Scientific management (also called Taylorism, the Taylor system, or the Classical Perspective) is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflow processes, improving labor productivity. The core ideas of the theory were developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s, and were first published in his monographs, Shop Management (1905) and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Frederick Winslow Taylor ( 20 March 1856 &ndash 21 March 1915) widely known as F A monograph ( Classical Greek, "One Writer" or "Single Writing") is a work of writing upon a single subject usually also by a single The Principles of Scientific Management is a monograph published by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 ^[1] Taylor believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an individual at work. A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation

In management literature today, the greatest use of the concept of Taylorism is as a contrast to a new, improved way of doing business. In political and sociological terms, Taylorism can be seen as the division of labour pushed to its logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of the worker and dehumanisation of the workplace. Sociology (from Latin: socius "companion" and the suffix -ology "the study of" from Greek λόγος lógos "knowledge"

Overview

General approach

• Developed standard method for performing each job.
• selected workers with appropriate abilities for each job.
• trained workers in standard method.
• supported workers by planning their work and eliminating interruptions.
• provided wage incentives to workers for increased output.

Contributions

• Scientific approach to business management and process improvement
• Importance of compensation for performance
• Began the careful study of tasks and jobs
• Importance of selection criteria

Elements

• Labour is defined and authority/responsibility is legitimised/official
• Positions placed in hierarchy and under authority of higher level
• Selection is based upon technical competence, training or experience
• Actions and decisions are recorded to allow continuity and memory
• Management is different from ownership of the organization
• Managers follow rules/procedures to enable reliable/predictable behaviour

Mass production methods

Taylorism is often mentioned along with Fordism, because it was closely associated with mass production methods in manufacturing factories. Fordism, named after Henry Ford, refers to various social theories. Mass production (also called flow production, repetitive flow production, series production, or serial production) is the production of Taylor's own name for his approach was scientific management. This sort of task-oriented optimisation of work tasks is nearly ubiquitous today in industry, and has made most industrial work menial, repetitive and tedious; this can be noted, for instance, in assembly lines and fast-food restaurants. An assembly line is a Manufacturing process in which parts (usually Interchangeable parts) are added to a product in a sequential manner using optimally planned Fast food is the term given to food that can be prepared and served very quickly Ford's arguments began from his observation that, in general, workers forced to perform repetitive tasks work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished. Punishment is the practice of imposing something unpleasant or aversive on a person or animal usually in response to disobedient or morally wrong behavior This slow rate of work (which he called "soldiering", but might nowadays be termed by those in charge as "loafing" or "malingering" or by those on the assembly line as "getting through the day"), he opined, was based on the observation that, when paid the same amount, workers will tend to do the amount of work the slowest among them does: this reflects the idea that workers have a vested interest in their own well-being, and do not benefit from working above the defined rate of work when it will not increase their compensation. He therefore proposed that the work practice that had been developed in most work environments was crafted, intentionally or unintentionally, to be very inefficient in its execution. From this he posited that there was one best method for performing a particular task, and that if it were taught to workers, their productivity would go up. Productivity in Economics refers to measures of output from production processes per unit of input

Taylor introduced many concepts that were not widely accepted at the time. For example, by observing workers, he decided that labour should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue. He proved this with the task of unloading ore: workers were taught to take rest during work and output went up. An ore is a volume of rock containing components or Minerals in a mode of occurrence that renders it valuable for mining

Today's armies employ scientific management. An army (from Latin Armata "act of arming" via Old French armée) in the broadest sense is the land-based Armed forces Of the key points listed; a standard method for performing each job, select workers with appropriate abilities for each job, training for standard task, planning work and eliminating interruptions and wage incentive for increased output. All but wage incentives for increased output are used by modern military organizations. Wage incentives rather appear in the form of skill bonuses for enlistments.

Division of labour

Unless people manage themselves, somebody has to take care of administration, and thus there is a division of work between workers and administrators. One of the tasks of administration is to select the right person for the right job:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. Pig iron is the intermediate product of Smelting Iron ore with coke, usually with Limestone as a flux The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. (Taylor 1911, 59)

This view – match the worker to the job – has resurfaced time and time again in management theories.

