Question:

Should be Double spaced pages excluding charts, tables and diagrams and saved in the MS word format..
-Should include the cover sheet at the ends of document.
-The cover sheet should be copied into the front of the research paper and completed.
-cover sheet should only be used for the research paper
-Hightlights from the research paper should be provieded in the powerpoint presentation format as if i was going to present in class
– send the powerpoint or the notes for it to me and i will upload it.

-The textbook for this class is called The Evolution of Mangement Thought, Sixth edition , Daniel A. Wren
– Use book or and any other refrences including Troy university website.

Answer:

Fredrick Taylor and his impact on Industrial Revolution

Introduction

Fredrick W. Taylor is widely known for his theories of scientific management and his innovative contributions in industrial engineering. Specifically, his innovations in time and motion studies ended up paying off by improving productivity dramatically. His theories of scientific management heralded the era of modern management. However, on a negative note, Taylor is often roundly criticized for spearheading the destruction of the soul of work, and of dehumanizing factories by turning men into automatons. Meanwhile, Taylor’s real legacy remains a heated debate over which historians and management scholars and theorists may never agree.

During the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, Fredrick Taylor decried the contemporary men’s ‘inefficient, awkward, and ill-directed movements’ as a national loss. For this reason, he started advocating a change from the age-old system of personal management to the system of scientific management. Within the realm of personal management, an industry’s capital was supposed to be personally brilliant. In Taylor’s view, a group of ordinary men who followed the scientific method would easily outperform older industry captains who were ‘personally brilliant’. Within the confines of Taylor’s management system, management activities in factories were carried out using scientific methods as opposed empirical ‘rule of thumb’ that had become prevalent during the late 19^th century. The scientific methods became very popular after the publication of the book: Scientific Management in 1911.

The present study explores the impact that Fredrick Taylor had on Industrial revolution.

Elements of scientific management theory

In Scientific Management, Fredrick Taylor described scientific management as consisting of four main elements: development of true science, scientific selection of true workman, scientific selection of workman, scientific education of workman and a friendly cooperation between management and the workforce.

Moreover, Taylor warned of the different risks that managers make in their attempts to bring about change in what is presently referred to as organizational culture. He insisted that management commitment is of great importance and there is need for gradual implementation of ideas relating to industrial revolution. Taylor described what he termed as the ‘really great problem” of bringing about the change that would result in the complete revolution. For a great revolution to be achieved, people had to change their attitude.

According to Taylor, there was only one method of work that ensured maximum efficiency. This method entailed gradually substituting science for the ‘rule of thumb’ approach throughout an industry’s mechanical parts. In this endeavor, there would first be a need for a careful investigation of each of the numerous modifications of the same implement that had been developed under the rule of thumb. Secondly, once a time and motion study is done on the speed attainable with each of the implements, the best points in several of these implements would be unified into a single standard implementation. This would enable the workman work faster with much more ease than previously. Then, this one implement would then be used in the place of very many different kinds previously in use. It would remain the standard for all workmen to use until a time comes when it is superseded by a new implement that will be shown, through time and motion study, to be still better.

A key barrier in the use of scientific management approach was the low level of education among workers at the level of supervision. In the industrial society in which Taylor lived, a large section of the factory population was made up of recent immigrants who were not even literate in English. Taylor observed that workers who possessed such low education levels lacked the qualifications for planning the way work ought to be done. For Taylor, this problem could best be solved by separating planning from execution. He observed that in every mechanic art, the science underlying each act of each employee is so complicated and amounts to so much that the employee who is most qualified to do the work is not capable of understanding this science fully. In a response to the complicated nature of tasks relating to mechanical arts, Taylor came up with planning departments and then staffed each of them with engineers. He then apportioned them the responsibility of developing scientific methods of carrying out tasks, establishing goals for productivity, establishing systems of rewards needed to meet goals, and training personnel on ways of using the methods outlines so as to achieve goals.

