Behaviorism, Animation, and EffectiveCinema

The McGraw-Hill Industrial Management Film Series andthe Visual Culture of Management

Ramón Reichert

After the end of World War II, new media representations of industrial workwere created in the US. A new genre of industrial educational film was devel-oped in the areas of military strategy, operations research, organization theory,and cybernetics: the management film. Based on the assumption that indust-rially disciplined work in the production process had long been established, in-deed, had already become a sui generis social model, the management film fo-cused instead on another aspect of productivity in industrial work: itsfunctional and abstract regulation. Unlike other forms of the industrial film likethe work-study film, the management film did not concentrate on optimizingphysical processes and worker performance, but on establishing and stabilizingits functional contexts.

For this reason, conventional photographic recording methods are not domi-nant in management film, as are film techniques that had previously been usedinfrequently in industrial film, namely those of animation. In order to investi-gate the specific visual knowledge that these films produce, it will be necessaryto examine their methods of producing images and detailed communication inimages. In the following essay, I would like to develop certain theoretical reflec-tions on media and representation in management film using three theses as aguide. Central to my reflections is the film series Industrial Management,which was produced by the textbook publisher McGraw-Hill and was also dis-tributed in Europe. The theses cover the following three fields:. Production context and reception history. Taking the specific historical and med-

ia production contexts of McGraw-Hill’s management films as an example,one can see the political development and historical importance of a newmedia format. The example chosen here is ideal in that the films of the In-

dustrial Management Series were not only used to educate American col-lege students. They also made significant contributions to the importation ofAmerican management methods to Europe in the postwar period, as well asto the success of the European Recovery Program, which the US governmentcarried out from to . The program was initiated by US Secretary of

State George C. Marshall, whose name it bore in the end (“Marshall Plan”).The legal basis of the European rebuilding program was shaped by the Eco-nomic Cooperation Act, which the US Congress replaced on April , with the Foreign Assistance Act. Sixteen countries, Belgium, Denmark, GreatBritain, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,Norway, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and beginning onJune , , West Germany also, received aid of approximately $. billionuntil . The signing of the Economic Cooperation Act required each of theEuropean participants to put certain measures in place to raise production:the creation of internal financial stability, close economic and political coop-eration with the European Duties Union, as well as the balancing of the tradedeficit with the US by simultaneously raising export quotas.

. Effective cinema, optimized view. If we want to elucidate film’s media produc-tive power as well as the specific structural qualities that distinguish it fromother media, it serves well to work out its rules of showing. Seen superficially,nothing happens in the management film without cause and effect, withoutlinear succession and continuity. The management film is an instrument ofthe cinematic popularization of knowledge, and if animation techniques areemployed in such films for tables, registers, maps, organizational diagrams,cyclograms, and graphs, this is not only intended to construct an epistemicobject, but more importantly a pedagogy of images. But what is the scope ofthis difference between epistemic object and the imperatives of a pedagogyof images? Films about organization and management require that abstractcontents be translated into moving images, which necessitates the develop-ment of specific film strategies and narratives to generate knowledge.Namely, the spectator’s attention must be drawn to decisive points, with thegoal of transmitting work knowledge effectively. It was therefore necessaryto develop a professionalized viewing technique, one which would have thetask of directing – and controlling – the gaze. To achieve this, a procedurewas borrowed from the cartoon. What in the cartoon is a technique for theentertainment of an audience of children becomes in the management film asocial technique, a technique of direction and control. The pioneer of colorand sound cartoons, Walt Disney, was the first to make such use of cartoontechniques when he produced educational films for the US government inthe s.

Like the industrial educational film, the management film took a behavioristapproach and then set out to condition the audience’s behavior. In terms oftheir cinematic form, however, two subspecies of industrial films can be fun-damentally distinguished. The dominant means of style in the managementfilm are animation, special effects, zooms, and wipes; they serve to direct the

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spectator’s gaze. In the end, then, what the management film contributed toindustrial pedagogy is a surplus of theatricality.

. Intermediality and intertextuality. The use of established non-cinematic reper-tories of images like those of the allegory, the memory card, the circuit dia-gram, etc. as well as media formats from outside cinema such as diagrams,maps, pictograms, etc. prove to be central to the cinematic methods of themanagement film, particularly in serving the goal of controlling vision. Atany rate, it will be shown that the film image, due to its unavoidable multi-plicity of meaning and the fact that it contains multiple intertextual refer-ences and works in complex visual traditions, in the end evades the intendedeffect of controlling efficient readings.

Production context and reception history

In , the McGraw-Hill Company, a New York-based publisher that special-ized in educational materials, published the book Industrial Organization andManagement. Two years later, in order to advertise its own textbooks and furtherthe company’s image, McGraw-Hill commissioned Transfilm Inc. to make a filmversion of the textbook. This film was finally finished in as part of a newseries. Entitled Industrial Management, production began in in coop-eration with leading representatives of business-management and private com-panies. According to the existing archival reports, the series contains filmsmade between and . Managers such as Lawrence L. Bethel (directorof New Haven YMCA Junior College), Franklin S. Atwater (industrial engineer-ing manager, Fafnir Beavy Company), and Harvey A. Stockman Jr. (personneladministrator, Scovill Manufacturing Company) served as regular consultants.

