The Principles of Scientific Management

In 1907, Taylor began to invite those who were interested in his ideas to come to his
home, Boxly, in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he would lecture on
his system. These lectures were well attended and Morris L. Cooke, a disciple of
Taylor, employed a stenographer to record Taylors talks which Cooke would edit.
Cookes intent was to publish a polished version of Taylors Boxly talks as a book,
originally entitled Industrial Management (Wrege, 2008). After studying the lecture,
Cooke advised Taylor that he should change the tone of his talks to make them
sound less dictatorial, and to reduce the amount of time spent talking about slide
rules (15 minutes) and pig-iron handling and shovelling (1.5 hours) (Taylor, 2008).
By 1908, the ASME began to forget Henry Townes plea about the engineer as an
economist and began to define their mission in a more narrow fashion. For example,
the ASME declined to join the Conservation League of America, the League of Good
Roads, and rejected Morris Cookes proposal that engineers should be concerned
with smoke abatement in industry (Calvert, 1967).
Taylor was President of the ASME in 1906 but an increasing number of the members
did not like the direction he was taking regarding efficiency, management, and the
conservation of resources. After the Eastern Rate Case and the Brandeis-coined
phrase, scientific management, ASME members who were affiliated with the railroads
objected, especially to Harrington Emersons claim of $1,000,000 a day savings if the
railroads adopted scientific management. Taylor wanted the ASME to recognize his
scientific management as based on scientific laws (Layton, 1971, pp. 140-141).
By 1910, Taylor was ready to publish The Principles of Scientific Management though
it has been alleged that Taylor plagiarized 69 pages of Cookes Industrial
Management to use in his work. One hundred years later Principles of Scientific
Management remains a lasting contribution to the development of management
thought. Taylor continues to dominate any list of persons who have made business
management a worthy calling and a fitting topic to study. His reach was international
and to a broad spectrum of audiences and his ideas shaped how we live and think
today.
His model was one where techniques (today we would say technologies) of product,
processes, machines and tools, along with working methods and control systems,

were in a systematic equilibrium with the workers. The human element, as a central
component in Taylors conception, is in its rapport with the factors outlined here.
The first is relative to the model of scientific management that Taylor implemented in
his daily practice, combining factors considered scientific or scientifically plausible,
and factors where science had yet to enter, such as common sense, trade practices,
and folk psychology.
Taylor gradually developed his theory of scientific management by aggregating a
disperse and fractal understanding while he began to outline, which is typical of fast
and fluid historical periods such as the period of industrialization. Taylors main
objective was to pursue a scientific model or rather, to search for scientific truth, by
outlining certainties and gradually improving on his first approximations. These
approximations, sometimes called sophistries (Nelson, 1975; Kanigel, 1997), cunning
and often careful communication, were the consequence of the impossibility to
perform his studies in a laboratory context. Taylor needed to work in corpore vivo, in
the concrete reality of the factories: approximations to gradually overcome in favor of
more scientific reconfigurations. This kind of hybrid, incomplete or intuited knowledge
became the theoretical path for many disciplines in the following decades, such as
the

psychology

of

work

and

organizations,

sociology,

management,

and

organizational behavior studies, for which Taylor was the appropriate model, frame,
and support (Kaneklin, 2004).
Confronting a time of knowledge specialization, and the continuous emergence of
new and useful disciplines and subdisciplines, Taylor developed his system in order
to reconfigure a global theory of understanding focused on production factors.
Although it may be related to the emergence of other technical disciplines of the 19th
century, scientific management is still a recent concept when compared to medicine,
mechanics, physiology, and engineering. Nonetheless, it is a complex concept,
characterized by multidisciplinary aspects and sustained by insights and common
sense psychology, (as well as by more scientific theory fragments) that all merge
together into a sort of bricolage. In other words, a fluid intelligence with the capacity
to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independently from acquired
knowledge. This was typical of the heroic phase of scientific management from the
end of the 19th century until the First World War (Accornero, 1980; Zuffo, 2004).
Adam Smith (1776) foresaw the importance of the division of labor and the causes
generating it but he could not see beyond. He could not have known the implications

