Scientific Management

Scientific management
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Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), lead developer of scientific management
Scientific management, also called Taylorism,[1] was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. Its main objective was 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.
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 management also caused interpersonal

References: edit] Jump up ^ Mitcham, Carl and Adam, Briggle Management in Mitcham (2005) p.1153, quote: Beissinger, Mark R. (1988), Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power, London, UK: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, ISBN 978-1-85043-108-4. Braverman, Harry (1998) [1974], Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York, NY, USA: Republication by Monthly Review Press, ISBN 0-85345-940-1. Dawson, Michael (2005), The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life (paper ed.), Urbana, IL, USA: University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-07264-2. Drury, Horace Bookwalter (1915), Scientific management: a history and criticism, New York, NY, USA: Columbia University. Kanigel, Robert (1997), The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, New York, NY, USA: Penguin-Viking, ISBN 978-0-670-86402-7. A detailed biography of Taylor and a historian 's look at his ideas. Mitcham, Carl (2005), "Management", Encyclopedia of science, technology, and ethics 3, Macmillan Reference USA, ISBN 978-0-02-865834-6. Noble, David F. (1984), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, New York, New York, USA: Knopf, ISBN 978-0-394-51262-4, LCCN 83048867. Rosen, Ellen (1993), Improving Public Sector Productivity: Concepts and Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications, ISBN 978-0-8039-4573-9 Sorensen, Charles E.; with Williamson, Samuel T Stalin, J.V. (1976), Problems of Leninism: Lectures Delivered at the Sverdlov University, Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press. Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1911), The Principles of Scientific Management, New York, NY, USA and London, UK: Harper & Brothers, LCCN 11010339, OCLC 233134. Also available from Project Gutenberg.