Today [Frederick Winslow] Taylor’s name conjures up dehumanized, inefficient, and conflicted work methods. His purposes were exactly the reverse. No consultant in history ever had so much impact on the workplace as Taylor.
— Weisbord (2004: 28).
It would easy to equate scientific management to so-called Taylorism as though it all came from one man. However, this school of thought was indeed more than the result of the work of one Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915). Rather, it represented a whole movement during the 1910s to both improve work performance and incentivize the worker.
First, about the founder F. W. Taylor and his Principles of scientific management (Taylor, 1911) that introduced a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. Weisbord (2004) described Taylor as two very different people within the same person – at once a “mechanistic engineer, dedicated to counting, rigid control, and the rationalization of work” but also a “humanitarian social reformer, who believed workers could produce more with less stress, achieve greater equity in their output, and cooperate with management for the good of society.” Unfortunately, Weisbord was right when he said that the latter Taylor was quickly forgotten in history.
We would cover Taylor (1911) and his “one best way” in our inaugural episode of the podcast, discussing his use of scientific rationalism as a way of analyzing and reorganizing both work and the management of it. Much of Taylor’s work occurred in the steel industry. Convinced that traditional methods of work allowed workers to produce only a fraction of their actual capacity, Taylor observed and timed factory employees as they did their work to develop simple, replicable series of tasks that workers should be able to perform with precision, consistency, and greater speed. Accompanying the changes in the workplace were detailed plans to codify the work, assign daily responsibilities to each worker, and monitor actual job performance.
But Taylor was hardly a one-man show in promoting scientific management. In a seminal history of this school of thought, Drury (1918: 102-129) catalogued the significant efforts and contributions made by several of Taylor’s disciples. Henry Gantt invented the bonus system by which workers who completed all assigned tasks in a given day were granted extra pay as an incentive. Carl Barth, inventor of the slide rule, focused on manipulating the machine tools as a way to help improve worker efficiency. As Vice President of the Tabor Manufacturing Company, Horace Hathaway was credited with using scientific management to triple the factory’s output. Other notables were Morris Cooke and Sanford E. Thompson who extended the approach to other industries such as respectively printing and bricklaying, Frank Gilbreth whose contributions involved reducing worker motion stress and fatigue, and Harrington Emerson who focused on reorganizing factories and whole organizations for improved efficiency.
Unfortunately, Taylor and others in the scientific management movement fell afoul of senior managers – whom Taylor often clashed with – and union leaders who considered his methods as exploitative. These views are on full display in a film we covered in Episode 53, Charlie Chaplin’s famous 1936 film Modern Times, which was a spoof of scientific management taken to its worst impulses. But for the movement itself, the controversies that emerged and the rise of the human relations tradition in the 1920s would reduce the understanding of Taylorism to the opposite of its initial intensions. However, the influence of Taylorism is everywhere and many contemporary management systems employ degrees of quantification and standardization to routinize tasks – whether in industry or in other services such as education (Tyack, 1974).
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & Row.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) was an American inventor, mechanical engineer, and management consultant best known for his systematic approach to organization of work outlined in the 1911 monograph ‘The Principles of Scientific Management’. Taylor’s ideas, most frequently referred to as ‘Taylorism’, are widely recognized to be at the foundation of modern management theory, which is why we chose to read his book for the inaugural episode of the Talking About Organizations Podcast!
Drury, H. B. (1918). Scientific management: A history and criticism. London: P.S. King & Sons.
This book is a dissertation by Horace Bookwalter Drury from The Ohio State University published in 1915 (the link provided here is to the US Library of Congress entry in which the PDF version is freely available for download). In Part I, Drury provides a detailed history of scientific management from the origins of the term (Taylor’s writings in 1903) through its introduction into various firms and industries. Part II is a critical review of the concept including the extent to which it meets its promises to solve various labor problems and the merits of various charges against its implementation (e.g., abuse or overuse of labor and the dehumanization of work).
Del Mar, D. & Collons, R. D. (1976). Classics in scientific management: A book of readings. University of Alabama Press.
Account required to access full text of the book from the archive. org website.
From a book review, Wren, D. A. (1977). Classics in scientific management [book review]. Academy of management review, 2(2), 324-326: “Materials are drawn entirely from the Taylor Society Bulletin which was issued six times a year from 1914 to 1934, except for two years during World War I. Only 13 libraries have a complete collection of the TSB and the editors have made a contribution by making some of these rare materials available. … Del Mar and Collons arranged their selections in six parts, each dealing with some aspect of the scientific management movement and its influence on America and the rest of the world.”
For more about the Taylor Society, see Brown, P. S. (1925, May). The work and aims of the Taylor Society. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 119, Science in Modern Industry, 134-139.
Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education (Vol. 95). Harvard University Press.
Scientific management principles have found their way into many other professions and vocations, not just industry. This book shows how its principles entered the education system.
From the Harvard University Press website (linked above): The One Best System presents a major new interpretation of what actually happened in the development of one of America’s most influential institutions. At the same time it is a narrative in which the participants themselves speak out: farm children and factory workers, frontier teachers and city superintendents, black parents and elite reformers. And it encompasses both the achievements and the failures of the system: the successful assimilation of immigrants, racism and class bias; the opportunities offered to some, the injustices perpetuated for others.
Related episodes and special posts from the Talking About Organizations Podcast:
- 53: Taylorism in Motion — Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
We discuss Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times” balances great physical comedy with powerful social commentary. Chaplin portrayed a hapless Worker on an assembly line who is tormented both by supervisors and the work itself. After being subjected to a humiliating experiment intended to improve the line’s efficiency, the Worker runs through a series of rotating jobs, stints in jail, and other misadventures as he tries to find his purpose in life. - Your Kitchen Probably Comes from F. W. Taylor!
It might sound strange at first, but the impact of Taylor’s ideas went way beyond factory work and production! The attention for optimizing work activities was taken up by numerous others, the Gilbreth couple perhaps being the most famous ones. Check out the photos in this special post to learn if your kitchen was a product of scientific management! - 1: Principles of Scientific Management – F.W. Taylor’s One Best Way
Presents the seminal text that defined Taylorism and scientific management, a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. The ‘Principles of Scientific Management’ proposed a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. Taylor decried the waste of effort and resources that resulted from inefficient management practices, and thus proposed a science-based way of analyzing and reorganizing both the work and the management of it.
Additional References
Weisbord, M. R. (2004). Productive workplaces revisited: Dignity, meaning, and community in the 21st century. Revised edition. John Wiley & Sons. Chapters 2 and 3.
Weisbord’s book is a general history of organizational development that begins with Taylorism and proceeds through the works of Kurt Lewin, Douglas MacGregor, Emery & Trist, and beyond. This “revisited” version updates the 1987 original.