Control, Managerial

Notions of managerial control have a long if occasionally dubious pedigree in educational administration, a practical discipline that has borrowed much, sometimes indiscriminately, from cognate fields and practices concerned with organizational management. Two of the most formative borrowings, each of which underscores the significance of managerial control, consist in appropriations of Frederick Winslow Taylor's (1856–1915) scientific management and Max Weber's (1864–1920) depiction of bureaucratic organizations. An American mechanical engineer credited with founding systems engineering, Taylor sought to redesign workplace practices in order to maximize industrial efficiency. Weber, a German sociologist and a discerning student of cultural development, presented bureaucracy as the rational organizational form optimally suited for complex social settings.

The tightly interwoven principles and directives for ensuring workplace productivity that constituted Taylor's (1911/1967) scientific management found ready application in the large, industrial factories that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the promise of employment swelled populations in North America's industrializing centers, institutions that would serve and regulate the new urban populations proliferated. With rapid growth, schools and factories faced the common problem of how to establish orderliness and productivity given their increasingly diverse, abundant, and at times truculent populations. It is not surprising, then, that school leaders in their quest for regularity and control would look to the factory for both models and ideologies of organization. What they would find in the early years of the twentieth century was the persuasive and practical set of managerial precepts that Taylor assembled under the heading of “scientific management.”

Scientific management was empirically secured by the time-and-motion studies, which are captured in the caricature of the efficiency expert who times task performance with a stopwatch in order to maximize output by minimizing superfluous motions and behaviors. Such systematic empirical observations allowed Taylor to distill what he would call the “one best method” for executing specific tasks. By ensuring compliance with empirically determined best methods through meticulous managerial control and by implementing a system of individual rewards for productivity, Taylor created a seemingly objective method for regulating work and for ensuring the prosperity of owners, managers, and laborers alike. In the process, an omnipresent system of managerial control would be endowed with the integrity of science and the authority of fact.

Educational administrators hard-pressed to deal with the organizational and financial tensions engendered by a dramatic increase in the number, complexity, and cost of public schools would find the promise of scientific management irresistible. Needing to rationalize the organization, operations, and expenditures of the public schools and to strengthen both the perception and the reality of their managerial control over them, school administrators began to adopt and [Page 212]to adapt Taylor's language and methods. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Frank Spaulding, a New Jersey school superintendent, Franklin Bobbitt, who taught educational administration at the University of Chicago, and Ellwood Cubberley, a Stanford professor, would unabashedly draw upon Taylor's scientific management in seeking the efficiencies and the controls that had made businesses predictable, profitable, and orderly. The emulation of business models resulted not only in the adoption of businesslike practices and industrial patterns of organization in schools and school systems, it also resulted in administrators taking on the persona, the interests, and the behaviors of the industrial manager.

...