Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

In the 1936 movie, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin plays as factory worker employed alongside other workers on a typical Fordist/Taylorist manufacturing assembly line. In the first 20 minutes of the movie Chaplin portrays in detail what non-mainstream organization and management theorists see as the alienating and degrading nature of the detailed division of work in a modern 20th Century factory environment. The movie shows how under Fordist production methods workers are subjected to close senior management and first-line management surveillance and control at the point of production, made possible by a moving-production-line which allows managers to determines the pace of work (control over the speed at which workers perform their roles) and the duration of work (how long workers remain at their work stations between breaks).

When the Fordist moving manufacturing-line was invented in 1911 it was celebrated as something of revolution in production. It allowed management to radically improve productivity by exercising close constant control over the pace of production, the flow of parts through the production process, and the role and performance of each individual worker along the assembly line. This form of production brought into being the systematic ‘mechanization’ of work designed for the purpose of improving factory output and efficiency. The performance of productivity benefits of Ford’s assembly line system of mass-production for mass-consumption subsequently caught the imagination of other manufacturers throughout the advanced industrial and developing world, and it is still in operation today in many manufacturing industries the world over. So much so that the 20th Century is often referred to in organization and management studies as ‘the Century of Fordism’!

Indeed, as you may or may not have noticed during the occasional visits to your favorite ‘fast food restaurant’, such as McDonald’s, Burger King or Subway for example, the mode of production used to ‘assemble’ the component parts (i.e.: buns, bread burgers, bits of chicken meat, ham or cheese and salad) of the ‘delicious’ meal you eventually receive over the front counter is very much a Fordist process! But as Chaplin demonstrates the Fordist assembly line-based system of production also de-humanized work. This was not necessarily Ford’s intention, but at the same time it was not something that concerned him either. Henry Ford’s view at the time was that people are motivated to work purely by extrinsic (material) reward, and therefore the actual nature and conditions of work (as long as they are safe and legal) are not something managers needed to worry about.

The importance of satisfying the kinds of social and psychological human needs at work that the ‘human Relations Movement’ in management studies later identified was not something Henry Ford’s considered to be important. Like many of his contemporaries, and indeed like many leading management theorists and practitioners today, Henry Ford’s view was that managers should only concern themselves with whether or not the production arrangement and management control methods they choose to adopt lead to improved productivity and efficiency gains – that is, whether they are profitable or not.

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Initial Questions:

1) Why is the Fordist moving production line considered an effective and efficient mode of production in manufacture?

2) Why did Henry Ford introduce his moving production line, and what are its benefits for organizations and management?

3) What are the costs of this mode of production for workers, and why does it seem to result in workers feeling alienated and degraded?

4) How does Chaplin show how the separation of the conception from the execution of work under Fordist moving assembly line condition results in work degradation, and worker alienation?

5) What metaphors does Chaplin use to illustrate what he sees as the contradictions and human cost of Fordist assembly line conditions?
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Whether it was Henry Ford’s intention or not, the introduction of the moving assembly line has led organization and managers to consider people to be a resource no different to any other resource available to them (e.g.: material or financial), which they are at liberty to put to use as they see fit irrespective of the actually ‘lived-experience’ of work. For many organization and management theorist this ‘mindset’ has led managers in organizations throughout the 20th Century to view workers employed to assemble component parts into final products along a Fordist mass production assembly line as if they were not human beings at all, and consider them instead, as Chaplin demonstrates, as simply human components of production for achieving maxim productivity irrespective of the de-humanizing social, psychological and emotional consequences of this kind of production arrangement.

As we see in the movie the nature of Fordist mass production arrangements is based on a ‘detailed division of labour’ that compels each individual workers to perform just one of a number of simple assembly operations in a monotonous mindless robotic fashion that renders each worker totally reliant on other workers performing the individual operation they are assigned to in a specific way within the specific time allowed. Chaplin shows how the assemblage of parts along the Fordist moving production line has the intended effect of locking each individual worker into the overall chain of production, to prevent them from deviating from the requirements of each specific task, from working at their own pace, and resting or leaving a work station without permission from the production line supervisor / overseer or until the line is stopped by management. }

After being subjected to the inhumanity of the Fordist production and supervisory regime, during the lunch break Chaplin then suffers the indignity of being selected to take part a worker ‘feeding machine experiment’ designed to enable management to force-feed workers while they work so that production never stops, which management rejects only because it is ‘impractical’ and not because it is ‘de-humanizing’. He returns to work after lunch to an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin is compelled to screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto components, so much so that as the pressure increases he eventually suffers a physical and mental breakdown. Chaplin then engages in various acts of sabotage to disrupt production, and uses industrial materials and control of the line to degrade his fellow workers, before eventually being caught and taken away.

