November 27, 2006: Why Call it "Science?"

Over a quiet Thanksgiving meal I had the chance to vent some of my discontent with the terminology of "service science" with a friend who teaches philosophy at San Jose State. With his background in philosophy, he asked a fundamental question that I realized I had ignored: Why do its proponents insist on calling it a "science?" Giving the matter some thought, I realized that this was probably a reflection of an obsession with science that went back (at least) as far as Frederick Winslow Taylor's effort to approach management "scientifically." Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Since Taylorism already exacted a devastating blow on the management of public education, there should be no surprise that there are those who now wish to apply its "scientific" approach to a broader range of services. Unfortunately, this is a nightmare from which we are unlikely to awaken as long as we remain under the spell of what Isaiah Berlin has called the "three unquestioned dogmas" of Western civilization. Taylorism is as much a faith as any other religious fundamentalism and can impose just as much distortion upon our view of the "real world."