Extension to "Sales Engineering"

Taylor believed scientific management could be extended to "the work of our salesmen. " Shortly after his death, his acolyte Harlow S. Person began to lecture corporate audiences on the possibility of using Taylorism for "sales engineering. " (Dawson 2005) This was a watershed insight in the history of corporate marketing. In popular usage "marketing" is the promotion of products especially Advertising and Branding However in professional usage the term has a wider meaning of

Criticism

Applications of scientific management sometimes fail to account for two inherent difficulties:

• It ignores individual differences: the most efficient way of working for one person may be inefficient for another;
• It ignores the fact that the economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's methods would frequently be resented and sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.

Both difficulties were recognised by Taylor, but are generally not fully addressed by managers who only see the potential improvements to efficiency. Taylor believed that scientific management cannot work unless the worker benefits. In his view management should arrange the work in such a way that one is able to produce more and get paid more, by teaching and implementing more efficient procedures for producing a product.

Although Taylor did not compare workers with machines, some of his critics use this metaphor to explain how his approach makes work more efficient by removing unnecessary or wasted effort. A machine is any device that uses Energy to perform some activity However, some would say that this approach ignores the complications introduced because workers are necessarily human: personal needs, interpersonal difficulties and the very real difficulties introduced by making jobs so efficient that workers have no time to relax. As a result, workers worked harder, but became dissatisfied with the work environment. Some have argued that this discounting of worker personalities led to the rise of labour unions. A trade union or labour union is an organization of workers who have banded together to achieve common goals in key areas such as wages hours and working conditions forming

It can also be said that the rise in labour unions is leading to a push on the part of industry to accelerate the process of automation, a process that is undergoing a renaissance with the invention of a host of new technologies starting with the computer and the Internet. Automation ( Ancient Greek: = self dictated) roboticization or industrial automation or Numerical control is the use of Control systems This shift in production to machines was clearly one of the goals of Taylorism, and represents a victory for his theories.

However, tactfully choosing to ignore the still controversial process of automating human work is also politically expedient, so many still say that practical problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by the human relations school of management in 1930. Human Relations Movement refers to those researchers of Organizational development who study the behavior of people in groups, in particular workplace groups Others (Braverman 1974) insisted that human relations did not replace Taylorism but that both approaches are rather complementary: Taylorism determining the actual organisation of the work process and human relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures.

However, Taylor's theories were clearly at the roots of a global revival in theories of scientific management in the last two decades of the 20th century, under the moniker of 'corporate reengineering'. Reengineering is radical Redesign of an Organization 's Processes especially its Business processes Rather than organizing a firm into As such, Taylor's ideas can be seen as the root of a very influential series of developments in the workplace, with the goal being the eventual elimination of industry's need for unskilled, and later perhaps, even most skilled labour in any form, directly following Taylor's recipe for deconstructing a process. This has come to be known as commodification, and no skilled profession, even medicine, has proven to be immune from the efforts of Taylor's followers, the 'reengineers', who are often called derogatory names such as 'bean counters'. Commodification (or commoditization) is the transformation of goods and services (or things that may not normally be regarded as goods or services into a Commodity

Legacy

Scientific management was an early attempt to systematically treat management and process improvement as a scientific problem. With the advancement of statistical methods, the approach was improved and referred to as quality control in 1920s and 1930s. In Engineering and Manufacturing, quality control and quality engineering are involved in developing systems to ensure products or services During the 1940s and 1950s, the body of knowledge for doing scientific management evolved into Operations Research and management cybernetics. Operations Research (OR in North America South Africa and Australia and Operational Research in Europe is an interdisciplinary branch of applied Mathematics and Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the Structure of Complex systems especially Communication processes control mechanisms and Feedback In the 1980s there was total quality management, in the 1990s reengineering. Total Quality Management ( TQM) is a business Management strategy aimed at embedding Awareness of Quality in all organizational processes Today's Six Sigma and Lean manufacturing could be seen as new kinds of scientific management, though their principles vary so drastically that the comparison might be misleading. Six Sigma is a Business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, that today enjoys wide-spread application in many sectors of industry Lean manufacturing or lean production, which is often known simply as " Lean " is the practice of a theory of production that considers the expenditure In particular, Shigeo Shingo, one of the originators of the Toyota Production System that this system and Japanese management culture in general should be seen as kind of scientific management. born in Saga City, Japan, was a Japanese Industrial engineer who distinguished himself as one of the world’s leading experts on manufacturing practices The Toyota Production System (TPS combines management philosophy and practices to form an integrated socio-technical system at Toyota. The culture of Japanese management so famous in the West is generally limited to Japan's large corporations

Peter Drucker saw Frederick Taylor as the creator of knowledge management, as the aim of scientific management is to produce knowledge about how to improve work processes. Peter Ferdinand Drucker ( November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was a writer management consultant and self-described “social ecologist Knowledge Management (KM Although some have questioned whether scientific management is suitable only for manufacturing, Taylor himself advocated scientific management for all sorts of work, including the management of universities and government.