Criticism of Taylor’s concept of task allocation

It appears that the concept of allocation is the one that has attracted most criticism in Taylor’s idea of scientific management. Task allocation is the idea that when tasks are broken down into smaller and smaller tasks, it becomes easy to determine the optimum solution to the bigger task. Taylor offers the example of a man who plans a room, and insists that the man’s specialty should not go beyond the task of planning. Taylor adds that such a man invariably finds out that the work can be done much more economically through the subdivision of labor. For example, each act of each mechanic should be preceded by several preparatory acts performed by other workmen.

The main criticism against Taylor emanates from this reductionist approach to tasks, which appears to dehumanize the worker, a problem that was commonly cited throughout the duration of the industrial revolution. The allocation of work specifies not only what needs to be done, but how it is done and the specific time that a workman is allowed to do it. This approach is seen as denying the workman any scope to excel or think. This argument has been triggered by Taylor’s later writing, in which he stated that: “the task should always be so regulated that the worker who is well suited to the job thrives while working at the predetermined rate in the length of many years and become happier and more prosperous rather than feel overworked”.

Interestingly, Taylor’s strongest legacy with regard to the industrial revolution seems to lie in task allocation. This efficiency expert came up with explicit descriptions of how to break down complex tasks into a number of simpler, smaller subtasks, while at the same time optimizing the performance of these subtasks. This positive legacy led to the unveiling of stop-watch-measured time trials, which have in turn led to Taylor’s biggest negative legacy. Many historical and contemporary critics have observed that Taylor’s theories had the tendency of ‘dehumanizing’ workers. Taylor seemed to dehumanize workers by stating that in all mechanical arts, the science underlying every act was too complicated to be understood by the workman undertaking the act. Moreover, Taylor indicates that not only was the science too complicated, the workman was incapable of understanding it, either because of insufficient mental capacity or lack of education.

Taylor also seemed to dehumanize workmen by saying that “in order to work in accordance with scientific laws, the management should take over and undertake much of the work that is now left to the workmen”. Taylor added that almost every act performed by the workman must be preceded by preparatory acts by the management to enable the workman do his workman do his job more quickly and more efficiently than he otherwise could.

Meanwhile, Taylor is credited with being the pioneer management expert who founded what is today known as hierarchical task analysis techniques. These techniques were highly focused on specialization and were the hallmark of industrial practices during the industrial revolution. As early as the early 1990s, Frederick Taylor was the leading management theorist in the scientific management movement. In this movement, little was considered in the way of psychological make-up and its contribution to work. It was largely the case in this movement that the individual person was not taken into account when ways of enhancing management efficiency were being devised.

It is clear, though, that the movement towards hierarchical task analysis was a timely response to the need for an in-depth understanding of how cognitive tasks were undertaken. With the high degree of automation that came with the industrial revolution, the nature of worker tasks kept changing, and the relevance of Taylor’s ideas on task allocation tended to take on new dimensions. All in all, these ideas continued to influence workplace practices of large corporations. Some scholars have argued that Taylor’s ideas on task allocation involved more cognitive components than many people thought. These components include anticipating, monitoring, predicting, planning, and decision making. Whereas the existing approaches tended to focus only on the observable aspects of workplace performance, task allocation approaches focused on the representation of system plans and goals.

Fredrick Taylor’s name remains intricately linked with the scientific management community because of the numerous questions he posed regarding the way tasks were allocated during the industrial revolution. For him, it was important to embark on a serious analytical critique of all details of the methods used during a task. The scientific manager needed to determine how the work was performed, what was needed in order for the work to be performed, why the work was done in a specific way, and most importantly, how the work could be improved. This general method of critique has been maintained in modern task analysis methods. Today, hierarchical task analysts are encouraged to think about not just what should happen but also what actually does happen and how it can go wrong. These questions ought to arise naturally as the analysts endeavor to discover all the indicators of success and failure in each of the sub-goals.

