Scientific Management
With labor relations such a mess and new management
issues arising as factories grew larger, management as well as workers
sought new
answers. Two important ideas that grew out of this were
scientific management
and the assembly line
Scientific management was invented by
Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1856-1915)
- Taylor came from an rich Philadelphia family
and
was preparing for college but had problems with both his eyesight and
family
finances. He was interested in machines so he took a
apprenticeship
in industry, expecting to work his way to the top
- he was shocked by how inefficient his fellow
workers
were
- in 1878 he went to work for Midvale Steel,
first
as a laborer, then as a foreman, then as chief engineer. He
started
trying to find ways of getting the workers to work more efficiently
- by 1881 he was doing time and motion studies
- he studied the design of shovels and
introduced
a better design at Bethlehem Steel Works, reducing the number of people
shoveling from 500 to 140
source
- in 1883 he earned a night school engineering
degree
from Stevens Institute of Technology and fairly soon he had a business
as
a consulting engineer helping businesses with worker efficiency
- in 1909 he published a book on
Principles of Scientific Management
Taylor's approach was based on the principle of
telling the worker how to do the job
, but it had several interconnected parts:
- improved metal-cutting machines using
high-speed
tool steel that would cut faster without heat damaging the tool
- better layout of the shop floor
- expected factory managers to get more
involved
in how the work was done instead of leaving that to the workers and the
foreman (paid managers were replacing entrepreneurs and not doing as
good a job)
- timed workers with stopwatches, breaking
down the
job into parts and looking at how the parts might be done more
efficiently
- Frank Gilbreth, who joined Taylor in 1907,
extended
this to motion
study
, watching how the worker moved and showing him or her how to eliminate
waste
motion.
Lillian Gilbreth pioneered adaptions to allow the handicapped to
work.
- sought to figure out how to hire the right
worker
for the job and to give the worker appropriate training
- introduced incentive pay plans--workers were
assumed
to be motivated only by money. The
differential piece rate gave you a higher rate per piece if you
worked faster.
- more efficient recordkeeping
Taylor studying a worker
Taylor thought workers would like this
- their work was made more efficient and what
was
expected of them was determined objectively on the basis of scientific
study
rather than by a boss acting as a dictator
- what do you think workers thought?
- Congress investigated complaints by
government
workers and the use of stopwatches was banned by law in government shops
- workers had gone on
strike at the Watertown Arsenal when specialists came in with
stopwatches
- Taylor blamed this on union agitators but
it was
in fact directed at Taylorism--skilled workers did not want to loose
control
of their work
- workers weren't convinced by Taylor's
belief that
rationalizing management so that it was fair according to scientific
principles
would eliminate the conflict between workers and management.
- Scientific management turned in the
direction of
industrial psychology (
Lillian Gilbreth was a key figure in this change) to try to get
more cooperation from workers
- Taylor has continued to be
controversial
Winding
Armatures at Westinghouse
this page written and copyright ©
Pamela E. Mack
History
323
last updated 2/18/2005