synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially

labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering

of processes and to management. Its development began with Frederick Winslow

Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in

the 1910s; by the 1920s, it was still influential but had begun an era of competition and syncretism

with opposing or complementary ideas. Although scientific management as a distinct

theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important

parts of industrial engineering and management today. These include analysis; synthesis;

logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization

of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to protect the

social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production

into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools,

processes, and documentation.

Larger theme of economic efficiency Scientific management's application was contingent

on a high level of managerial control over employee work practices. This necessitated

a higher ratio of managerial workers to laborers than previous management methods. The great

difficulty in accurately differentiating any such intelligent, detail-oriented management

from mere misguided micromanagement also caused interpersonal friction between workers and

managers. While the terms "scientific management" and

"Taylorism" are often treated as synonymous, an alternative view considers Taylorism as

the first form of scientific management, which was followed by new iterations; thus in today's

management theory, Taylorism is sometimes called the classical perspective. Taylor's

own early names for his approach included "shop management" and "process management".

When Louis Brandeis popularized the term "scientific management" in 1910, Taylor recognized it

as another good name for the concept, and he used it himself in his 1911 monograph.

The field comprised the work of Taylor; his disciples; other engineers and managers; and

other theorists, such as Max Weber. It is compared and contrasted with other efforts,

including those of Henri Fayol and those of Frank Gilbreth, Sr. and Lillian Moller Gilbreth.

Taylorism proper, in its strict sense, became obsolete by the 1930s, and by the 1960s the

term "scientific management" had fallen out of favor for describing current management

theories. However, many aspects of scientific management have never stopped being part of

later management efforts called by other names. There is no simple dividing line demarcating

the time when management as a modern profession diverged from Taylorism proper. It was a gradual

process that began as soon as Taylor published, and each subsequent decade brought further

evolution. Scientific management is a variation on the

theme of economic 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 a larger narrative that includes many ideas,

from the folk wisdom of thrift to a profusion of applied-science successors, including time

and motion study, the Efficiency Movement, Fordism, operations management, operations

research, industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, logistics, business process management,

business process reengineering, lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma. There is a fluid continuum

linking scientific management by that name with the later fields, and there is often

no mutual exclusiveness when discussing the details of any one of these topics.

In management literature today, the greatest use of the term "scientific management" is

with reference to the work of Taylor and his disciples in contrast to newer, improved iterations

of efficiency-seeking methods. In political and sociological terms, Taylorism can be seen

as the division of labor pushed to its logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of

the worker and dehumanisation of the workers and the workplace. Taylorism is often mentioned

along with Fordism, because it was closely associated with mass production methods in

factories, which was its earliest application. Today, task-oriented optimization of work

tasks is nearly ubiquitous in industry. Soldiering

Taylor observed that some workers were more talented than others, and that even smart

ones were often unmotivated. He observed that most workers who are forced to perform repetitive

tasks tend to work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished. This slow rate of work has

been observed in many industries in many countries and has been called by various terms, including

"soldiering",, "dogging it", "goldbricking", "hanging it out", and "ca canae". Managers

may call it by those names or "loafing" or "malingering"; workers may call it "getting

through the day" or "preventing management from abusing us". Taylor used the term "soldiering"

and observed that, when paid the same amount, workers will tend to do the amount of work

that the slowest among them does. This reflects the idea that workers have a

vested interest in their own well-being, and do not benefit from working above the defined

rate of work when it will not increase their remuneration. He therefore proposed that the

work practice that had been developed in most work environments was crafted, intentionally

or unintentionally, to be very inefficient in its execution. He posited that time and

motion studies combined with rational analysis and synthesis could uncover one best method

for performing any particular task, and that prevailing methods were seldom equal to these

best methods. Crucially, Taylor himself prominently acknowledged that if each employee's compensation

was linked to their output, their productivity would go up. Thus his compensation plans usually

included piece rates. He rejected the notion, which was universal in his day and still held

today, that the trades, including manufacturing, were resistant to analysis and could only

be performed by craft production methods. In the course of his empirical studies, Taylor

examined various kinds of manual labor. For example, most bulk materials handling was

manual at the time; material handling equipment as we know it today was mostly not developed

yet. He looked at shoveling in the unloading of railroad cars full of ore; lifting and

carrying in the moving of iron pigs at steel mills; the manual inspection of bearing balls;

and others. He discovered many concepts that were not widely accepted at the time. For

example, by observing workers, he decided that labor should include rest breaks so that

the worker has time to recover from fatigue, either physical or mental. Workers were taught

to take more rests during work, and as a result production "paradoxically" increased.

Unless people manage themselves, somebody has to take care of administration, and thus

there is a division of work between workers and administrators. One of the tasks of administration

is to select the right person for the right job:

the labor should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue.

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular

occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles

in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent

is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony

of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is

unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.

Relationship to mechanization and automation Scientific management evolved in an era when

mechanization and automation existed but had hardly gotten started, historically speaking,

and were still embryonic. Two important corollaries flow from this fact: The ideas and methods

of scientific management were exactly what was needed to be added to the American system

of manufacturing to extend the transformation from craft work to mechanization and automation;

but also, Taylor himself could not have known this, and his goals did not include the extensive

removal of humans from the production process. During his lifetime, the very idea would have

seemed like science fiction, because not only did the technological bridge to such a world

not yet look plausible, but most people had not even considered that it could happen.

