Taylor, Frederick W. (1856–1915)

In the field of organization studies, the American engineer Frederick W Taylor is recognized as a pioneer in scientific management, a set of techniques for analyzing how any given job is performed, devising a more efficient way of performing it, and then training workers in the use of the new, improved method. Taylor's own academic training as an industrial engineer and his practical experience in factories as a machinist, foreman, and plant manager enabled him to develop a methodology that, over the course of a century, has not only directly influenced the way in which most manufacturing operations are performed but also helped to shape the very background of modern thinking about how organized human activities are to be managed and, consequently, about the way in which most people view time.

The cornerstone of Taylor's career was the com-monsense recognition that in the performance of any task, certain methods will prove more efficient than others. The worker who, each time after assembling a machine component, must pause to fetch another set of parts from a bin on the other side of the factory will of course produce fewer units per day than will a worker who can simply extend a hand and pick the next set of parts from a moving conveyor belt. The worker who must stop to change the bit in his drill press twice to machine a single workpiece correctly will be less productive than if the component itself were redesigned to eliminate the need to change drill bits.

In serving industrial clients, Taylor and his associates, armed with notebooks and stopwatches, would carefully observe each routine step in a manufacturing process, analyze the task down to its smallest details, and discuss the job with the workers who actually performed it. Next, they would reengineer the task so as to eliminate all wasted time and motion and, finally, assist managers in retraining workers to use the new, more efficient method. In later years, Taylor would use the new technology of motion picture cameras to record on film the way industrial jobs were being performed, the better to analyze each movement and identify instances of wasted time and motion.

[Page 1220]Such exercise of managerial control over the smallest aspects of workers' performance has been strongly criticized for removing the chief source of satisfaction from workers' lives, placing workplace knowledge in the hands of management and thereby alienating laborers from their own work. The effect, critics say, has been to devalue the acquisition and practice of traditional craft skills and to replace these with mind-numbing and inhumanly repetitive tasks. Also noted by critics is that from the capitalist's standpoint, an unskilled labor pool has the advantage of being quickly trained, cheaper to employ, and, if necessary, easier to replace. Thus, Taylor's methods would seem ideally suited to the purposes of modern capitalism, in which the desire to maximize profit requires the exercise of strict economic rationalism. As the German economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), a contemporary of Taylor, noted, the Protestant work ethic historically has understood the striving for profit as divinely ordained and the accumulation of wealth as an end in itself. To waste time is thus to be sinful, whereas the rationalizing of time, together with its increasingly precise quantification, serves as the instrument for increased productivity and the ever greater accumulation of capital.

...