Taylor’s ideas on task allocation are also in use today, although the most commonly used term is function allocation. During the industrial revolution, the term ‘task allocation’ was being predominantly used. The notion of function allocation has been of great interest for ergonomics researchers and practitioners since the 1950s. For these researchers and practitioners, a great challenge has been allocation of system function. In efforts to deal with this challenge, numerous methods have been outlined, all of which are dependent upon a clear description of the systems within which functions need to be allocated to either humans or machines.

In literature on function allocation, it is clearly implied that the best system description is one that is defined on the basis of sub-goal hierarchy simply because of the way in which it focuses on all the goals and sub-goals of a specific system. Although there are many function allocation problems, they can be circumvented by ensuring that stakeholders agree upon the core description of the overarching purpose of the system. In task allocation, one is also able to maintain neutrality within the system. In this case, the underlying aim entails what needs to be done instead of how it should be done. By focusing on what needs to be done, managers are able to engage in an impartial process of allocating functions. In the real world, one may think of a car-manufacturing company, where the underlying aim at a given time may be to increase demand for the cars. In this case, a key sub-goal may be to check the desirability of addressing the potential increase in car demand in the market.

Taylor’s concept of motivation

Similarly, Taylor’s concept of motivation was criticized largely on the basis of the views of latter-day management scholars and found to be wanting. This is because for him, motivation was all about monetary objectives. In this regard, Taylor seems to have been heavily influenced by the industrial society in which he lived. In this society, capitalism and money economy predominated. Meanwhile, Taylor is credited with being critical of the way in which a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ prevailed between the workmen and employers. In this regard, Taylor made conscious efforts to come up with a common ground between those who did managerial work and those who undertook lower-level production-line tasks.

For Taylor, scientific management is founded on the firm conviction that for both the employer and the employee, their true interests are always the same. In essence, the argument here is that the employer cannot achieve prosperity within a long term of years if it is not accompanied by prosperity on the side of the employee and vice versa. However, most of the criticisms against Taylor regarding employee motivation are directed towards his seemingly negative bias against workmen. This could be because the methods that Taylor advocated for were meant for use solely by uneducated workmen. In this case, when he instructed the workman to pick up a piece of iron bar and walk, he expected the workman to pick it up and simply walk. Similarly, Taylor expected that whenever an employee was asked to sit down and rest, he would simply sit down and rest. According to Taylor, the workmen should do things right throughout the day.

Interestingly, Taylor went so deep into trivialities as to discourage back talk in the workplace.  To the modern reader, this behavior towards employees seems barbaric. However, during the industrial revolution, such a behavior was so commonplace that many people did not give it much thought. Taylor was able to use examples from contemporary steel companies to test his theories. Moreover, he admitted that such measures might seem rather rough talk, and they surely would if applied to educated mechanics or even ‘intelligent’ laborers. However, the fact that this theorist took the pain to first know each worker by name and to keep citing it is an indication of his feelings of empathy towards the workforce. In the end, Taylor managed to prove the worth of scientific management by improving the work-rate at Schmidt, a steel company, to 47.4 tons per day, up from 12.6 tons.

Fredrick Taylor acknowledged that there was a potential for his scientific management theory to be abused during the industrial revolution and thereafter. Indeed, Taylor’s fears were confirmed, considering that the greatest abuse of this approach came from the application of scientific management techniques without consideration for the philosophy behind them. Meanwhile, an excellent case of proper use of the theory is in the time-study, a powerful implement that can be used beneficially in two ways. In the first instance, it can be used for promoting harmony between the management and the workmen by gradually and continuously educating, training, as well as leading employees towards more efficient methods of doing their work. In the second instance, the implement can be used more or less in the form of a club for driving the workmen towards doing a larger part of the day’s work for just about the same pay that they used to receive in the past.

