Background
By the late 19th century American factories had grown large, but work methods were still left to craftsmen's experience and rules of thumb. Frederick Taylor, an engineer at Midvale and later Bethlehem Steel, saw systematic soldiering, workers deliberately working slowly for fear that higher output would lead to cuts in piece rates, as the central problem. He argued that replacing rule-of-thumb management with scientific measurement and analysis would benefit both employers and workers, and set out his ideas in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).
Taylor's four principles
- Develop a science for each element of a worker's job to replace rule of thumb.
- Scientifically select, train and develop workers.
- Have managers and workers cooperate heartily to ensure work is done by the developed methods.
- Divide work and responsibility, with management doing the planning and workers the execution.
Main techniques
- Time study: jobs were broken into elements and timed with a stopwatch to set a standard daily task. The pig-iron handling experiment at Bethlehem and the shoveling studies, which matched shovel size to material, are well known.
- Task management: standard workloads and written instructions were set in advance and followed exactly.
- Differential piece rate: workers meeting the standard earned a higher rate per piece, those falling short a lower one.
- Functional foremanship: instead of one supervisor, specialized foremen handled planning, speed, inspection, repair and so on.
- Standardization of tools, working conditions and methods.
Successors and spread
- The Gilbreths: in Motion Study (1911) Frank Gilbreth analyzed bricklaying to eliminate wasted motions and devised the therblig as a unit of basic motion; Lillian Gilbreth added research on fatigue and psychological factors.
- Gantt: Henry Gantt devised the Gantt chart for scheduling and a task-and-bonus wage system.
- Fordism: Henry Ford built mass production on standardized parts and the moving assembly line, extending the logic of scientific management to an entire production system.
Together with Fayol's administrative management and Weber's bureaucracy, scientific management forms one pillar of classical organization theory and was a starting point for industrial engineering and operations management.
Critiques and legacy
- View of people: critics charged that it treated workers as economic beings responding only to pay, like parts of a machine. The human relations school, stressing social needs and informal groups, emerged partly in response.
- Labor: unions resisted, fearing speed-ups and layoffs, and after a 1911 strike at the Watertown Arsenal a special committee of the US House of Representatives investigated the system. Braverman (1974) argued that by separating conception from execution it stripped workers of skill (deskilling).
- Legacy: ideas of standardized work, incentive pay and efficiency measurement live on in modern methods such as the Toyota Production System and Six Sigma and TQM, although these differ from Taylor in valuing workers' participation and improvement suggestions.
References
- Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers.
- Gilbreth, F. B. (1911). Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman. New York: D. Van Nostrand.
- Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
- Kanigel, R. (1997). The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency. New York: Viking.