Scientific management introduced a novel way of organizing work and measuring productivity into the modern workplace. With a stopwatch and a clever method of analysis, Frederick Winslow Taylor is either acclaimed or reviled, depending on the audience, for giving industrial/organizational consultancy a groundbreaking tool: the efficiency study. What is less well known is that the American pragmatist John Dewey criticized scientific management for its dualistic assumptions, for treating workers as pure doers or “muscle” and management as pure thinkers or “brains” in an efficient, though inhumane, work process. The first section of this paper examines the similarities and differences between Dewey’s and Taylor’s respective conceptions of science and management. In the second section, I consider Dewey’s critique of scientific management in his book Democracy and Education. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the implications of Dewey’s critique of Taylorism for organizational theory and industrial relations today.

In this paper, I describe a category of political values that I call “institutional values.” An institutional value (the quintessential examples of which are democracy and the rule of law) is distinct from an ordinary (or “abstract”) political value like justice by having both descriptive and evaluative components. I defend a method of sorting out correct from incorrect conceptions of an institutional value that relies on two ideas: coherence and verisimilitude.

Two alternative accounts have emerged as viable competitors to the forerunning counterfactual comparative account in the recent debate concerning the nature of harm. These are the “non-comparative statebased account of harm” defended by Elizabeth Harman, the “event-based account of harm” defended by Matthew Hanser. I raise one simple but serious counterexample involving “non-regrettable disabilities” that applies to both of these alternative accounts but that is avoided by the counterfactual comparative account. I point out that my counterexample is one instance of a broader problem for alternatives to the counterfactual comparative account. The problem is that each of them divorces the concept of harm from the intuitive idea that we have moral and prudential reasons to avoid it.