With a company history that dates back to , McGraw-Hill still serves as aglobal provider of information services, publishing, among other things, text-books in the areas of finance, education, and business information, as well asthe most commonly used introductory work to film studies, Bordwell andThompson’s Film Art: An Introduction. The publisher’s current form is the re-sult of the publishing houses McGraw and Hill merging in , and since thenit has concentrated on textbooks for college students, above all in the core areasof engineering and science. In the s and s, McGraw-Hill expanded intothe areas of economics, management, and the social sciences. In order to reach awider audience the publisher also invested in the production of educationalfilms on industrial management, beginning in . After World War II,McGraw-Hill’s textbooks were also integrated into the lesson plans of elemen-tary and high schools. With the acquisition of the Gregg Company (a publisher

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of trade school textbooks) and the California Test Bureau (a developer of testingsystems), the company managed to establish itself at all levels of educationalpublishing, from pre-school to th grade. In , a department was foundedfor the internal production of educational films, McGraw-Hill Textfilms; it wasplaced directly under the business department of “economy and management.”In this same year, the first films were also created. These initial films wereversions of the company’s textbooks, made to reach a wider audience. DuringWorld War II, McGraw-Hill cooperated with the War Department, the UnitedStates Information Service/Visual Media Section and the United States Office ofEducation/Division of Visual Aids. These close contacts also laid the ground-work for the McGraw-Hill Company to make their educational films conform tothe needs of the Marshall Plan Aid, thereby making a significant contribution tothe economic Americanization of Europe. As a result, the publisher was ableto establish itself quite early in the European market as a provider of multime-dia information in the area of industrial knowledge.

The films of the Industrial Management Series reached a wide audience inEurope and contributed considerably to the introduction of American manage-ment methods at European companies. Together with Marshall Plan Movies,they were distributed in numerous participating countries in the ERP by theEuropean Film Unit of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), lo-cated in Paris. Along with the America Houses and the Information Centers,the national productivity centers represented one of the most important institu-tions in the comprehensive import of American-style management.

Leading firms in the US included McGraw-Hill films in their archives andorganized company screenings, which were then discussed in trainingcourses. In the Europe of the Marshall Plan, films from the Industrial Man-

agement Series were introduced into various social situations. In the German-speaking context, for example, they were presented as “educational films” and“training films.” In general, they were used for training and further educationof (future) workers. The differentiation of “education” and “training,” reflecteddifferent social usages. One spoke of “educational goals” when the films werescreened in schools, trade schools, and universities, and of “training goals”when the films were placed in companies, unions, and other business-relatedinstitutions. Finally, the term “further education” was used when the filmswere shown by non-profit organizations. The same films were shown in con-crete situations using different terminology; the various categories like furthereducation and training, however, signified a different social context in eachcase.

Although the films of the Industrial Management Series are not industrialfilms per se, produced under commission from a company, they were regularlyshown at companies and business-related organizations. The management

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films were added to a communications framework that arose from a genuineinterest on the part of various businesses. As such, a film screening always in-itiated an attempt at social organization as well. The social and communicativesetting specified learning strategies and tactics that were geared toward utiliz-ing the film to achieve the goals of the given situation. Private companies suchas Böhler, Andritz, Siemens, and Elin, for instance, started renting managementfilms from the film service of the Austrian Productivity Center in , and theywere then screened in wider contexts. In discussion groups, questions that radi-cally called the usefulness of the management principles into doubt often ar-ose. And the screening of brand new, English-language US management filmsduring factory tours and general company meetings always produced a newsocial situation, through which the management tried to create social distinc-tions: the company presented itself as being an advanced organization at whichsuch films were shown. The creation of a company’s own film archive, theacquisition of the company’s own projector, the provision of a (temporary)space for the screening, as well as competent and knowledgeable assistance bya projectionist and personnel director, play an important role in the process ofdifferentiating industrial forms of organization.

Effective cinema, optimized view

The use of films to optimize company operations can be traced back to the earlys and the work-study films of Frank Butler Gilbreth. Study films intendedto optimize industrial work are, as a rule, films of observation. For this reason,even after they remain closely bound to the method of the “time and mo-tion studies” that Gilbreth had developed. Management films, on the otherhand, radically break with the empirical field. The films do not examine andpresent physical operations, but rather the structures and formal criteria of in-dustrial organization. While the work-study film focused on what happens onthe factory floor, the management films focus on administration. Both types fol-low leading theories of industrial organization, if in different ways. The work-study film based its position on a project of disciplining the “individual work-er” (Taylorism) with the goal of ergonomic optimization of individual produc-tion operations, and thereby also managed to contribute to the integration ofindividual workers into the “collective worker” (Fordism).

Essentially, McGraw-Hill’s management films build on Max Weber’s conceptof bureaucracy and classical teachings on organization. In terms of film tech-nique and cinematic stylistics, this difference is shown most noticeably in thatmanagement films are abstract films, in which geometric rather than organic

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bodies are animated. A new media apparatus for presenting and observing thecompany was established with the management film. There was a transitionfrom a concrete, physical rationalization of the body on the “factory floor” to asystematic view, produced within the management film itself. In the framingstory we see the disciplined worker; the actual core of the film consists in mak-ing the company’s organizational structures visible. As early as the s, forexample at Krupp, films were produced to introduce the Hollerith Method

with the intention of making the administrative structures transparent to aninternal audience. Even so, it was only with the massive popularization ofmethods and operational practices from American business in the frameworkof European reconstruction aid that films on industrial planning, organization,and administration were screened to a wider audience.

