How productivity culture and technology became emblematic of the American economic system in pre- and postwar Germany. The concept of productivity originated in a statistical measure of output per worker or per work-hour, calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A broader productivity culture emerged in 1920s America, as Henry Ford and others linked methods of mass production and consumption to high wages and low prices. These ideas were studied eagerly by a Germany in search of economic recovery after World War I, and, decades later, the Marshall Plan promoted productivity in its efforts to help post–World War II Europe rebuild. In Productivity Machines, Corinna Schlombs examines the transatlantic history of productivity technology and culture in the two decades before and after World War II. She argues for the interpretive flexibility of productivity: different groups viewed productivity differently at different times. Although it began as an objective measure, productivity came to be emblematic of the American economic system; post-World War II West Germany, however, adapted these ideas to its own political and economic values. Schlombs explains that West German unionists cast a doubtful eye on productivity's embrace of plant-level collective bargaining; unions fought for codetermination—the right to participate in corporate decisions. After describing German responses to US productivity, Schlombs offers an in-depth look at labor relations in one American company in Germany—that icon of corporate America, IBM. Finally, Schlombs considers the emergence of computer technology—seen by some as a new symbol of productivity but by others as the means to automate workers out of their jobs.

This book brings out the visible low hanging fruits of belt and pulley related energy losses in your daily working machine. By implementing the ‘few-months-only-as-payback-proposals’ based case studies given in this book, your industry can restore the productivity in production machines, which are mostly constant torque loads. Also, you can achieve appreciable energy savings by optimizing the speed demanded by variable torque loads like centrifugal blower, fan and pump.

This is the first book to examine the “nuts and bolts” of production processes. It proposes a truly consilient approach to modeling production processes – one that goes beyond the vague principles found in standard economics – and provides details that are consistent with the applied mechanics and engineering literature. Providing a credible analysis of some of the most pressing questions of our era, such as the productivity slowdown and the information paradox, and bridging the gap between engineering, applied physics, economics, and management science, this book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in industry, the modern economy, and how physical factors constrain productivity growth.

The mathematical models of productivity theory allows for the productivity rate of manufacturing machines and systems to be modelled with results that are validated by their actual output. This book presents the analytical approaches and methods to define maximal productivity rate of manufacturing machines and systems, based on the parameters of technological processes, structural design, reliability of mechanisms, and management systems.