Taylorism, or scientific management

The roots of our modern management approach began with Weber, but quite quickly were picked up by one Frederick Winslow Taylor as scientific management (Jackson, 2000). Fred was "[b]orn in 1856 to rich Quaker parents in Philadelphia [USA, where] he spent two years of his childhood traveling in Europe before attending Phillips Exeter Academy. Rather than becom[ing] a lawyer like his Princeton-educated father, Taylor opted for a machinist apprenticeship at a pump manufacturing company" (Stolzoff, 2023, 55%). I find it surprising that even at the outset of his career, Fred Taylor trod his own path.

The young man gained work at a steel manufacturing plant, Midvale Steel, where he "was promoted from time clerk to machinist to machine shop foreman and, eventually, to chief engineer—all before he turned thirty" (Stolzoff, 2023, 55%), and it was in this role where he began to think about management. During his shifts, "he noticed his colleagues putting in minimal effort, which resulted in higher labor costs for the company. Taylor saw his colleagues’ lack of hustle as a personal affront. As he advanced in leadership, he dedicated himself to figuring out how to squeeze the most work out of every worker" (55%). Ouch.

However, what he was really after was uniformity: if actions could be the same each time, the process becomes more predictable (National Humanities Centre, 2013). He began using "stopwatches on the factory floor to study [plant and worker] efficiency. He broke down each job into discrete actions —pick up a piece of metal, place the metal on the lathe, mark where to cut—and then measured how long it took to complete each action. Taylor believed there was 'one best way' to do every task, which revealed itself through close inspection. Every action was an opportunity to maximize efficiency, and thus save the firm money" (Stolzoff, 2023, 55%).

He opened a consultancy business in the late 1890s based around his growing confidence in his scientific management approach, and firms hired him to analyse and optimise their processes, but Taylor’s scientific approach didn't necessarily follow scientific method: 

"He notoriously fudged the numbers, lied to clients, and inflated reports of his own success. One client, Bethlehem Steel, fired Taylor after his recommendations did not actually yield any increases in profit. But that didn’t stop Taylor from preaching his gospel to anyone who would listen. His skill as a writer and marketer trumped the unreliability of his data. He published multiple books and traveled around the [USA] to broadcast his ideas. In Taylor’s mind, workers were simply unintelligent cogs in the capitalist machine. He described the average steelworker as 'so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox.' Never mind workers’ humanity; he saw their every action, their every second, as an opportunity to maximize corporate profits" (Stolzoff, 2023, 55%).

I tend to class Fred Taylor's work more at the trait and factor end of matching and task management, rather than at the development end of human resource development theory, despite his desire that workers had a decent day's pay for their decent day's work (Jackson, 2000). While Fred Taylor trained the staff he worked with in componentising the tasks (National Humanities Centre, 2013), I think it might be a stretch to consider this 'development' in today's view: Taylorism honed the task to perfection, incentivising workers to perform (National Humanities Centre, 2013). 

What is interesting is just how pervasive Taylor’s Scientific Management approach remains. We can see Taylorism even in small warehousing operations with 'picker packers' tasks in Aotearoa, showing that the principles of scientific management have travelled right around the world.

Much of the Taylorism-style of work we can - and should - automate. We have better uses for human creativity than being cogs in a machine. And more rewarding ones.

Sam

References:

Jackson, M. C. (2000). Systems Approaches to Management. Kulwer Academic Publishers.

National Humanities Center. (2013). Frederick Winslow Taylor: The Principles of Scientific Management 1910. America in Class. https://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Taylor-Scientific-Management-1910-excerpt.pdf

Stolzoff, S. (2023). The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work [e-book]. Penguin.