If we think about what was Chaplin was trying to tell us (i.e.: modern society) about workers’ ‘lived-experience’ of the conditions of production and management control methods he portrays in Modern Times, we can see that productivity rather than people are uppermost in the way managers think about the role of work and organizations in modern society. What Chaplin was also trying to say is that the way modern society organizes itself and the methods of production is used to satisfy its need and want has led to a contradictory situation where the main cost of production involves human being - both workers and managers - becoming de-humanized ‘cogs in the wheels’ of an industrial system they have no say in and no real influence over.

The individual learns what the system requires and learns what part of himself or herself is needed or unwanted, and organizes himself or herself in a way that corresponds with the requirements of the system, to minimize the personal social, psychological and emotional cost of participating in the system. Parts of workers personality, in other words, must be suppressed or depressed in the course of playing a role in industrial society. All that a man is that is not useful will somehow be excluded or at least not be allowed to intrude or interfere in the production process and as a result becomes alienated and estranged from his own interests, needs and capabilities just as there are unemployed people in society there is also the unemployed self. Here then is the exclusion of self fostered by an industrial system orientated towards utility, it is a fundamental form of a sense of a life wasted which is so pervasive in an industrial society the excluded self while muffled, is not voiceless and makes its protests heard as we see in modern times workers take their revenge upon a system and its betrayers with sad but poetic justice those who spend their days creating a hellish efficiency.

As we see in the movie, albeit in very different ways than that of workers, management role in production is also boring and monotonous, and to a certain extent seemingly alienating. What Chaplin was trying to shows most of all is that work in a modern industrial society is not quite all what it seems. Or perhaps as Alvin Gouldner (1969: 346) put it, maybe what Chaplin was trying to show is that the problem with work is that it is very much what it seems: “a familiar world of routine mundane meanings and routine encounters, a hammer and saw, a button and switch, a mix together and assemble world, a pound and shilling and a buy and sell world, a Monday through Friday world - a perfectly ordinary everyday world […], a not enough world” we take so much for granted that we do not see it for what it is, lacking so much in what makes people human.
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Main Questions?
1) Does maximizing efficiency and productivity in organizations, to make maximum profit, justify treating workers as a resource just like any other resource?

2) Are workers entitled to expect the work they are paid to do to be interesting and meaningful to them as human beings?

3) Do managers have a responsibility to make the day-to-day ‘lived-experience’ of work interesting and meaningful for the people they employ?

4) What do human relations theorists suggest are the potential consequences of neglecting how people experience work, and ‘human needs’ in work?

When answering these questions in your group, you may like to consider what the following people who have conducted researched into the human cost of the logic of the system of production portrayed by Charlie Chaplin.

“I wanted to show the inhumanity of it all - not only its inhumanity but also the unquestioning adherence to such a system. Is the prosperity of modern, industrial society worth such a cost, such a cruel compulsion of robotlike work? If the production of cars - mere machines - necessitates such a sacrifice of human freedom, just what does this say about the paradox of modern civilization” (Satoshi Kamata. Japan in the Passing Lane, 1982: viii).

“The market economy of jobs in a capitalist society emphatically does not extend to a market economy of satisfaction” (Paul Willis. Learning to Labour, 1977:1).

“I once read in a book, I can’t remember who wrote it and I can’t actually remember what it was called. But what I do remember was that it said ‘a working man’s life is spent in quiet desperation’. That more or less sums up my working life for the past 50 years” (Peter K on the day of his retirement from ‘The Factory that Time Forgot’. Quote taken from un-published research notes from a study of contemporary factory work, conducted by Frank Worthington (2002).