The difference between the work-study film and the management film canalso be seen in their reception and desired effect. The observation-orientedstudy film is intended to make the workers’ bodies “motion minded”: InFrank and Lilian Gilbreth’s films on optimizing work, this had primarily been amatter of internalizing physical movement. In contrast, the management filmwas presented in small circles of industrial and academic elites. Like the studyfilms, there was also an economy of attention; at any rate, the film took on thegoal transforming the basic “attitudes” of its addressees. In the managementfilm, it was namely a matter of presenting the successful organization as beingtransparent and easy to organize. The appropriate methods here proved to beimaging and mapping the company by means of special effects and anima-tion. The basic profile of business pedagogy was altered through the introduc-tion of certain animation techniques intended to reduce complexity.

The functional distinction between the goal of disciplining individual work-ers on the factory floor and that of normalizing administrative operations in thebusiness then demands that the business be represented in various ways. Docu-mentary shots of the concrete industrial location only provide the backgroundin the industrial-management film. They serve to present the object of the ad-ministration and the industrial organization, to whose construction and stabili-zation the film is meant to contribute, to position it in a concrete social andhistorical field. The prime task of the Industrial Management Series, in anycase, consisted of bringing abstract data and contexts of business managementinto a graphic form that was easy to understand visually. For this reason, thedominant representational forms in the film are those drawn from the graphicvisual techniques of the textbook (that is, tables, diagrams, maps of visual sta-tistics, diagrams, organizational diagrams, descriptions of workplaces, isotypetables, matrix plans, pictograms, etc.).

I would like to clarify the specific methods of mental and visual pedagogy inthe management films by analyzing an example. The film Internal Organiza-

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tion (USA ) seeks to put into practice administration and managementteachings that had been developed in the US and Great Britain in the s ands. Questions of task and department education, of administration, andproblems of the business leadership and its coordination occupy the fore-ground. A central part of the film is dedicated to visually presenting a catalogof management functions like preliminary planning, organization, delegation ofduties, coordination, and follow-up. Internal Organization consists of aframing story and a main story. The framing story shows external and internalshots of a large company, not mentioned by name, and workers punching in at atime clock. The main story consists exclusively of sketches and animated specialeffects. In the first part of the film, basic leadership structures are made visible,in the second the typologies and criteria of efficient personnel leadership arerepresented differentially, and the systematic archiving of company knowledgeis discussed.

Figure Internal Organization ()

The opening title credits of Internal Organization show a book. An insertindicates that it is the source text on which the film was based. The book itselfis out of focus, which provides the advantage, in terms of production and dis-tribution, that the image of the book need not be altered when the language ofthe insert is changed, which happened when the film was distributed in Europe.At the same time, however, the lack of focus also produces a symbolic charge.The fact that the book remains the same from version to version also means thatit is a universally valid text, independent of specific cultural contexts. The cred-its are followed by four scenes of workers entering the factory. There is an estab-lishing external shot of an unnamed factory as well as scenes showing forms ofthe division of labor and the smooth operations inside the factory. The visualmaterial was drawn from archival material or found footage shot in documen-tary style. In the images’ interplay, the male voice-over establishes the univers-

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ality of the topics “management” and “organization” and refers to the “neces-sity” of modern organizational culture. This is followed by a caesura, which isannounced by a cartoon. The commentary presents the programmatics of thefilm and turns to the question of how people and things can be regulated andadministered and how these elements can be made operable in the space of thecompany. We see an animated sequence of images which establishes a record-ing matrix and creates the possibility for administration and regulation, a spacethat is particularly well suited to the representation of administration and per-sonnel management. The structure of the matrix forms a line diagram, arrangedin a pyramid: a small leadership staff oversees many workers, and communica-tion proceeds from the top down. The presentation therefore follows the rulesthat have been put forward in the McGraw-Hill guidelines, which are gearedtoward a cinematic Verlebendigung des Lehrbuchs (bringing the textbook to lifewith cinematic means). Seen pedagogically, the methods direct the gaze andshut out alternative readings. One could speak in this context of a social techni-que of “correct” memory training which makes use primarily of two cinematicmethods:. The successive construction of images. The animated diagram of the company’s

hierarchy comprises elements, fields, and vectors. The tableau is set up suc-cessively and, as a rule, opened with an element (e.g., General Manager) or afield (e.g., Management, consisting of the Advisory Board and the GeneralManager). The commentary prepares the subsequent visual statement (ele-ment/field) immediately beforehand. Then the element or field is put into arelationship with another element or field, as a rule by means of a vector thatties both visual statements together. Additionally, a continuous deficit of in-formation is generated through the unchanged camera position and the si-multaneous reduction of the image (cut in). Control of the gaze here meansthat the recipient’s should not “wander around” the table, but should be ledin a step-by-step method.

. The zoom. A second relevant method of directing the gaze is the zoom to acertain detail in the table. The zoom is a gestural method of emphasis: anelement is placed in the midpoint, giving it special meaning. What is signifi-cant here is that in the film examined, zooming only occurs on the upperlevel of the hierarchy (Manager). The “worker,” located in the lower third ofthe table, does not receive such treatment. The zoom is also usually used toprepare the exit from the table. The zoom, for example, goes from a box en-titled Advisory Board into a cartoon that shows top management gatheredaround a table. The spectator may recognize him or herself and the widercircles of the film’s addressees in those represented, which we could call akind of identificatory viewing.

