Experts, Exiles, and Textiles: German Rationalisierung on the 1930s Turkish Shop Floor

Abstract

In the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s the Turkish state decided to undertake an ambitious project of industrialization. Though state factories were presented and celebrated as model institutions of national modernity, their operations were characterized from the outset by serious and chronic problems of inefficiency and low productivity. To secure technical and managerial know-how on the shop floor, the Turkish state approached knowledgeable German industrial managers to organize its industrial production rationally, hoping to take advantage of the increasingly repressive political climate in Germany, which was driving leading experts into exile. This article analyses the transfer of scientific management from the German industrial context, with its craft control of the labour process and predominance of skilled labour with a strong labour movement, to Turkey, with its army of unskilled, cheap, and unorganized labour and where industrial development was in its infancy.