Scientific Management

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

What is scientific management?

Scientific management for Frederick W. Taylor is “the art of management has been defined as knowing exactly what you want men to do and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way; furthermore, the principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee”.

For Theodore Roosevelt it is the application of the conservation principle to production. It does not concern itself with the ownership of our natural resources.

For Brandeis scientific management means universal preparedness, the same kind of preparedness that secured to Prussia a victory over France and to Japan a victory over Russia. In scientific management nothing is left o chance; all is carefully planned in advance.

For Cleveland Moffat, the basis of scientific management, as it is of art, is the rigorous cutting away of superfluities, not one wasted motion, and not one wasted a minute.

What I understand is that scientific management is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the complex problems of the control of labor in developing capitalist enterprises.

Scientific management needs true science concepts because of its assumptions which show nothing more than the viewpoint of the capitalist conditions of production. It starts from the capitalist viewpoint and from the point of view of the management of a refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations, not from the human point of view. It does not try to discover the cause of this condition, but accepts it as a natural condition. It investigates the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital, not labor in general. It enters the workplace not as the representative of science, but as the management masquerading in the trappings of science.

A comprehensive and detailed explanation of Taylorism is essential in order to understand scientific management clearly because there is a strong connection between them and wrongly the Taylor plan of management is generally known as scientific management, but there are many plans of management formulated by scientists that do not conform to the laws of management as discovered by Taylor.

Frederick Taylor’s functional leader plan of management founded upon time study is the basis for all scientific management, for types of management where scientific laboratory methods of analysis are substituted for the rule of “thumb methods” that have been handed down by word of mouth.

Taylor's 4 Principles of Scientific Management

After years of various experiments to determine optimal work methods, Taylor proposed the following four principles of scientific management:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

These principles were implemented in many factories, often increasing productivity by a factor of three or more. Henry Ford applied Taylor's principles in his automobile factories, and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and motion studies.

Drawbacks of Scientific Management

Although scientific management principles developed 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.

References:

Book: Labor and monopoly capital

Wikipedia

Mtmb

Jstor