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Such cinematic methods of directing the gaze, as could be maintained in rela-tion to Bruno Latour’s reflections on viewing in the sciences, add up to a read-ing apparatus, aimed as a whole at controlling the gaze. The McGraw-Hillfilms use techniques like the successive setup of the image and the zoom ascinematic gestures of showing. In the guidelines, it is noted that “the spectatorshould only perceive what is relevant for him in each situation.” In additionto directing the gaze, the management film also makes use of strategies like in-troducing overly clear distinctions, concentrating on the most essential andmost easily comprehensible, while all these strategies make graphic representa-tion – as opposed to photographic “illustration” – the starting point of the ped-agogical argument. Like all graphic devices, how they can be viewed or per-ceived is precisely established through the construction of the organizationaldiagrams. At this point, another genuine cinematic technique comes into play,namely special effects. They transform the multidimensionality of the organiza-tional diagrams and tables into a precise representation of speech, that is, theytranslate the linear succession of spoken arguments into an interplay of imageand voice-over commentary. This means that, at first, we never see the entiretable, just a portion of it. Every subsequent and additional visual element issimultaneously commented upon by the voice-over: Image: Manager – Voice-over: “The tasks of the manager are...” – Image: arrow vector – Voice-over: “Theleadership of...”

The coordination of animation and commentary is meant to prohibit the gra-phics from being read in different ways. In the second part of the film, lists ofcategories are introduced in order to arrange the decisive criteria of linear orga-nization according to their relevance. The table of categories is also intended togeneralize the characteristics of effective organization and contribute to thefurther abstraction of the company. This table is a representational method thatbelongs to the technique of synopsis. It makes hierarchies comprehensible and,in the case of the example examined here, gives the viewer an overview of alltypes, methods, and solutions in question. The stylistic table of the managementfilm corresponds completely to the Taylorist workplace. The superfluous doesnot appear; the visual tools are organized by goal; the way film methods areutilized target the optimization of performance exclusively, in this case convey-ing knowledge, and the spectator is directed by the film in a similar way to thework-study film, which contains concrete references to optimization. So, in thevisual pedagogical succession, for example, ([close up] gaze toward A [pan]follow the arrow to B [zoom] watch B).

According to information provided in Internal Organization, the exemp-lary business can be recognized above all by a working hierarchy of command.This is presented in line and hierarchical diagrams. Its Lines of Responsibil-ity mean that each spot arranged in a hierarchy can receive instructions from

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a higher authority only. The elements, therefore, are always arranged from thebottom up or rather from the top down. The construction of this organizationaldiagram is strictly symmetrical in the horizontal direction and strictly asymme-trical in the vertical direction (top down). In the course of legitimizing clearchains of command, “clear” leadership is in the end distinguished from “un-clear” leadership. This qualitative difference is made visible through meander-ing curves (“ineffective”) and straight lines (“effective”). What is most notice-able in this context is the wide use of elementary graphic techniques: lines andarrows have varying widths, making self-evident statements – the difference intheir intensities remains limited to speculations such as “important/less impor-tant” or “main/secondary direction.” The linking of linear and circular ideasthat double back (which are generally presented by McGraw-Hill by a dottedline) connotes ideas of the methodic, the successive, and the ability to programoperations, also creating the image of a perpetual circulation of work.

The medium of animation unites the expressive means of the most varied artforms: painting, literature, graphics, and typography. If film is the medium ofmoving images in their temporal succession, then animation is perhaps the sub-species in which the possibilities of the medium can be used most consistently,since the filmmaker who works in animation – at least in manually producedanimation as was common until the mid s – works on each individual im-age personally. He or she can therefore achieve such precision in detail and hasso much control over representation that, in educational films in particular, athought can be brought to an exact point, which the use of conventional photo-graphic images does not allow as easily. It is precisely these factors that makeanimation the preferred stylistic and communicational method of managementfilms concerned with efficiency, and it is precisely these factors that explain whyeven Industrial Organization employs a great deal of animation effects.

The cinematic management discourse makes extensive use of the principle ofmodeling and simulation, and therefore anticipates scientific modeling, that is,the computer-generated visualization of digital data. As is the case with virtualsimulation, management films focused not on illustrating the business world,but putting a normative model of the business organization into play and ofmaking it manifest and useful through modeling. The simulation then createsaffirmations in cinematic management discourse, not of what it is, but in viewof what it could become.

It is then only to be expected that, in management films like Internal Orga-

nization, the classic dichotomies of distinguishing the form of content and ex-pression, or of a discursive formation like the language of efficiency and a visi-ble, physically material space of reference like the factory building, would tendto disappear. The manager, as he appears in the management film, is orientedtoward the table and does not phenomenologically make a distinction between

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the behavior of the workforce and the mathematical optimizing functions of theorganizational planner. In the course of a development that began in the middleof the th century with the introduction of media technologies like the tele-phone, the telegraph, and the typewriter, the space of business and ultimatelyof political decisions was also provided with a new symbolic foundation. Theideal of realtime modeling of all business operations soon formed the horizonmore than it corresponded to the requirements of a running evaluation of com-pany performance, which had previously been the domain of the financial mar-kets.

