Taylorism Transformed

Scientific Management Theory Since 1945

Stephen P. Waring

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780807844694, 9780807819722
• eBook ISBN: 9781469619644
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This intellectual history interprets recent American business management ideas as political theory, describing their underlying assumptions about power and value. According to Stephen Waring, most business management theory descends from either Frederick Taylor's 'bureaucratic' theory of scientific management or Elton Mayo's 'corporatist' idea of human relations. Waring discusses the subsequent evolution of several management theories and techniques, including organization theory, computer simulation, management by objectives, sensitivity training, job enrichment, and innovations usually attributed to the Japanese, such as quality control circles.

Chapter 1: Taylorism and Beyond

Bureaucracy and Its Discontents

At the beginning of the twentieth century, members of America’s progressive business community were pursuing a parallel strategy. Inside firms, they began rationalizing their organizations by adopting bureaucratic governance. On the outside, they began developing and disseminating scientific knowledge about management by establishing professional societies, journals, and schools. As time passed, they guided their strategies using Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management. Although managers repudiated parts of Taylor’s prescriptions, his fundamental premises met their philosophical and technical needs and by mid-century had come to dominate managerial theory and practice. Even in the second half of the century, moreover, many in the management community have continued to believe that successful management and Taylor’s scientific management were one and the same. One recent management writer has gone so far as to claim that Taylor’s ideas were as influential as those of Marx and Freud but were more “objectively valid.”¹

Such paeans indicate continued faith in Taylorism as well as fear of heretics. Indeed, from the beginning, heretics have understood the hegemony of Taylorism and criticized its premises. They understood that reforming business government depended on transcending Taylorism, either by refining it or by repudiating it altogether.

Reformers developed innovations in a social context of bureaucratic firms and professional managers. So understanding recent ideas requires understanding the history of bureaucratization and professionalization that provided the setting in which Taylorism became dominant. This chapter briefly describes that history, focusing especially on the dysfunctions of Taylorism and on the early expressions of its corporatist variants.

As business and labor historians have shown, bureaucratic firms run by professional managers were established in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.² This new managerial capitalism emerged from a search for ways to coordinate operations and control workers. It was the outcome of technological evolution, adjustment to market forces, value choices, and political struggle.

In the years after the Civil War, entrepreneurs faced problems that proved difficult to solve using traditional techniques. They were pressured particularly by falling prices, periodic market gluts, and a transportation revolution that increased the size and competitiveness of their markets. In some industries, moreover, changes in machinery led to output imbalances and a reorganization of work. Yet adjustments proved difficult because workers and organizations were nearly beyond executive control. Labor was expensive because of high turnover and dependence on well-paid skilled workers. Control from the top was limited because operations were typically directed by skilled workers who followed craft customs and inside contracting systems and by foremen who used the despotic “drive” mode of supervision. Such ways of organizing work, to be sure, often benefited shop floor elites. But from the perspective of owners and top managers, the methods led to ineffective planning, inadequate coordination, incomplete information about costs, irregular scheduling, and intermittent returns; these problems were compounded for leaders of newly consolidated firms with large and scattered operations. So business professionals gradually decided to wrest control by establishing and legitimizing a new constitutional system.

They began founding bureaucratic government as early as the late nineteenth century. The traditional drive system, to be sure, lasted well into the twentieth century even in large firms because shop floor managers worked to preserve their personal authority by resisting systematic methods. But top managers continued to introduce bureaucratic reforms. Reluctant reformers were prodded by federal policies designed to stabilize competition and stimulate production and especially by union efforts to escape arbitrary foremen and irregular employment. Such efforts particularly accelerated bureaucratization during the First World War and the depression. As a result, bureaucracy gradually advanced with the application of written rules to guide supervisors, the use of central personnel departments to erode foremen’s power, the introduction of machines that undermined craft autonomy and its organization of work, and the construction of job ladders and compartmentalized buildings.³ This process specialized tasks and separated planning from doing.

Building bureaucracy transferred the reins of power from subordinates to superiors. Mechanizing and specializing jobs restricted the discretion of those on the bottom of the organization and expanded the power of those on top. Both changes also reduced the costs of wages and training, since using semiskilled workers minimized the costs of turnover even without lowering its rate. In addition, lowering and homogenizing skill levels improved the bargaining power of management. It engendered a labor surplus that made workers dependent on employers and imposed the discipline of the reserve army of the unemployed. Homogenization in skill was accompanied by stratification in status and income, a system that rewarded workers for their seniority and subservience, not to mention their sex, race, and ethnicity. Specializing tasks, moreover, made it easier to measure individual performance against organizational standards and to motivate workers through productivity-based wages. And finally, homogenized and standardized jobs helped to simplify the functions of management to the point that some managers came to believe they were scientists applying general principles to specific cases.⁴