Scientific management has had an important influence in sports, where stop watches and motion studies rule the day. (Taylor himself enjoyed sports –especially tennis and golf – and he invented improved tennis racquets and improved golf clubs, although other players liked to tease him for his unorthodox designs, and they did not catch on as replacements for the mainstream implements. )

Scientific management and the Soviet Union

Historian Thomas Hughes (Hughes 2004) has detailed the way in which the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s enthusiastically embraced Fordism and Taylorism, importing American experts in both fields as well as American engineering firms to build parts of its new industrial infrastructure. Thomas Parke Hughes (born in 1929) is an American Historian of Technology The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR was a constitutionally Socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991 The concepts of the Five Year Plan and the centrally planned economy can be traced directly to the influence of Taylorism on Soviet thinking. A planned economy or directed economy is an Economic system in which the Government or Workers' councils manages the Economy. Hughes quotes Stalin:

American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognises obstacles; which continues on a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is impossible . Joseph Stalin ( ნამდვილი გვარი ჯუღაშვილი|Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili; March 5 1953 was General Secretary of the Communist Party . . The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the essence of Leninism. Leninism refers to various related political and economic theories elaborated by Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. (Hughes 2004: 251 – quoting Stalin 1976: 115)

Hughes offers this equation to describe what happened:

Taylorismus + Fordismus = Amerikanismus

Hughes describes how, as the Soviet Union developed and grew in power, both sides, the Soviets and the Americans, chose to ignore or deny the contribution that American ideas and expertise had had – the Soviets because they wished to portray themselves as creators of their own destiny and not indebted to a rival, and the Americans because they did not wish to acknowledge their part in creating a powerful rival.

See also

• Fordism
• Division of labour
• Hawthorne effect
• Benjamin S. Graham
• Lillian Moller Gilbreth, Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Fordism, named after Henry Ford, refers to various social theories. Division of labour or specialization is the specialization of cooperative labour in specific circumscribed tasks and roles intended to increase the Productivity The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity, and describes a temporary change to behavior or performance in response to a change in the environmental conditions with the response Benjamin S Graham Sr (1900-1960 was a pioneer in the development and application of Scientific management and industrial engineering techniques to office and factory clerical Lillian Moller Gilbreth PhD, ( May 24 1878 &ndash January 2, 1972) was one of the first working female Engineers holding Wife and husband team of time and motion study engineers
• Pandora's Box by Adam Curtis
• The Principles of Scientific Management
• The Secret Life of Machines: The Office by Tim Hunkin
• The Pajama Game, a Broadway spoof of scientific management

References

• Hugh G. J. Aitken, Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915, Princeton University Press, Reprint 1985
• Braverman, Harry, 1974, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York 1974, New Edition: Monthly Review Press, New York 1998, ISBN 0853459401
• Dawson, Michael (2005). The Watertown Arsenal was a major American Arsenal located on the northern shore of the Charles River in Watertown Massachusetts. Harry Braverman (1920 – 1976 was an American Communist and political writer The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life, paper, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-07264-2.  
• Head, Simon : The New Ruthless Economy. Work and Power in the Digital Age, Oxford UP 2005 - Head analyzes current implementations of Taylorism not only at the assembly line, but also in the offices and in medicine ("managed care"), ISBN 0195179838
• Hughes, Thomas P., 2004 American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870-1970. Thomas Parke Hughes (born in 1929) is an American Historian of Technology 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226359271
• Robert Kanigel, 1999 The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-026080-3
• Stalin, J. V. (1976) Problems of Leninism, Lectures Delivered at the Sverdlov University Foreign Languages Press, Peking

External links

• Principles of Scientific Management - Full text online
• Scientific Management and Frederick Winslow Taylor - Full text online
• Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management