Figure Efficiency in Internal Organization

Decisions were therefore not oriented to the “material substance” of companyoperations, but instead to their media modeling, to relational elementary timefunctions, efficiency coefficients, and performance indicators, whose standardi-zation, on the other hand, requires a complete statistical investigation of ele-mentary operations and the company’s micro-relationships. In order to organizeand predict production in the most efficient way, it is no longer enough tomerely arrange, classify, or sound out a company’s empirical data. The datamust be brought into numerically legible form, mutually comparable, whichmakes possible a form of relations, only expressible and visible within this sym-bolic space of numbers, which can be used as the basis of business leadership. Inthe end, the business is organized as a form of relations; the stock of machines,tools, the warehouse stock, and the production waste, the gestures, body lan-guage, and reaction time of the workforce, up to the monetary flow of sales,income, and of accounts receivable, all of this finally creates – in representationand in a “reality” that can no longer be separated and divided from this – asingular functional ensemble of relationships.

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Intermediality and intertextuality

As was made clear in the previous section, the animated tables from Internal

Organization are responsible for putting into play the necessary succession of theargument in images. In order to increase, first, the iconic representation of sug-gestivity and, second, the ability to remember the material taught, every visualmultiplicity was to be avoided wherever possible. In this central point of theirimage pedagogy, McGraw-Hill and Transfilm make explicit reference to the“speaking signatures” developed by Otto Neurath in his visual statistics. Inthe “guidelines for the correct use of the teaching material” from McGraw-Hill,Manager and Worker are also called “speaking figures.” Animation film-makers and engineers modeled these visualizations of “behavior in social roles”on the “common experience that we have today in the cinema.” The develop-ment of a social typology according to models borrowed from the cinema is,however, in no way new. Otto Neurath himself had established a close connec-tion between cinema and visual pedagogy as early as . He derives his vi-sual pedagogical method from the premise that the “modern man is veryspoiled by cinema and illustrations”: the advantages of “optical impressions”

should be exploited to popularize social topics. The visual language developedby Neurath in his Vienna Method served the iconic transmission of sociologicaldata and was therefore meant to increase the visibility of visual argumentation.How can visual pedagogy solve the problem that a few managers must dealwith a large number of workers in industrial production? In Internal Organi-

zation, the larger number of workers is not represented by a larger figure; thefigures are instead multiplied. Furthermore, one can speculate about whetherpolitical concerns played a role in this decision. Undoubtedly, “the worker”would have been more significant politically if the mass of workers were repre-sented by a figure, larger in both scale and volume. That such an effect was notnecessarily desirable in the US in the s and s goes without saying.

McGraw-Hill’s visual pedagogical program, however, proves to be contradic-tory in several respects. On the one hand, the film is meant to speak withoutwords, that is, to create unmediated evidence, on the other, the deciphering ofimages that channel understanding buries, through the commentary thatMcGraw-Hill provides, precisely this demand for unmediated understanding.

The fact that the images always contain text and are also described in a voice-over is not least an indicator of the equally unwanted and unavoidable multiplemeanings of visual symbols. An efficient cinema for managers can obviouslynot be satisfied with the fact that images are seen any old way. It does not getby without a “literal” codifying of the film image, as is intended in Internal

Organization. The intention is to add visuality to a “readable text.” The

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images should be read correctly, and to ensure this, the eye must be given in-structions. Walter Benjamin described captions as “directives” that stipulatehow the viewer should receive the image. At any rate, the multiple meanings invisual language cannot be so easily eliminated by a simply authorial gesture.Visual signs constantly refer to symbolic and allegorical fields of meaning,which, for their part, are interwoven into certain historical and cultural contexts.Paradoxically, however, the gesture of unified meaning alone is what introducesmultiple meanings into the field of visual pedagogy.

An aperçu of Rebis Debray’s may clarify this: “When the mediologist meetssomeone who’s pointing to the moon, he does not look at the moon, but at thefinger and the gesture of showing.” The gesture of directing attention alwaysimplies, in other words, that directing the eyes toward something simulta-neously entails directing them away from something else. In its attempt to do-mesticate the visual potential for meaning, business visual pedagogy becomesthe showplace of a cultural transformation. Ideals of business efficiency run upagainst the borders of culturally sanctioned methods of evidence, on which theystill rely for their transmission.

The structurally determined precariousness of the correct coding of the filmimage can be seen from the following observations. The voice-over in Internal

Organization insistently claims that a successful organizational theory musttake into account every concrete and individual view of its objects and subjects.But the attempt to put the film image into such a programmatic is itself avoidedby the visual. Let us attempt, then, to “describe” the image differently, in a waythat takes into account the excess of the visual. The visual shape of InternalOrganization has a leitmotiv: workers are consistently presented as facelessfigures; while male management staff, on the other hand, have faces. Further-more, the manager appears as an active figure in the diegesis of the film, and heis given his own gaze, as is typical for film characters. This is managed bymeans of a media caesura. The narration privileges the manager by having himappear in a cartoon as a singular figure. In contrast to the faceless workers, thisfigure has a comparatively distinguishable psychology. This is shown in a med-ium shot and expressed mimetically and gesturally. The manager is persona-lized, as opposed to the workers. At the same time, he becomes part of a com-plex staging of gazes. The task of the narrative is, as has been indicated above,directing and channeling the manager’s gaze, that is, the gaze of the intendedaudience. In the film, the figure of the manager is accompanied by his gaze,what is directed toward the image is now inside the image. The spectator isduplicated in the film via the narrating figure of identification, which strength-ens the attachment to the spectator and, at the same time, legitimizes narrativeauthority: indeed, it speaks through the spectator to the spectator, or ratherthrough his animated representative, the cartoon manager.

