually employed more than one hundred people, physiologists, engineers, economists and sociologists alongside writers, artists and theatre directors. After fifteen years of activity it had trained 548,643 workers and twenty thousand industrial instructors in some two hundred professions, and by the 1930s it consulted for more than six hundred enterprises, ran 1,700 training centres and had produced about ten thousand sets of instructions and 950 work-organization charts. The Russian article records that in practice it became a powerful applied institute that trained 'more than 500 thousand' qualified workers.

Lenin, who had maintained good relations with Gastev since their years in exile, instructed the People's Commissariat of Finance and later the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade to purchase equipment for the institute in Germany 'with Romanov money'. In 1924 the Social-Engineering Laboratory developed a 'social-engineering machine' intended to function as an instructional system without a teacher or instructor, including automatic control of operations and feedback allowing the worker to influence and modify the process; this operator role was later interpreted as a precursor of cybernetics.

Distinctions from Taylorism and Fordism

Gastev was widely regarded as a 'Taylorist' though he repeatedly distanced himself from the label. Capitalist Taylorism served only as an initial point of departure for the institute, and one of its tasks was overcoming the alienation described by Marx in which it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. Unlike Taylor, who highlighted system and organization, and Ford, who concentrated on perfecting production technique, Gastev emphasized the human factor; he was in regular correspondence with Ford. In 'How to Work' he argued that most Soviet citizens lacked a labour culture which had to be instilled, since culture in the institute's sense is skill (snavka) and is formed not by agitation but by drill.

Platon Kerzhentsev criticized Gastev's Taylorist approach for adopting a 'narrow base' by focusing on the worker rather than on how production should be organized in socialist society. In 1921 the Central Council for the Scientific Organization of Labour (SOVNOT) was set up with both factions, and at the 1924 All-Russian Scientific Management Conference both men argued their cases; the conference sided with Gastev, though Kerzhentsev argued the institute had wasted three years.

Turn and repression

The 'narrow base' method began with the elementary operation of chiselling and filing, was studied at the institute for three years and unfolded into 64 separate scientific problems but was never completed. The Russian article criticizes Gastev's setup concept for weak elaboration of the setup methodology, too narrow a research base and orientation toward the individual worker. Gastev considered it necessary to extend work 'setups' to everyday life and the general culture of people, in which case he called them cultural rather than labour setups, and he was a co-author of the Proletkult idea.

The horizontal autonomy and inter-factory cooperation embedded in the institute's principles, in which trained workers would rise to become engineers and inventors, stood in fundamental contradiction to udarnichestvo, the shock labour introduced by the Stalinist leadership from the early 1930s. Top-down administration and multitiered hierarchical control came to dominate, output was extracted through unregulated overtime and 'socialist competition', and by the Second Five-Year Plan trade-union independence had been destroyed. After the purges in the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, the institute came under the newly created People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry and was tasked with providing 'scientific' justification for shock labour and the Stakhanovite movement, an agenda that fundamentally contradicted its original pedagogical principles. In the 1930s it shifted toward standardization, intensification of production and functional planning schemes, the social-engineering machine concept effectively disappeared by mid-decade, and the institute was reoriented to military-industrial tasks.

Mikhail Tomsky, head of the trade unions, committed suicide, while Gastev and many of his colleagues were arrested and executed as members of a so-called 'right-Trotskyist terrorist organization'; they were also accused of syndicalism and trade unionism. Gastev was arrested on 7 September 1938 and on 14 April 1939 the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him to shooting on the charge of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. There was no defence attorney and no possibility of appeal, as was common during the Great Purge. He was shot on 15 April 1939 at Kommunarka shooting ground outside Moscow. He had chaired the All-Union Committee for Standardization from 1932 to 1936 and in 1935 led the Soviet delegation to the International Standardization Congress in Stockholm.

Reception and legacy

Gastev drew on and adapted Western scientific-management sources rather than copying them. He admired Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's micromotion studies ('therbligs') and visual recording methods, adapted at the institute by physiologist Krikor Kekcheev and photographer Nikolai Tikhonov. Henry Gantt's chart method was introduced there, and Gantt's close colleague the Marxist engineer Walter Polakov became an important mediator between the institute and the United States in the 1920s.

Gastev's idea on labour management is one of the prototypes satirized by Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel 'We'. His poetry celebrated industrialization and announced an era of a new type of human trained by the mechanization of everyday life, and by the 1920s he abandoned literary work entirely. Together with the ideas of O. A. Ermansky, his ideas are held to lie at the basis of lean production, and in the 1930s a special institute was created in Japan to study the experience of Soviet industrialization; it subscribed to all Soviet journals on scientific organization of labour, labour psychology and management and borrowed a large number of the ideas, approaches and technologies developed at the institute.