Fredrick became interested in improving the productivity of workers early on in career after making contacts with steel workers of the era of industrial revolution and observing that there were gross inefficiencies in the way they did their work. In time studies, Taylor’s argument was that even the most mindless tasks needed to be planned in a way that increased productivity dramatically. For Taylor, the incentive and initiative method of employee motivation is not as effective as scientific management. According to him, when the basic and mindless tasks are properly planned, productivity is greatly increased and employees are motivated. The reason given for this assertion is that the initiative and incentive method offers employees incentives for increasing productivity but places the responsibility on workers to figure out what needs to be done.

Taylor performed experiments known as time studies or (sometimes time and motion studies) to determine the optimal way of performing a job. In these studies, a stopwatch would be used to time the sequence of motions of workers with the underlying aim of determining the best way through which a certain job could be performed. One of the examples of time studies performed by Taylor is that of pig iron. In this case, Taylor observed that if each of the workers was moving 12 tons of pig iron daily, the manager could incentivize them to attempt to move 47 tons daily. When left to their wits, probably they would get exhausted after just a few hours and fail to accomplish their goal. However, if experiments were carried out first to determine the amount of resting needed, the manager could determine the optimal timing of activities involving lifting and resting intervals so that every worker could move the 47 tons daily without getting tired.

All in all, Taylor was considerate enough to appreciate that not every worker was capable of moving 47 tons daily. Perhaps only an eighth of the handlers of pig iron could do so. Although this eighth was not made up of extraordinary people whom the society highly prized, their physical attributes were properly suited for moving pig iron. Here, the impression created by Taylor is that workers should always be selected for tasks depending on how well they are suited for them. When such an approach is chosen, the employees may obviously feel motivated in their areas of expertise.

In a different experiment, Taylor focused on the ‘science of shoveling’. The time studies in this case enabled him determine that the optimal weight that a workman needed to lift into a shovel was exactly 21 pounds. He noted that since the materials being handled varied in densities, the shovel ought to be sized in such a way that it would hold only 21 pounds of the substance that is being shoveled. For this reason, the firm on which Taylor was carrying out his experiments availed optimal shovels to workmen. As a result, productivity increased fourfold and workers were rewarded with salary increases. Prior to the introduction of scientific management, workers relied on their own shovels, which were rarely optimal for the job at hand.

Prior to developing interest in time studies, Taylor had observed a phenomenon where workers purposely operated well below their optimal capacity. He referred to this phenomenon as soldiering. For him soldiering was caused by three things. The first one was the belief among workmen that if productivity increased, the company would need fewer of them and some jobs would have to be eliminated. The second reason was the existence of non-incentive wage systems, which encouraged low productivity, since the employee would receive the same wage regardless of the efforts he puts into the job. All that was needed was for the employee to convince the employer that the slow pace is the right pace for the job. It is natural for employees to fear working at an excellent pace for the fear that the faster pace would be set as the new standard. In instances where employees are paid on the basis of quantity produced, the fear is that the management may increase the per-unit pay in case quantity increases, meaning that the employees will continue taking home the same pay despite putting in more efforts. The third reason for soldiering was that workers were wasting a lot of their effort because of relying on rule-of-thumb methods instead of on optimal-work methods, which could be determined through a scientific study of the tasks.

According to Taylor, the main source of motivation for workers is pay. For Taylor, managers should first acknowledge that employees do not naturally enjoy working. For this reason, they require close supervision and control. It is because of the need for supervision and control that managers have to break down the production process into a series of smaller tasks. Moreover, workers require training as well as tools for working as efficiently as possible on the tasks that they have been assigned. Consequently, these workers should be paid in accordance with the number of items that they have produced within a certain period. This means that the manager has to decide on a payment standard for a specific time-piece set of work. In this case, a key aspect of motivation entails encouraging workers to worker harder in order to maximize their productivity.

Many people associate Taylor’s approach to employee motivation with capitalism. Nevertheless, this approach was widely adopted during the industrial revolution, where it resulted in increased productivity levels as well as lower unit costs. For instance, Henry Ford, a renowned industrialist, used this approach in designing the first ever production line. This production line was used to make Ford cars, and it marked the beginning of the era of mass production.