Before digital computers existed, such ideas were not just outlandish but also mostly unheard

of. Nevertheless, Taylor was laying the groundwork

for automation and offshoring, because he was analyzing processes into discrete, unambiguous

pieces, which is exactly what computers and unskilled people need to follow algorithms

designed by others and to make valid decisions within their execution. It is often said that

computers are "smart" in terms of mathematic computation ability, but "dumb" because they

must be told exactly what to calculate, when, and how, and they can never understand why.

With historical hindsight it is possible to see that Taylor was essentially inventing

something like the highest-level computer programming for industrial process control

and numerical control in the absence of any machines that could carry it out. But Taylor

could not see it that way at the time; in his world, it was humans that would be the

agents to execute the program. However, one of the common threads between his world and

ours is that the agents of execution need not be "smart" to execute their tasks. In

the case of computers, they are not able to be "smart"; in the case of human workers under

scientific management, they were often able but were not allowed. Once the time-and-motion

men had completed their studies of a particular task, the workers had very little opportunity

for further thinking, experimenting, or suggestion-making. They were expected to "play dumb" most of

the time. In between craft production and full automation

lies a natural middle ground of an engineered system of extensive mechanization and partial

automation mixed with semiskilled and unskilled workers in carefully designed algorithmic

workflows. Building and improving such systems requires knowledge transfer, which may seem

simple on the surface but requires substantial engineering to succeed. Although Taylor's

original inspiration for scientific management was simply to replace inferior work methods

with smarter ones, the same process engineering that he pioneered also tends to build the

skill into the equipment and processes, removing most need for skill in the workers. This engineering

was the essence not only of scientific management but also of most industrial engineering since

then. It is also the essence of offshoring. The common theme in all these cases is that

businesses engineer their way out of their need for large concentrations of skilled workers,

and the high-wage environments that sustain them.

Effects on labor relations in market economies Taylor's view of workers

Taylor's view of workers was complex, having both insightful and obtuse elements. Taylorism

took some steps toward addressing their needs, but Taylor nevertheless had a condescending

view of less intelligent workers, whom he sometimes compared to draft animals. And perhaps

Taylor was so immersed in the vast work immediately in front of him that he failed to strategize

about the next steps. Many other thinkers soon stepped forward to

offer better ideas on the roles that humans would play in mature industrial systems. James

Hartness, a fellow ASME member, published The Human Factor in Works Management in 1912.

Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth offered alternatives to Taylorism. The human

relations school of management evolved in the 1930s. Some scholars, such as Harry Braverman,

insisted that human relations did not replace Taylorism but rather that both approaches

were complementary—Taylorism determining the actual organisation of the work process,

and human relations helping to adapt the workers to the new procedures. Today's efficiency-seeking

methods, such as lean manufacturing, include respect for workers and fulfillment of their

needs as inherent parts of the theory. Clearly a syncretism has occurred since Taylor's day,

although its implementation has been uneven, as lean management in capable hands has produced

good results for both managers and workers, but in incompetent hands has damaged enterprises.

Implementations of scientific management usually failed to account for several inherent challenges:

Individuals are different from each other: the most efficient way of working for one

person may be inefficient for another. The economic interests of workers and management

are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's

methods are frequently resented and sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.

Taylor himself, in fact, recognized these challenges and had some good ideas for meeting

them. Nevertheless, his own implementations of his system were never really very successful.

<citation needed> They plugged along rockily and eventually were overturned, usually after

Taylor had left. And countless managers who later aped or worshipped Taylor did even worse

jobs of implementation. Typically they were less analytically talented managers who had

latched onto scientific management as the latest fad for cutting the unit cost of production.

Like bad managers even today, these were the people who used the big words without any

deep understanding of what they meant. Taylor knew that scientific management could not

work unless the workers benefited from the profit increases that it generated. Taylor

had developed a method for generating the increases, for the dual purposes of owner/manager

profit and worker profit, realizing that the methods relied on both of those results in

order to work correctly. But many owners and managers seized upon the methods thinking

that the profits could be reserved solely or mostly for themselves and the system could

endure indefinitely merely through force of authority.

Workers are necessarily human: they have personal needs and interpersonal friction, and they

face very real difficulties introduced when jobs become so efficient that they have no

time to relax, and so rigid that they have no permission to innovate.

Early decades: making jobs unpleasant Under Taylorism, workers' work effort increased

in intensity. Workers became dissatisfied with the work environment and became angry.

During one of Taylor's own implementations, a strike at the Watertown Arsenal led to an

investigation of Taylor's methods by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, which

reported in 1912. The conclusion was that scientific management did provide some useful

techniques and offered valuable organizational suggestions, but it gave production managers

a dangerously high level of uncontrolled power. After an attitude survey of the workers revealed

a high level of resentment and hostility towards scientific management, the Senate banned Taylor's

methods at the arsenal. Taylorism lowered worker morale and exacerbated

existing conflicts between labor and management. As a consequence, it inadvertently strengthened

labor unions and their bargaining power in labor disputes,) thereby neutralizing most

or all of the benefit of any productivity gains that Taylorism had achieved. Thus its