Efficiency

Etymology: Latin ex + facere → Latin efficere → English efficiency

The Latin verb efficere combined ex (out) and facere (to make or do), meaning to accomplish or to bring about.¹ In English by the 1590s, efficiency described the power to produce an intended effect. For three centuries, the word belonged to philosophy and science, not to management.

The transformation began with Frederick Winslow Taylor. His Principles of Scientific Management (1911) made efficiency the organizing principle of industrial work.²

Taylor timed steelworkers with a stopwatch, broke their motions into components, and eliminated every movement that did not contribute to output. His goal was to find the one best way to perform each task. Productivity was the measure. Efficiency was the method.³

The historian Samuel Haber traced how efficiency became a cultural ideal that extended far beyond the factory. By 1920, Americans were applying the vocabulary of efficiency to education, government, the home, and personal life.⁴

A word that once described the capacity to produce any intended effect narrowed to mean the ratio of output to input. What was lost in the narrowing was the question of which effects were worth producing.⁵

Timeline

• 1590s, Efficiency entered English, describing the power to produce an intended effect.
• 1911, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management.
• 1920s, Efficiency became a cultural ideal applied to education, government, and personal life.

Endnotes

1. Harper, Douglas, "Etymology of efficiency," Online Etymology Dictionary.
2. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911).
3. Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way (New York: Viking, 1997).
4. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
5. Haber, Efficiency and Uplift.