These changes were normally not part of any comprehensive plan. But the clearest ideology for building bureaucracy came from the mechanical engineer and consultant Frederick W. Taylor (1856–1915). Some of his techniques, including time-and-motion study and skill transfer from workers to managers, were not widely practiced before the late 1920s, partly because of concern with the added costs of administrative overhead⁵ and partly because business leaders and foremen feared that power would shift to college-educated engineers.⁶ But many people in business seemed to accept the efficacy of bureaucracy even as they rejected Taylor’s techniques for establishing it.⁷ Taylor himself argued that “the mechanism” of his system should “not be mistaken for its essence, or underlying philosophy.” And his philosophy of “scientific management” quickly proved very attractive to business people in and to technocratic intellectuals outside business.⁸

In his speeches and writings, Taylor proposed that managers should become scientific, study the organization of work, and invent apolitical methods for overcoming industrial waste and conflict. He thought they especially needed to overcome disputes between foremen and workers about work organization and compensation. The disputes, he claimed, could be escaped only if business and labor underwent “a complete revolution in mental attitude” and realized their shared interest in maximizing income through maximizing output. Accepting a common productive goal would eliminate political controversy and make governing the corporation purely a technical matter of discovering the “one best way.” Then scientific managers could conduct experiments to find the one best way of working and allow rule by science to replace government by soldiering work gangs and whip-cracking foremen. The maximum capacity of a worker would become known and could be used to assign a “fair day’s work” in exchange for a fair day’s wage. And under the “intimate, friendly cooperation” of scientific management, labor and business would benefit, and the politics of the firm would be based on “harmony, not discord.”⁹

Taylor’s enlightened despotism, as Samuel Haber, Daniel Bell, Judith Merkle, and others have described it, was an early bureaucratic variety of what became known as “end-of-ideology” political theory.¹⁰ It assumed the naturalness of capitalism, accepted its goals, defined the social good in monetary terms of productive growth and efficiency, presumed that corporate government could be free from disputes over values, argued that an apolitical elite should make decisions based on scientific calculations of economic rationality, and presumed that employees were subjects obliged to obey and perform specific roles. And partly because Taylorism effectively expressed and legitimized the developing attraction to centralization and specialization, America’s management community quickly embraced it. They also accepted it because it helped create a professional agenda for managers in modern corporations and educators in newly formed business schools, urging them to make scientific studies to improve the management of bureaucracy.

Taylorism thus became the political philosophy of bureaucratic government. Peter F. Drucker, the management guru who knew political theory, got it right when he described Taylor’s scientific management as an “all but systematic philosophy of worker and work.” Its influence, he said, could well be described as “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”¹¹

The popularity of Taylor’s philosophy and of bureaucracy itself, however, did not mean that the management community had solved its problems. Bureaucracy helped create new problems that were particularly evident in workers’ reactions at the turn of the century. Workers objected to the way Taylorism and bureaucracy accelerated the pace of work, restricted autonomy, destroyed craft skills and hierarchies, lowered product quality and standards of workmanship, reduced workers from people to machines, undermined status and identity in the community, and caused wages to lag behind productivity and profits. Consequently they denied that Taylorism and professional managers were scientific and value-neutral. Workers’ disgust for the system provoked individual and collective acts of defense and defiance.

Although bureaucracy debilitated some of their traditional strategies, workers found weaknesses in the system, which they could exploit. Individually, workers took advantage of the way the diminution of skills made jobs accessible, which resulted in very high rates of turnover. Collectively, they restricted output, demanded higher wages, joined the Wobblies, went on strike over control issues, and formed unions. Workers in federal arsenals successfully secured congressional protection from Taylorism.¹² Ironically, workers’ collective efforts to check managerial bureaucracy often produced more bureaucracy, particularly in the form of union contracts and personnel departments.¹³

In response, some managers tried to tighten discipline. They assumed that achieving efficiency and control required more even homogenization. So they mechanized and simplified more jobs, waged open-shop and union-busting campaigns, or introduced even closer supervision; Henry Ford even extended supervision into leisure time. But greater exercise of power and intensified homogenization, they found, often stimulated more flight or fight among workers.¹⁴

Some managers and progressive reformers began to see the irrationality of bribing and bullying workers and took a few tentative steps beyond centralization and specialization. During the First World War, for instance, some of Taylor’s disciples acknowledged that scientific management was arousing the class conflict it had been designed to avoid. H. L. Gantt and several engineering professors blamed the problem on old-fashioned businessmen who had incorrectly used it to exploit workers rather than to expand production. To correct this, these “engineering intellectuals” concocted a volatile blend of English guild socialism and scientific management; their “scientific collectivism” called for shop councils of workers and production experts to plan production. This call was not heeded by workers, who figured the councils would only replace rule-of-thumb managers with college-educated ones. Moreover, Donald Stabile has explained that these pseudosyndicalists really did not transcend scientific management because they continued to see workers as another factor to be engineered. They sought ways to make “every worker his own Taylorite.”¹⁵