It is also common for people to associate Taylor’s approach with the autocratic management style, whereby managers take all decisions and then give orders to all their subordinates. Workers are seen as lazy people, who are always looking for opportunities to avoid responsibility. Meanwhile, workers themselves had different reasons for disliking Taylor’s approach; they only received boring, repetitive tasks to do while being treated just a little better than machines. With the resulting increase in productivity, firms could afford to lay off workers since the productivity levels increased dramatically. This was seen as a key factor in the increase in number of strikes and other varieties of industrial action by workers. This observation hints at a mixed reaction towards the legacy of Taylor’s scientific management theory with regard to motivation.

Scientific management and standardization

A key aspect of scientific management is standardization. An excellent instance of standardization at work is the study to ascertain the optimum shovel load for workmen, where the figure of 21 pounds was arrived at. Moreover, Taylor insisted that different shovels should be purchased for handling different types of material. For each shovel, the standard weight to be lifted was 21 pounds. This type of standardization stopped a scenario where every shovel operator owned his own shovel, which he would use to shovel materials of varying densities. For instance, a load of ore was about 30 pounds per shovel while a shovel-load of rice coal was only 4 pounds! This created a scenario where in one case the level of overloading was so extreme that it was impossible for a workman to manage a full day’s work. On the other hand, the workman ended up being so ridiculously under-loaded that it became impossible to even make an estimation of a day’s work.

The issue of standardization constitutes one of the hallmarks of contemporary industrial practices. During Taylor’s time, as it is today, the fear of redundancies was real. However, Taylor countered this argument through economic arguments, whereby increased demand was as a result of a decrease in pricing. He also put forward the idea of shared gains with the workforce as a way of motivating them. For Taylor, the weakness present in a piece of work occurred because of workers reactions to gradual decreases in peace rates. This is because the worker ended up producing more pieces simply by working harder and smarter. In order to ensure that there is no more reduction in the peace rate, workmen resorted to soldiering. This is the sort of deception that creates an antagonistic view of management and it is precisely the problem that Taylor was trying to address since it was a key factor in the deterioration of the relationship between management and workmen.

In efforts to ensure that there was standardization in the workplace, Taylor advocated strongly for worker development. Before any efforts at standardization were carried out, workmen needed to be trained and monitored individually so that their skill development process could be understood from a personal perspective. For Taylor, this was the only way that such a workman could work at the fastest pace and with optimal efficiency. Through employee development, managers could easily identify the highest class of work that a specific workman’s natural abilities were best suited for.

Fredrick Taylor’s contribution to organizational theory

            Taylor’s contribution to organizational theory is legendary. Nearly all the organizational theorists who came after him developed principles of management that contained much of Fredrick Taylor’s philosophy. This philosophy emphasized on responsibility, clear delineation of authority, incentive schemes for workers, separation between planning and operations, task specialization, and management by exception.

However, not all scholars received Taylor’s papers well. This was largely because of the association between his ideas and bad practice, for example, rate-cutting by some unscrupulous managers. In 1912, Taylor was questioned at length in the US by a special committee of the House of Representatives. This was followed by creation of laws that banned the use of stop-watches among civil servants. It was not until 1949 that the US government lifted this restriction. This opposition notwithstanding, Taylor’s views on motivation of employees continued to have a great influence throughout the 20^th century and up to the present day.

Taylor believed that man is a rational being who makes economic choices on the basis of the degree of monetary reward. This belief led him to come up with payment a system that was based on a relationship between the kind of effort sought and the level of reward being offered. It is not surprising, therefore, that this theory was sharply criticized for treating human beings like super-machines and assuming that workers are always satisfied by money only.

It is interesting that the three main underlying assumptions on which the scientific management theory was based continue to be very relevant even in the present era. One of the assumptions was the existence of a capitalist system as well as a money economy, whereby companies operating in a free market were pursuing the core objective of improving efficiency and maximizing profit. The second assumption was a protestant work ethic, where people are assumed to work hard and maintain a rational behavior so as to maximize their own income. In this case, people are perceived to put the perceived needs of the organization before their own personal goals. The third assumption is that an increased size is always desirable because it enables a firm benefit from the advantages of specialization of tasks and the division of labor.