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The guidelines of the McGraw-Hill films, consistently following commercialinterests, are marked by an attempt to legitimize and increase the social value ofthe management film: “The management film is a medium of culture. Its mis-sion is to create an image of modern management according to which man andmachine are equally important as factors of the successful enterprise.” In otherwords, the management film takes on the goal of anchoring the premises oforganizational theory that had been formulated since the twenties in a generaldiscourse of business culture. Along with this profession of business culturethere is also a hidden dimension in the image that is only implicitly communi-cated: in the cinema for the manager, disciplining the film image necessarilymeans concealing social power relationships. In Internal Organization, thestatic organizational diagram is dominant. Nothing, or so it seems, disturbs theunified linear order that was determined by invisible demiurges. An intertex-tually motivated examination, however, can problematize the unspoken subtextof the images, which seem not to allow any further explanation in their evi-dence.

Let us begin with the matrix of forms of expression in Internal Organiza-

tion.Here the symbolic language of forms is limited to a few geometric figures.There is the rectangular, the regular and the irregular, the linear, the open, andthe closed. The elements are the rectangle, the line, the speaking figure, as wellas various forms of written commentary in the image. How elementary conno-tations are established by means of simple geometric figures is decisive here:. The stable and unchanging is shown in square frames. This framing stands for

a firm position in business practice and marks a logical point. It presents thedeterminant from which a dynamic is developed that can most likely bemodeled theoretically and is expressed within the framework of the film’srepresentational system. The symbolic form of the rectangle, on the otherhand, is intended to create the impression of closure and completeness.

. The vague and undetermined is marked by round forms. Serpentine lines re-semble mythological images of nature (snakes) and code them as ambiguousand potentially harmful.

Using this visual formal canon, which runs through the entire matrix, the filmestablishes a world of order, connection, and working together, of the conse-quential and the continuous.

In the tables, the basic pattern of the pyramid-shaped order of organization isdominant. The film image is therefore positioned fundamentally: the verticallines code the social superiority of the Manager over the Worker. The Workercan be found at the bottom of the vertical line, above him the Foreman, PlantManager, and others. Still higher is the President, and above the Board of Direc-tors. In other tables of linear organization in the same film, the positions are

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even more radically situated: a lone, ruling General Manager has a Superinten-dent and three Foremen under him, and there are three Workers beneath eachof the individual Foremen. The distinction between Manager and Worker is re-flected in a subtly formed, unnoticeable difference in the fades. A slow, faintfade is used when leadership tasks are discussed, a jumpy hard fade is em-ployed when the “lower” duties of subordinate workers are dealt with.

Difference is also created by means of posture: The Worker symbol shows afigure in the posture of someone receiving a command, the demanded attentionto the superior’s instructions being presented as a constant given. The Man-ager, on the other hand, is shown sitting with another attribute of power andrights over the workforce placed beneath him, namely the desk. In this way thedichotomy of tasks involving mental and physical labor reflects the spatial hier-archy of everything in the tables, that is, its matrix. The ruling relationships inthe business are also depicted abstractly: Vertical relationships (e.g., the Leader-ship Lines between Foreman and Worker) are represented by even, thick lines.Horizontal relationships, termed Cooperation, are drawn as dotted lines. Theseso-called Lines of Participation signal an open channel of communication. Whatis decisive, however, is that the vertical, constant lines suggest a stronger bondby virtue of their shape. The line diagram itself is by no means free of historicalrequirements. Namely, it presents the business within a visual rhetoric of origin,adaptation, and evolution. The simple experience of workers form somethinglike the organic foundation of the business, which grows steadily through themental achievements of the well-educated leadership, who translate the work-ers’ experiential knowledge into intellectual achievements. But there is yet an-other visual tradition that should be more closely examined here: the technicaldrawing. The linear organizational diagrams in Internal Organization sug-gest an ideal totality, regularity, and simultaneity of all aspects and functions ofthe business. A central part of this control fantasy is the assumption of the uni-versal, normative effectiveness of suggestive images, which seems to be pre-sented by the animated tables. Their power of suggestion relates these imagesnot least to the fact that they use the style of technical designs. They map out thesocial relationships within the business according to the model of a circuit dia-gram or blueprint, which also makes sense because, in a world of circuitry sym-bols, creating order must be possible at any time, as would be the case with areal circuit. Due to this coding of the business as serially produced software,Internal Organization connects in large part to a visual tradition of the all-knowing gaze, a tradition which includes the blueprint of the ideal city as muchas the tree chart or even the technical drawing of circuitry. In organizationtheory, questions regarding systems and models, regulation, circular causality,feedback, equilibrium adaptation, and control have been rampant since thes – questions that should have become problems of action-oriented cyber-

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netics. Long before the use of the information theories of cybernetics, systemsanalysis, and operations research, an increasing methodologization, technologi-zation, and concretization of knowledge and activity took place within organi-zation theory. With the codification of business organizational units not onlywas a rational model of business put in place, there was a similar attempt todirect the reception of the films by drawing figures that were “correct” and“conformed to regulations.” Information that gets lost or falsified during a filmviewing should be integrated into the information process by means of redun-dant feedback loops (overviews by the projectionist, distribution of question-naires after the screening, discussions led by experts, requests for suggestionsfor improvement, etc.).

