Technocracy

Good old Encyclopedia Britannica gives a brief summary

Segal (1985:121ff) suggests that the Technocracy Movement grew out of the work and influence of Thorstein Veblen:

Veblen offered a strategy, spelled out in The Engineers and the Price System [1921], for ridding American society of the waste and extravagance he had long condemned. He advocated
  1. the voluntary abdication of all absentee owners of big business;
  2. their replacement by reform-minded technicians and workers;
  3. the creation of a national directorate to supervise the reallocation of all goods and services; and
  4. the elimination of the artificial price system based on the equally artificial monetary system
Veblen contended that these changes would increase America's industrial output by from 300 to 1200 per cent... (1985:121)
In a footnote, Segal traces the origins of the Technocracy movement through a 1916 organization called The New Machine, founded by one Henry L. Gantt (the inventor of the Gantt Chart for scheduling processes --the Encyclopedia Britannica spells it 'Gannt', incorrectly), a disciple of Frederick Jackson Taylor "who thought the master indifferent to social issues" (242, note 90).

I did a quick Annie search for "technocra*" and found that only a few of the items retrieved dealt with the American movement --most uses of the terms 'technocrat' and 'technocracy' were applied to particular subsets of elites in developing China and Soviet Union.

The Technocracy movement had its moment in the early 1930s, in the search for 'solutions' to the problem of the deepening Depression. Segal quotes Literary Digest:

Technocracy is all the rage. All over the country it is being talked about, explained, wondered at, praised, damned. It is found about as easy to explain... as the Einstein theory of relativity. (Dec 1932)
and goes on to say that
Technocracy's heyday lasted only from June 16, 1932, when The New York Times became the first influential press organ to report its activities, until January 13, 1933, when [Howard] Scott, attempting to silence his critics, delivered a rambling, confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup... (1985:123)

So here we have in capsule form a linkage among a bunch of things we've been looking at: a movement founded on notions of the social (human, economic, political) consequences of machine technology [technological unemployment], advocating energy-based calculation of value, idealizing efficiency, and proposing social/economic/political reform based on putting control in the hands of engineer-specialists ('technocrats'). The extreme version advocated by Scott was discredited (and so was he, for misrepresentation of his own background, and for bogus numerical/statistical claims), but one could argue (and indeed John Kenneth Galbraith does) that the basic ideas of technocracy won --that there is a "techno-structure", composed of specialists [engineers, administrators, managers] that does in fact make the decisions that affect the operation of economy and society. If we draw no other conclusion, it's clear enough that it's reasonable to consider management a technology, fully as much as any contrivance of gears and rods, or silicon...