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scientific management

A Dictionary of Sociology

scientific management A leading example of technicism and a theory of work behaviour based on the highly influential and controversial writings of Frederick William Taylor (1856–1915). Taylorism sought to eradicate the industrial inefficiency and loss of leadership supposedly due to the growth in scale of enterprises and the managerial revolution. It sought a new legitimacy and discipline for management by basing it on the authority of science—time-and-motion studies. The result would be a supposed mental revolution in which worker-management conflict would be replaced by: scientific redesign of supervision and work organization, including the celebrated notions of functional foremanship, and a thinking department to research into task performance; detailed study and fragmentation of individual tasks so as to identify the ‘one best way’ to be adopted by all workers; selection and motivation of workers to give systematic matching of tasks and abilities; and incentive payments to determine by scientific (implicitly incontestable) means ‘a fair day's work for a fair day's pay’. In this way, individual economic reward was to be linked directly to task completion, as the only means of compelling workers to labour—the assumption being that, unlike management, workers are of limited intelligence, innately idle, and driven by a need for immediate gratification.

Scientific management was the beginning of systematic work study in industry, and impressed not only industrialists (notably Henry Ford) but also leading figures elsewhere, including Lenin. However, it was resisted strongly at grassroots level by workers, trade unionists, and even managers, because of its very tight control of personal work-life. Taylor viewed workers as if they were, or ought to be, human extensions of industrial machinery. Scientific Management (or ‘Taylorism’) ignores the nature of work as a social process, has a dehumanized view of workers, and treats work motivation in crude instrumental terms—defects later criticized by the ‘Human Relations’ school of industrial organization and organizational sociology. In recent sociological studies of the labour process, a lively controversy has surrounded the question of whether Taylorism was unique, or expressed a general tendency for capitalism to divide mental from manual labour (see MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION).

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© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.

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