Against Time: Scheduling, Momentum, and Moral Order at Wartime Los Alamos

Abstract

Abstract This article examines scheduling as a source of institutional momentum in the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory during World War Two. As well as allowing coordination of the large and geographically dispersed sites of the atomic bomb project, the scheduling regime operated as a system of social control, suppressing opposition to the use of the weapon. The analysis suggests the importance of historical and ethnographic attention to how schedules inscribe instrumental rationality in the quotidian life of modern organizations.