On the whole, Taylor’s impact on organizational theory and the industrial revolution was monumental largely because he came up with the concept of work design, production control, work measurement, and some other functions, which completely transformed industrial practices. Prior to the introduction of scientific management, departments such as personnel, work study, maintenance, and quality control never existed.

Impact of Scientific management on industrial revolution

During Taylor’s lifetime, the core aim of scientific management was to enhance business performance. Many Taylor’s followers and consultants during the industrial revolution installed scientific management tools for fees. In the meantime, Taylor and his followers continued to argue that their ideas enhance productivity, increased profits, and eliminated capitalism-type class divisions and labor unrests. However, critics were steadfast in charging that these ideas encouraged degraded work, excessive specialization, and personal competition, a sense of alienation, and hostility. These conflicting charged were often so sweeping that it was virtually impossible for management scholars to reconcile them.

However, there is a lot in historical research that addresses pertinent issues, including the extent of adoption of scientific management during the industrial revolution. This research also focuses on the changes that took place in the plants of different industrial societies plus the effect of such changes on work and employees’ wellbeing. Between 1900 and 1915, Taylor and his associates had managed to introduce scientific management in about 200 American businesses, 80% of which were factories. While some of these plants were large, modern establishments, such as the Remington and Pullman typewriter companies, others operated on small, technologically primitive technologies. About a third of these companies were large-volume producers targeting mass markets.

Initially, scientific management had limited appeal among managers of large, mass-production plants. Most of the 181 firms that adopted scientific management between 1900 and 1915 could be categorized into two groups. The first group was made up of those whose activities necessitated the movement between numerous workstations of large quantities of materials, for instance railroad repair shops, textile mills, and automobile plants. The managers of such firms sought to reduce all delays and bottlenecks and to increase the throughput, that is, the volume produced per unit of time. The second group was made up of innovative firms, most of them small, which were committed to managerial reform. The executives of these firms were impressed by Taylor’s promise of unwavering social harmony as well as improved working conditions. Only a minority of firms would fall into both categories. Most of the textile mills, for example, tended to be leaders in promoting welfare work.

In the manufacturing plants of the era of industrial revolution, the history of scientific management clearly indicates that Taylor’s work was concerned as much with the work of the individual workman as asserted in later accounts. The history offers little support for such a contention. On the contrary, the consultants who supported Taylor’s ideas devoted most of their energies and time exploring machine operations, materials and tools, routing patterns, cost, production schedules, and other record systems. In one-third of such factories, these activities generated too much controversy that it became impossible to undertake time and motion studies. In some other plants, for example the Franklin Automobile Co. and some other textile mills, the installation process comprised almost exclusively of drastic improvements in routing and schedules. This translated into a scenario whereby one-half of all the employees in the 181 firms essentially acted as mere onlookers. The employees may have started experiencing fewer delays, used completely different tools, or found out that the authority of their supervisors had diminished, but their own routine activities were never affected.

Taylor’s promise was that the employees would start receiving higher wages and would have more opportunities for promotion as well as fewer reasons for conflicts with their superiors, particularly supervisors. In most assessments that focus on these claims, the conclusion has been that Taylor was promising much more than his associates and followers could or would deliver. Similarly, the dangers of scientific management were grossly exaggerated by critics and union leaders. Their core argument was that skilled workers were going to forfeit their skills and creativity, and that scientific management would soon promote fatigue, speedups, and rate cuts. In essence, the key contention was that the average worker would eventually lose his job.

