First published in 1921, Industrial Fatigue and Efficiency aims to provide a fairly complete overview of industrial fatigue and its influence on efficiency. It brings crucial themes like fatigue and its measurement; output in relation to weekly hours of work; output and hours of work in various industries; the six- hours day and multiple shifts; work spells and rest periods; limitation of output; lost time and its causation; sickness and mortality; industrial accidents and their causation; the prevention of industrial accidents; and adoption of healthy factory conditions, to showcase the importance of adequate lighting, heating and ventilation, washing facilities, cloak rooms, ambulance room and a well found canteen as basic requirements in factories. This book is an important historical document for scholars and researchers of labour studies, labour economics, industrial studies, and political economy.

A new model of health emerged in Britain between 1870 and 1939. Centered on the working body, organized around the concept of efficiency, and grounded in scientific understandings of human labor, scientists, politicians, and capitalists of the era believed that national economic productivity could be maximized by transforming the body of the worker into a machine. At the core of this approach was the conviction that worker productivity was intimately connected to worker health. Under this new ?science of work,? fatigue was seen as the ultimate pathology of the working-class body, reducing workers? capacity to perform continued physical or mental labor. As Steffan Blayney shows, the equation between health and efficiency did not go unchallenged. While biomedical and psychological experts sought to render the body measurable, governable, and intelligible, ordinary men and women found ways to resist the logics of productivity and efficiency imposed on them, and to articulate alternative perspectives on work, health, and the body.

Commercial air flight, mass manufacturing, ergonomic design -- many cornerstones of twenty-first century life have been made possible through the study of industrial efficiency and human factors. In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, pioneering researcher Hugo Munsterberg elucidates many of the core concepts of this field of study.