Scientific Management

Scientific Management, term coined in 1910 to describe the system of industrial management created and promoted by Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915) and his followers. Though Taylor, a native of Philadelphia, had used the term informally to describe his contributions to factory management, his associates, particularly Morris L. Cooke, deliberately chose the label “scientific management” to dramatize the novelty and significance of their work. This strategy worked brilliantly as the term came to be applied to managerial practices based on clear‐cut responsibilities, rational organization, close attention to detail, and the centralized direction of work.

Scientific management arose from what historians have termed “systematic management,” a wide‐ranging late nineteenth‐century effort to improve factory performance through cost accounting, inventory and production controls, incentive wage plans, and other modern management techniques. Working at Midvale Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and other plants in the 1880s and 1890s, Taylor refined these managerial practices, added innovations such as stopwatch time study, and combined the disparate features into a single comprehensive management package. After his retirement in 1901, he and a group of associates effectively promoted his managerial system to manufacturers. Only after the publication of Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), mostly written by Cooke, however, did their work become well known outside engineering circles, contributing to a Progressive Era “efficiency” vogue. The impact of scientific management on industry is harder to assess. Taylor's full system was too rigorous for most manufacturers; they adopted bits and pieces according to their needs. By the 1930s most American and European and many Asian factories had introduced isolated features of scientific management, but apparently no plant had introduced and maintained every feature of Taylor's original, carefully prescribed system. The intellectual currents Taylor set in motion, however, proved more profound. By the 1920s, “Taylorism” had disciples in virtually every industrialized nation, and they succeeded in publicizing the value of the precise, systematic management of economic resources, from machinery to national economies.

In the 1930s, American social scientists rediscovered Taylor's writings and began to stigmatize “scientific management” or “Taylorism” as a shorthand designation for an oppressive industrial system. In particular, Taylor and scientific management became straw men for theorists and consultants who advocated more humanistic approaches to industrial organization. Both the criticism and the application of Taylor's principles continued as the twentieth century ended. Scientific management has thus proven to be a highly malleable and ambiguous term defined by diverse, conflicting constituencies.
See also Automation and Computerization; Capitalism; Factory System; Industrial Relations; Industrialization; Labor Movements; Mass Production; Social Science; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Daniel Nelson, ed., A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor, 1992.
Robert Kanigel , The One Best Way, 1997.

Daniel Nelson