Conclusion

As I have attempted to show, it is no accident that the management film system-atically uses animation effects to represent business. Through the stylisticmeans of camera work and animation techniques used in McGraw-Hill films,the tendency toward abstraction of business operations, which has increasedsince the middle of the th century, has been modified in reception and aes-thetics. The use of animation effects suggests an omnipotent ability to plan andadminister all possible resources without going into the actualities of a concrete,individual business.

Furthermore, however, it proves to be the ideal cinematic means of realizingthe project of an actual “Taylorization of the gaze,” which can be detectedthroughout the Industrial Management Series. The visual pedagogy of filmslike Internal Organization is oriented toward a particular goal: rationalizingthe cinema experience. At the same time, however, the graphic language offorms in the management film furthers and transforms a series of cultural oppo-sitions that draw on the visual pedagogical codification of educational films andundermine the informationally and organizationally strategic placement ofgoals at many points. Or, turning once more to a formulation suggested above:the ideal of business efficiency in the management films, as is the case elsewherein business communication, is limited by the culturally codified representa-tional methods on which it relies for its transmission.

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Notes

. Cf. Agatha C. Hughes, Thomas P. Hughes (eds.), Systems, Experts, and Computers:The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, ); see on the historical debate Stafford Beer, Cybernetics andManagement (New York: John Wiley & Sons, ); Stafford Beer, Decision and Con-trol: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics (London andNew York: John Wiley & Sons, ).

. Cf. Robert A. Reiser, “A history of instructional design and technology. Part I: Ahistory of instructional media,” Educational Technology Research and Development, , (), pp. -.

. See Michael Eraut, “Educational technology: Definition and conceptual back-ground,” in Tjeerd Plomp, Donald P. Ely (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Educa-tional Technology (Oxford: Pergamon, ), pp. -.

. Cf. Lisa Cartwright, Brian Goldfarb, “Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Edu-cation Films for Latin America,” in Eric Smoodin (ed.), Disney Discourse (New Yorkand London: Routledge, ), pp. -; on visual pedagogy in general, seeBrian Goldfarb, Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures of Education in and Beyond the Class-room (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).

. Gottfried Boehm’s classification of the images of science as “performative and utilityimages” represents, in my opinion, the common characteristic of the educationalfilm. Cf. Gottfried Boehm, “Zwischen Auge und Hand: Bilder als Instrumente derErkenntnis,” in Bettina Heintz, Jörg Huber (eds.),Mit dem Auge denken. Strategien derSichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten (Zurich and New York:Springer, ), p. .

. John K. Burton, David M. Moore, Susan G. Magliaro, “Behaviorism and instruc-tional technology,” in David H. Jonasen (ed.), Handbook of Research for EducationalCommunications and Technology (New York: Macmillan, ), pp. -; Peggy Ert-mer, Timothy J. Newby, “Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparingcritical features from an instructional design perspective,” Performance ImprovementQuarterly , (), pp. -.Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology (Englewood: Informa-tion Age Publishing, ), pp. -.

. McGraw-Hill (ed.), Index to mm Educational Films, National Information Center forEducational Media (University of Southern California, New York: McGraw-Hill,), p. .

. McGraw-Hill (ed.), McGraw-Hill Films: Film Catalog of Motion Pictures including Se-lected Releases from Contemporary Films (New York, n.d.), p. .

. Credits, Industrial Management Series.. Gary J. Anglin, Instructional Technology: Past, Present, and Future (Englewood: Infor-

mation Age Publishing, ), p. ; David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Film Art.An Introduction (th edition, Boston: McGraw-Hill, ).

. Charles F. Hoban, The State of the Art of Instructional Films (Stanford: ERIC Clearing-house on Media and Technology, ), p. ; Edward B. Van Ormer, InstructionalFilm Research, - (New York: Arno Press, ), pp. f.

Behaviorism, Animation, and Effective Cinema 295

. The first film series was called Engineering Drawings Series and began with thefilm Engineering Drawing (US , b&w, min., mm).

. Saettler, op. cit., p. .. Ibid., p. .. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. Film Section, Information Division, Special Representative in Europe (ed.), Catalogue

of Information Films Produced in Europe for the Marshall-Plan - (Washington,D.C., ), pp. f.

. Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology (Englewood: Informa-tion Age Publishing, ), p. .

. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. Ibid.. Cf. the results of audience research in Austria in the period from - in Ra-

món Reichert, “Die Popularisierung der Produktivität. Die Filme des Österrei-chischen Produktivitätszentrums -. Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um denFilm als historische Quelle,” in Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.),Relation. Medien, Gesellschaft, Geschichte , (), pp. -.

. Österreichisches Produktivitäts-Zentrum (ed.), Produktivität. Mitteilungen , (),p. .

. See the regularly printed readers’ letter and reports about the film screenings ofInternal Organization (), Physical Facilities (), Methods Analysis

(), Job Evaluation () and Material Control () in ÖsterreichischesProduktivitätszentrum (ed.), Der Schlüssel, vols. -.

