Abstract Incentives are so widespread and seemingly so insignificant that we might simply take them at face value and fail to ask how we can account for their emergence and proliferation. Building upon Foucault’s notion of ‘problematization’ as a mode of reading history, this paper questions the taken-for-granted place that incentives have come to acquire in our current reflections and practices. To do so, it returns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when American mechanical engineers and social scientists turned the behaviour of factory workers into a managerial problem and began to design new instruments to incentivize them. The shift from the current proliferation of incentives to their past opens up a genealogical space that invites us to explore the contingent shifts in meaning and use of incentivization as a framework to understand and govern human behaviour over the course of the twentieth century. Such a shift opens up an analytical space too. The return to early instances of incentivization allows us to compare labour incentives with labour discipline and to tease out some of the similarities and differences between these two ways of wielding power on the shop floor – and possibly beyond.

中文翻译：

---

激励：从当前的扩散到激励的（重新）问题化

摘要 激励措施如此普遍且看似如此微不足道，以至于我们可能只是将它们视为表面价值，而不会问我们如何解释它们的出现和扩散。基于福柯将“问题化”作为一种阅读历史模式的概念，本文质疑激励在我们当前的反思和实践中已经获得的理所当然的地位。为此，它回到了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初，当时美国机械工程师和社会科学家将工厂工人的行为变成了管理问题，并开始设计新的工具来激励他们。从当前激励的扩散到过去的转变开辟了一个谱系空间，邀请我们探索激励的意义和使用的偶然变化，作为理解和管理 20 世纪人类行为的框架。这种转变也开辟了一个分析空间。回到早期的激励实例，我们可以将劳动激励与劳动纪律进行比较，并梳理出这两种在车间（甚至可能之外）行使权力的方式之间的一些异同。