Angels of Efficiency

“Angels of Efficiency makes a fantastic contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the role played by film and visual media in modern systems of knowledge, governance and control. The book is far more than just a study of the Gilbreths or even of consulting films more widely. It offers a compelling case for the agency of visual media in shaping forms of knowledge, while showing how techniques of visualisation developed around 1900 anticipatedthe cybernetic turn of the post-WWII period.” – Michael Cowan, University of St. Andrews”This incisive volume demonstrates how the business of consulting harks back to the audiovisual motion studies of Lillian and Frank Gilbreth. Hoof unfolds a media history from ergonomics, proto-cybernetics, and control interfaces to the flip charts, graphs, and slide decks of roving advisors today” – Peter Krapp, University of California - Irvine”Charting the reciprocal emergence of corporate consulting and a series of visualization techniques-including graphs, charts, tables, photographs, and motion pictures-between 1880 and 1920, Hoof definitively demonstrates how these visual media were not merely new forms of communication, but new forms of knowledge that actively shaped corporate strategy and practice. Angels of Efficiency provides an insightful portrait of modernity’s visual culture ofuseful images, but it also brilliantly fuses film and media studies with economic history to make a powerful argument for the mutually constitutive relationship between media and discipline.” – Scott Curtis,Northwestern University

Florian Hoof is Research Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study on the Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, University of Lüneburg.