Heretical Taylorites did not give up, however, and they tried other methods of ending class conflict. Some scientific managers tried working out agreements with unions. In these cases the authority of managers was checked by negotiated work rules and grievance procedures. But such cases were rare, and scientific managers usually cooperated with unions only when they were forced to, particularly during the labor shortages of the First World War and after the organizing drives of the 1930s.¹⁶

Still other methods for reconciling workers to bureaucracy came from the personnel management movement. The movement involved some of Taylor’s heirs, including Henry S. Dennison, Ordway Tead, Robert B. Wolf, and Robert G. Valentine. They supported personnel schemes that could help eliminate inefficiency and disharmony.

Personnel management took various forms depending on the background of its supporters. Some personnel managers had been social workers; they wanted to make the firm into a welfare state. Their corporate welfare programs led to health, safety, and sanitation improvements, housing assistance, pension plans, insurance packages, recreation facilities, and profit-sharing programs. Other personnel managers had been teachers; they wanted the firm to become a school, and their vocational education schemes sought to upgrade skills, inculcate a professional attitude toward manual work, and match workers with suitable jobs. Still others saw themselves as progressives who were trying to bring “industrial democracy” to the firm. Their company unions sought to make workers more loyal by giving them some voice on some matters. But none of these reforms went significantly beyond Taylorist government. By eliciting consent without reorganizing bureaucracy, personnel management hid the iron cage in chintz curtains.¹⁷

While the demand for more rational government came from conflict inside firms, the supply of managerial techniques often came from outside. By the 1920s, many academics had become management mandarins and were increasingly developing scholastic theories and governmental innovations for dealing with dysfunctions in bureaucracy. Psychologists, for instance, attempted to design intelligence and personality tests similar to those used by the army during World War I and thus to help managers select employees for specific jobs. And more important in the long run, they and other social scientists began conducting studies of “human relations” at work. They investigated the attitudes and behavior of workers and the rationality of managerial techniques, intending to discover information that could be used to help managers.¹⁸

The most famous of the human relations experiments in a factory setting was conducted by National Research Council investigators, Western Electric managers, and Harvard University researchers at the Hawthorne works near Chicago from 1924 through the early 1930s. Initially, they undertook studies of fatigue and the effects of lighting on productivity. But their investigations soon turned to examining informal relationships to learn how managers could manipulate workers and maximize output.¹⁹ From the Hawthorne experiments, mandarins helped codify a new set of managerial postulates and prescriptions. These were most clearly expressed by Australian-born psychologist George Elton Mayo (1880–1949).²⁰

Much influenced by European theories of “psycho-pathology” and especially by Emile Durkheim’s social psychology, Mayo believed that industrialization and destruction of craft systems had caused “social disintegration” and normless, maladjusted behavior. Workers suffered from “an inadequate social interrelation with other people,” stemming especially from their misunderstanding and distrust of managers. Managers contributed to this maladjustment by being more concerned with economic efficiency than social solidarity and drove workers to seek asylum in informal work groups. Mayo denied, however, that worker groups were rational means for members to maximize wages, employment, and autonomy. On the contrary, they irrationally restricted output, thus inhibiting economic growth and hampering members’ ability to exploit incentive wages. And consequently for Mayo, the “problem of administration,” indeed the problem of industrial civilization itself, was workers’ “anomie” rather than the centralization and specialization inherent in bureaucracy.

While Mayo’s diagnosis tended to blame the victims, his solution was an intimate style of management. Nurturant supervision could adjust workers to bureaucratic life and get informal groups of workers to accept the formal goals of managers. It would convince workers that managers were their friends and that bureaucracies were communities, thus giving them “a sense of participation,” “a feeling of release from constraint,” and a desire to cooperate. But specialized jobs and centralized power would remain. Workers would participate only in social decisions, in choosing such things as the colors of restroom walls, and not in governmental decisions about personnel or organization. In addition, they would explore their personal problems by participating in nondirective counseling, which, the Hawthorne researchers found, worked to diffuse disconte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction Politics in Management History
• 1 Taylorism and Beyond Bureaucracy and Its Discontents
• 2 Management by the Numbers Operations Research and Management Science
• 3 Economics and Cybernetics The Bureaucratic Rationality of Herbert A. Simon
• 4 Virtue as Managerial Vision Peter F. Drucker and Management by Objectives
• 5 The Rationality of Feelings Sensitivity Training and the Democratic Manager
• 6 Capitalism without Class? Job Enrichment and the Baby Boomers
• 7 The American Samurai Japanizing American Corporatism
• Conclusion The Management Theory of Value
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index