. In Motion Study (), Gilbreth proposed the use of steroscopic and cinemato-graphic cameras for the first time; see Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study: A Method forIncreasing the Efficiency of the Workman (New York: D. van Nostrand, ); MartaBraun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (-) (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, ), p. .

. On the differentiated representation of Taylorism and Fordism, see Alfred Kieser,“Managementlehre und Taylorismus,” in Alfred Kieser (ed.), Organisationstheorien(Köln: Kohlhammer, ), pp. -. On the differences between Taylorism andthe work of Frank B. Gilbreth, see Philip Sarasin, “Die Rationalisierung des Körpers.Über ‘Scientific Management’ und ‘biologische Rationalisierung,’” in Philip Sarasin(ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,), pp. -. As Sarasin explains it, Taylor’s problem was the “laziness” of theworker, who had to be kept on the track toward achievement, while Gilbreth’s at-tention was primarily devoted to ergonomic questions, namely the avoidance ofdamage from wear and tear. Gilbreth accordingly worked on the optimization ofprocedures, whose construction was no longer problematic.

. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ); Henri Fayol,Administration Industrielle et Génerale (Paris: Dunod, ).

. See Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization: In-dustrial Organization and Film,” in this volume.

. Cf. Jacqueline Mac Glade, “The US Technical Assistance and Productivity Programand the education of Western European managers –,” in T.R. Gourvish, N.Tiratsoo (eds.), Missionaries and Managers: American Influences on European Manage-ment Education – (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ).

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. See Gilbreth, op. cit.; Frank. B Gilbreth, Lilian M. Gilbreth, Angewandte Bewegungs-studien: Neun Vorträge aus der Praxis der wissenschaftlichen Betriebsführung (Berlin:Springer, ), p. ; Frank B. Gilbreth, Das ABC der wissenschaftlichen Betriebsfüh-rung (Berlin: Springer, ), p. .

. See footnote .. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. See on cognitive mapping Donna J. Peuquet, Representations of Space and Time (New

York: Guilford, ), pp. ff.. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. The successive setup of images is also dominant is the films Methods Analysis

() and Job Evaluation ().. Ibid., p. .. Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, ).. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .,. Arrow vectors and flow charts are used in an analogous way in Physical Facil-

ities () and Material Control (), two other films from the McGraw-Hillseries.

. See Denis Bayart, “How to Make Change Manageable: Statistical Thinking and Cog-nitive Devices in Manufacturing Control,” in Miriam Levin (ed.), Cultures of Control(Amsterdam: Harwood, ), pp. -.

. Line diagrams represent the development of a series of values in the form of a stea-dy line; hierarchical diagrams picture a functional overview in the branches of ahierarchical tree.

. According to the voice-over commentary in Internal Organization.

. Cf. Heiko Neumann, Siegfried H. Stiehl, “Modelle der Informationsverarbeitungzur frühen visuellen Wahrnehmung. Eine interdisziplinäre Synopse der Paradig-men: Von Helmholtzschen Tiefenhinweisen zur Neuroinformatik,” Klaus P. Denck-er (ed.), Interface : Weltbilder – Bilderwelten: computergestützte Visionen (Hamburgand Baden-Baden: Nomos, ), pp. -.

. See JoAnne Yates, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in AmericanManagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ).

. Cf. Otto Neurath, “Statistische Hieroglyphe,” in Rudolf Haller, Robin Kinross (eds.),Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften, vol. (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, ),pp. -.

. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. Ibid., p. .. Cf. Otto Neurath, “Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien,” in Rudolf Hal-

ler, Robin Kinross (eds.), Gesammelte bildpädagogische Schriften, vol. (Vienna:Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, ), p. .

. On the process of the uselessness and inefficiency of knowledge, cf. Klaus Amann,Karin Knorr-Cetina, “The fixation of visual evidence,” in Michael Lynch, SteveWoolgar (eds.), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, ),pp. -.

. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), p. .. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in

Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken, ), p. .

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. Régis Debray, Vie et mort de l’image (Paris: Gallimard, ), p. .. This transformation was examined in the example of the medical educational film

by Cartwright , op. cit.; cf. in particular Chapter , “Women and the PublicCulture of Radiography,” pp. -.

. McGraw-Hill Films (ed.), Guidelines, n.d., p. .. “Den Managementfilm verstehen wir als Kulturträger, seine Mission ist es, ein Bild

des modernen Managens darzustellen, das Mensch und Maschine als gleichberech-tigte Faktoren eines erfolgreichen Unternehmens ansieht.” Thus, social work al-ready figured as an industrially disciplined subject, as was noted in the first para-graph of this text.

. Cf. Thomas Jantschek, “Bemerkungen zum Begriff des Sehen-als,” Ralf Koners-mann (ed.), Kritik des Sehens (Leipzig, ), pp. -; on the genealogy of themodel of circuitry as a visual strategy, see also Friedrich A. Kittler, “Die Stadt ist einMedium,” in Gotthard Fuchs, Bernhard Moltmann, Walter Prigge (eds.), MythosMetropole (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ), pp. -.

. In , the American engineer Robb Russel had already transferred the old ana-logy between the activity of the ship’s helmsman (kybernetos) and the activity of thepolitical leader and compared the company with a ship, which a manager wouldnavigate through the universe of statistical figures. Cf. Robb Russell, Lectures onOrganization (Boston: published by the author, ), pp. f.

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