Taylor’s followers were very keen to mock the argument on deskilling. They compared it to the idea that dentists or surgeons were nothing more than deskilled general practitioners. However, in recent years, this argument has resurfaced in social science texts as well as in radical critiques of the contemporary economy. The modern critics have focused on extrapolating from the principles as opposed to from the unique experiences of the 181 plants as well as other historical data. The critics have tended to reason that following the adoption of Taylor’s ideas, industrial jobs had ended up becoming psychologically and intellectually unrewarding. On the same breath, they claim that Taylor was the architect of modern workplace practices. Therefore, they argue, Taylor had already tipped his hand by referring to the notion of “gathering together all traditional knowledge which had in the past been in possession of the workmen”.

Seemingly, the most critical effect of the argument on deskilling may have been the obscuration of the more serious claims to the effect that scientific management caused rate cuts, speedups, and the discharge of all those employees whose skills or level of motivation seemed to be no better than average. In typically orthodox settings where employers were used to living up to the letter and spirit of scientific management, only inferior performers needed to worry. Moreover, in firms where there was commitment to personal management, even this threat tended to turn out to be minimal. However, many employers were often less scrupulous and extremely impatient. For them, faster work meant faster and diligent workers, instead of better planning, coordination, systematic maintenance, and improved communications. All that these managers did was give lip service to Taylor’s notion of interrelationships between the various components that made up the whole, yet they always looked up to employees to deliver immediate gains.

Impact of Taylor’s ideas on factory work   

After Taylor introduced the idea of time studies, many factories of the industrial-revolution era started using them to cut rates. This move had far reaching impact on the way workers related with their employers. For example, it caused the famous Watertown Arsenal strike in 1912. In America, this tendency was apparently the cause of strikes at three American Locomotive companies and at Joseph & Feiss. Outside Taylor’s inner circle, the tendency to use time studies was even more pronounced. For example, In 1913, the managers of Firestone Tire Company assigned one of the employees to carry out time studies of tire workmen to determine why their earnings were so high. This employee, named Robert Holmes, lacked experience in time studies and had no contact with Taylor’s circle. Nevertheless, he spent a whole day time workmen with a stopwatch, after which he predictably concluded that the workmen’s piece rates were too high. This caused managers to cut these rates, triggering a workers’ strike. This strike became the most serious labor conflict prior to the 1930s.

 

Conclusion

In summary, it is clear that Fredrick Taylor’s theory of scientific management had both positive and negative effects on the industrial revolution. Some people were staunch supporters of Taylor’s ideas while others vehemently opposed them. Many workmen feared that they were going to lose jobs and their skills. Some employers, on the other hand, misused time studies so as to increase their profits at the expense of the employees’ welfare, thereby triggering some of the biggest labor conflicts of all time.

If one considers the experiences of all the firms that left records, for example Firestone, one can make several conclusions regarding how scientific management impacted on factory work. To begin with, first-line supervisors ended up losing most of their authority to various higher-level managers together with their staff. Secondly, the proportion of the routine workday that was devoted to production rapidly increased because delays were eliminated. Thirdly, there were fewer decisions that depended largely on biases, personal judgments, and subjective evaluations. Fourthly, the individual workman started exercising less discretion, especially in firms where time studies were relied upon in scheduling production and setting piece rates. It is just in a small minority of firms where managers also used individual instruction cards, which reduced the area of discretion even more. The fifth key impact related to the level of earnings, which tended to go up most of the time, although many exceptions existed that blurred this effect.

On a largely negative perspective, Taylor’s ideas on scientific management did not quite raise the level of skill. If anything, some of the most highly skilled employees, such as the foremen, ended up losing some of their erstwhile de facto managerial functions. Moreover, some unskilled jobs completely disappeared since improvement in scheduling and routing mechanisms drastically reduced the need for large gangs of labors apart from encouraging the introduction of machinery for handling materials. Regarding the related issue of the mortal fear of loss of skill and jobs, things did not turn out as the workers had anticipated. The fear of job losses quickly waned, and the workmen stopped associating scientific management with labor conflicts of the early 20^th century.

References

Wren, D. (2010) The Evolution Of Management Thought (Sixth Edition), New York: John Wiley And Sons.