Towards theorizing the Death March: a fundamental law of Quality in business

Physics majors learn to define force as mass times acceleration. For a long time, I have been bemused by the use of Quality in the corporate lexicon.

Generally speaking, it is a primitive and uncountable/nonplural signifier which in unionized firms pushes back against lowercase and plural qualities (ideas for getting the job done) from the actual worker. Upper case singular/uncountable Quality on the other hand names managements' (sometimes well-placed) insistence that management must control, and that at least some of the lowercase qualities that emerge from the shop floor are merely ideas for soldiering, goofing off, loafing, and wasting time.

Upper case uncountable Quality emerged at first circa 1920 in the writings of the Scientific Management theorist Frederick Taylor, a member of the wealthy classes who was encouraged when young by the family physician to cultivate an active life to counteract his poor health.

Not apparently being able to buy a pair of running shoes in 1920, Taylor instead found a laboring man's job as a gentleman ranker of the working class.

He noticed that his mates often slowed the pace of work in highly "unscientific ways" and that more often than not this resulted in lower output. Taylor realized that if management exercised a much tighter and scientifically "rational" control, management could increase the pace and make much more profit.

Of course, a Marxist would say that here is class origins asserted themselves. Many workers also see this but find no point in pointing it out.

Taylor persuaded a few companies to adopt his primitive form of time and motion study but by the 1950s, worker militancy inside and outside unions meant that pure Taylorism was less popular than various forms of human relations theories.

However, Taylorism has never disappeared from the management playbook as a sort of ideal, and it appears in data processing in Death March projects wherein any effort by programmers to create "tools" is regarded as high-class loafing even if it can be shown that the tool saves time.

Basically, management in a Druckerite (as in Peter Drucker) American firm defines Quality.

Furthermore, at the zenith of corporate finance, Quality has to be Mercator-projected into the flat world of accounting with its spreadsheets, and the way this is done is by a universal factoring rule: where Q is final management-define acceptable Quality, and q is a community and cultural primitive,

Q = q/T

where T is the marginal time over expected or rate time to produce.

The problem is that two variables, Q and T, are definable by management alone.

The problem being that our instinct is to produce q, that form of quality (cool code) which is recognized by our friends and even enemies in a community of sharing, that form of community in other words which persists under capitalism and on which in fact capitalism feeds.

Management can always, at the end of the day, punish and reward in a free floating way for results because it overdefines Quality.