Scientific Management
Scientific management (also called
Taylorism or the Taylor system)
is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows,
improving labour productivity. The core ideas of the theory were
developed by
Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s, and were first
published in his monographs, Shop Management (1905) and The
Principles of Scientific Management
(1911).
Frederick Taylor
believed that decisions based upon tradition and rules of thumb should
be replaced by precise procedures developed after careful study of an
individual at work. Its application is contingent on a high level of
managerial control over employee work practices.
Taylorism is a variation on the theme of
efficiency; it is a late-19th-and-early-20th-century instance of the
larger recurring theme in human life of increasing efficiency,
decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters,
rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas of what matters.
Thus it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes, for
example, the folk wisdom of thrift, time and motion study, Fordism, and
lean manufacturing. It overlapped considerably with the Efficiency
Movement, which was the broader cultural echo of scientific management's
impact on business managers specifically.
In management literature today, the
greatest use of the concept of Scientific Management (or Taylorism) is
as a contrast to a new, improved way of doing business. In political and
sociological terms, Taylorism can be seen as the division of labour
pushed to its logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of the
worker and dehumanisation of the workplace.
Objectives of
Scientific Management
The four objectives of
management under scientific management were as follows:
-
The development of
a science for each element of a man's work to replace the old
rule-of-thumb methods.
-
The scientific
selection, training and development of workers instead of allowing
them to choose their own tasks and train themselves as best they
could.
-
The development of
a spirit of hearty cooperation between workers and management to
ensure that work would be carried out in accordance with
scientifically devised procedures.
-
The division of
work between workers and the management in almost equal shares, each
group taking over the work for which it is best fitted instead of
the former condition in which responsibility largely rested with the
workers. Self-evident in this philosophy are organizations arranged
in a hierarchy, systems of abstract rules and impersonal
relationships between staff.
Drawbacks of Scientific Management
While scientific management principles
improved productivity and had a substantial impact on industry, they
also increased the monotony of work. The core job dimensions of skill
variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback all
were missing from the picture of scientific management.
While in many cases the new ways of
working were accepted by the workers, in some cases they were not. The
use of stopwatches often was a protested issue and led to a strike at
one factory where "Taylorism" was being tested. Complaints that
Taylorism was dehumanizing led to an investigation by the United States
Congress. Despite its controversy, scientific management changed the way
that work was done, and forms of it continue to be used today.
Criticism on Scientific
Management
Applications of scientific
management sometimes fail to account for two inherent difficulties:
-
It ignores individual
differences: the most efficient way of working for one person may be
inefficient for another;
-
It ignores the fact
that the economic interests of workers and management are rarely
identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining
required by Taylor's methods would frequently be resented and
sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.
Both difficulties were
recognised by Taylor,
but are generally not fully addressed by managers who only see the
potential improvements to efficiency. Taylor believed that scientific
management cannot work unless the worker benefits. In his view
management should arrange the work in such a way that one is able to
produce more and get paid more, by teaching and implementing more
efficient procedures for producing a product.
Although Taylor did not
compare workers with machines, some of his critics use this metaphor to
explain how his approach makes work more efficient by removing
unnecessary or wasted effort. However, some would say that this approach
ignores the complications introduced because workers are necessarily
human: personal needs, interpersonal difficulties and the very real
difficulties introduced by making jobs so efficient that workers have no
time to relax. As a result, workers worked harder, but became
dissatisfied with the work environment. Some have argued that this
discounting of worker personalities led to the rise of labour unions.
It can also be said that
the rise in labour unions is leading to a push on the part of industry
to accelerate the process of automation, a process that is undergoing a
renaissance with the invention of a host of new technologies starting
with the computer and the Internet. This shift in production to machines
was clearly one of the goals of Taylorism (or Scientific Management),
and represents a victory for his theories.
However, tactfully
choosing to ignore the still controversial process of automating human
work is also politically expedient, so many still say that practical
problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by the human
relations school of management in 1930. Others (Braverman 1974) insisted
that human relations did not replace Taylorism but that both approaches
are rather complementary: Taylorism (or Scientific Management)
determining the actual organisation of the work process and human
relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures.
However,
Taylor's theories
were clearly at the roots of a global revival in theories of scientific
management in the last two decades of the 20th century, under the
moniker of 'corporate reengineering'. As such, Taylor's ideas can be
seen as the root of a very influential series of developments in the
workplace, with the goal being the eventual elimination of industry's
need for unskilled, and later perhaps, even most skilled labour in any
form, directly following Taylor's recipe for deconstructing a process.
This has come to be known as commodification, and no skilled profession,
even medicine, has proven to be immune from the efforts of Taylor's
followers, the 'reengineers', who are often called derogatory names such
as 'bean counters'.
References
http://accel-team.com/scientific/scientific_02.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylorism
http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/ |