that would follow in terms of productive and cultural assets and daily work. Within the
interpretations of industrial work, Taylors commitment represented a cultural turning
point. Taylor outlined a model of management where various disciplines intersected
and progressively created a new synthesis.
The first effective theoretical criticism to Taylors model can be found in Simons
works (1947, 1957) and subsequently in Thompson and Bates (1957)(Cyert & March,
1956; March & Simon, 1958). Basically, Simon called into question the Taylorist
model through the theory of intentional and bounded rationality. In decision-making,
Simon believed that managers faced uncertainty about the future and costs in
acquiring information in the present. These factors limited the extent to which
managers could make a fully rational decision, thus they possessed only bounded
rationality and must make decisions by satisfying. Taylors principle of maximizing
efficiency is replaced by the principle of subjective expected utility (Simon, 1957).
According to Simon (1957), this was the only rational choice that took into account
the cognitive limitations of both knowledge and cognitive capacity, exceeding the
psychotechnical dichotomies.
Taylor in the 21st Century
Higher levels of access to technology and information as well as increased
competition present another difficulty to theory of Scientific Management being
applied to organizations in the 21st Century. Modern organizations process huge
amounts of input, and employees no longer work in isolated units cut off from the
organization at large, but are quite literally connected to it. Satellite link-ups and the
Internet provide organizations with thousands of bytes of information everyday,
enabling companies to work on a global scale and within never shortening time
frames. Delivery times, information gathering, data processing and manufacturing
techniques are constantly becoming more technologically advanced and efficient.
Alongside this rapid technological growth organizations are finding it increasingly
important to react quickly to developments that may affect their welfare. Managers
recognize they are unable to control all aspects of employees functions, as the sheer
layers of information factored into everyday decisions are so high that it is imperative
employees use their own initiative. High competition between organizations also
means that companies must react fast to maintain market positions. All of these
forces modern companies to maintain high levels of flexibility.

In the era during whichScientific Management was developed each worker had a
specific task that he or she had to perform with little or no real explanation of why, or
what part it plays in the organization as a whole. In this day and age it is virtually
impossible to find an employee in the developed world who is not aware of what his
or her organization stands for, what their business strategy is, how they are faring,
and what their job means to the company as a whole. Organizations actively
encourage employees to know about their company and to work across departments,
insuring that communication at all levels is mixed and (what is becoming even more
popular today) informal. This phenomenon means that, for example, in companies
such as EXXON scientists, marketers and manufacturers are all constantly aware of
one anothers activities (Peters & Waterman 1982, p. 218).
Another weakness in Scientific Management theory is that it can lead to workers
becoming too highly specialized therefore hindering their adaptability to new
situations, in the 21st Century employers not only want workers to be efficient they
must also exhibit flexibility.
However, it can be reasoned that scientific management is still a relevant concept for
understanding contemporary work organizations. Scientific management has proved
it has a place in a post-industrial economy and within work organizations, albeit in a
hybrid form with the human relations model. This is because scientific management
allows a company to control its workforce through a series of measures that
guarantees them the desired levels of productivity and efficiency. In spite of this
guarantee, the model, as Taylor prescribed it, also manages to alienate the workforce
and cause dissatisfaction due to the authoritarian structure of the role of
management. The human relations model adds a new dimension to scientific
management as it allows management to work on the same principles as Taylor
approved, such as time and motion studies, while also serving to fulfill employees
social needs at the same time.
In conclusion, it can be seen that Scientific Management is still very much a part of
any organization in the 21st Century. Its strengths in creating a divide between
management functions and work functions have been employed widely at all levels
and in all industries. In addition its strengths in making organizations efficient through
replacement of rules of thumb with scientific fact has both insured its widespread
application and ironically bred the conditions that make it less applicable to modern

organizations. Now that all modern organizations work on a factual basis and all of
them have managerial and employee structures competition is controlled by other
factors outside the realms of Scientific Management. Modern organizations rank
humanistic factors such as employee initiative, loyalty and adaptability alongside
efficiency. For this reason, Taylors claim that workers are solely concerned with
monetary reward and that every facet of work needs to be controlled from above
seems outmoded, untrue, and impractical.

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