History Lesson
Where scientific management went awry by Morgen Witzel
M
ore than a century after its inception, scientific management remains one of the most controversial management theories of all time. To its supporters, it brought professionalism based on knowledge and scientific principles. It galvanised American industry and made possible the huge gains in productivity and prosperity of the early 20th century. To its detractors, scientifi scientificc management or ‘Taylorism’ represents everything that is bad about the capitalist system:: deskilling, dehumanising, the death system of the craft production system, the dominance of capital over labour, and American economic imperialism in the guise of promoting a ‘one best way’ to manage. Somewhere between these two opposites lies the truth. Scientific management did result in greater professionalism on the part of both managers and workers. The benefits of precise measurement, research and planning were widely acknowledged. At the same time, the introduction of scientific management was not without its problems, which were magnified when attempts were made to introduce the theory outside the US. In Britain, the concept met with widespread resistance. In France, it became the subject of a sterile professional feud but had little impact on business. In the Soviet Union, where scientific management was greeted with enthusiasm, the end result was tragedy: a warped version of Taylor’s theories that was known as the Stakhanovite system, ended in thousands of Soviet workers and their families banished to the gulags for missing production quotas. quotas.
Taylorism laid the foundations for science-based management more than 100 years ago. But early implementations led to worker resistance and distortions that have never quite gone away Time and motion How did this come to happen? The terrible irony is that scientific management had its origins in a movement to better the lot of the worker. It was developed at a time when working conditions had reached an all-time low and industrial unrest was becoming a major issue, especially in the US. A group of American engineers led by Frederick Winslow
Taylor (above) argued that the answer was to
pay workers according to productivity while at the same time improving working conditions so as to make maximum productivity possible. In an efficient workplace, it was argued, each worker could work to his or her full potential, and be rewarded accordingly. Taylor and his colleagues, especially
Henry Gantt and the husband-and-wife team of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, believed that they were acting in the best interests of the workers. Taylor himself was firmly convinced that “Scientifically managed workplaces would be more attractive to workers, not only for their higher wages but for the security they offered.” And Henry Gantt argued: “Poor management usually means poor wages. Good management means good wages, for the high efficiency demanded by good management can only be maintained by such wages as will attract good men and induce them to work at their highest efficiency.” For Taylor and his colleagues, the key to more efficient management and worker prosperity both lay in science. This was happening in the midst of the scientific revolution, at a time when Lord Kelvin's statement that “science begins with measurement” was regarded as almost a holy truth. Properly applied, science could show the best and most efficient way of getting work done. And, once the ‘one best way’ (to borrow Frank Gilbreth's term) had been discovered, it would be impossible for either side to argue or object in the face of scientific proof. Labour unrest would wither away. Companies would profit, and workers would see their wages and prosperity increase.
Theory into practice Taylor had experimented with time studies in the 1880s, and in 1898 he got a chance to implement them in full at Bethlehem Steel. For the next three years, working there as a consultant, Taylor was able to remake Bethlehem work practices according to his own theories. The results were mixed. On the credit side, productivity greatly improved. Taylor was able to show that efficiency had been improved at virtually every stage of the production process. He famously described the case of an unskilled worker named Henry Knoll (disguised under the pseudonym ‘Schmidt’). Taylor says ‘Schmidt’ carried an average of 12.5 tons of pig iron per day. After his job was redesigned, he was able to carry an average of 47 tons per day. For this, ‘Schmidt’ received a piece-rate-based pay rise of around 60 per cent. Everyone benefited, said Taylor. Not everyone agreed. First, the full implementation of the Taylor system required a huge team of consultants, timestudy experts, rate-fixers and many others. This infrastructure was very costly, and Bethlehem managers complained that most
of their productivity gains were being eaten up by the wage bills of the consultants. Workers were even more suspicious, and believed management was using the new system to increase productivity without a corresponding increase in pay. Worse, Schmidt's 60 per cent pay rise was a reward for a 376 per cent increase in output, and this disparity was common across the company. Despite the achievements of Taylor's methods, he was dismissed in 1901. Shortly thereafter, Bethlehem was sold to the entrepreneur Charles M. Schwab, who fired the remaining consultants and set about dismantling the system. Undeterred, Taylor and his colleagues set up as consulting engineers, and within a few years hundreds of American companies were using some version of scientific management. Taylor and his associate Carl Barth lectured at the newly formed Harvard Business School, helping to ensure that scientific management entered the academic mainstream. The ideas of scientific management spread across America like ripples on a pond.
into France by two convinced disciples, the metallurgist Henri-Louis Le Chatelier and the naval architect Charles de la Poix Fréminville. Le Chatelier's first publication on the subject came in 1905. Almost at once, clashes began between him and supporters of France's fledgling indigenous management philosophy, ‘Fayolism’. This school of thought was focused around a minor guru of the day, Henry Fayol, a mining engineer who had made his reputation by rescuing the troubled mining firm Commentry-Fourchambault and turning it into one of France's most successful companies. Fayol, influenced by logical positivism as well as experimental science, was interested in the development of generic management principles which could be adapted to a variety of situations. Fayolism was thus temperamentally opposed to the ‘one best way’ approach, and conflict with Taylorism was inevitable. Taylorists attacked Fayolism for being too vague and insufficiently scientific; Fayloists in turn attacked Taylorism as a foreign import, alien to French culture and tradition.
In three countries – Britain, France and the Soviet Union – determined efforts were made to introduce scientific management. Each country reacted in quite a different way There was opposition, especially from organised labour, due to fears that unscrupulous employers might use the piece-rate system to drive real wages down – and this did happen in some cases. In 1915, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor complained that some companies were setting production targets, then when they were met, slashing the piece-rate, effectively forcing workers to produce more in order to stay even. There is no real evidence, however, that scientific management led to an increase in labour unrest. Indeed, many union leaders had no objection to practices that gave their workers more security and higher wages. On the whole, despite problems of implementation costs and some worker unease, scientific management took over American industry fairly effortlessly.
The European reception In Europe, however, the situation was rather different. In three countries – Britain, France and the Soviet Union – determined efforts were made to introduce scientific management. Each country reacted in quite a different way. Scientific management was introduced
The argument rumbled on, and in 1919 Fayol founded the Centre d'Études Administratives to promulgate his theories. In the following year, Le Chatelier and Fréminville founded a rival body, the Conférence de l’Organisation Française. The rivalry between the two schools became intense. Finally, in 1925, Fayol admitted defeat, announcing publicly that there was no conflict between his ideas and those of Taylor. The two organisations agreed to merge, with Fréminville as president. Fayol died soon after, and Taylorism became the new orthodoxy in France. Or did it? Subsequent studies have shown that fewer than 100 French companies adopted scientific management methods during this period. The debate which raged in intellectual and academic circles had very little impact on French management or French industry. By the 1930s, even academic interest in the subject was waning. Not until after the Second World War would scientific management reemerge in force in France, this time introduced by American consultants as part of Marshall Plan aid. Taylor and his ‘ism’ survive prominently in France today as companies continue to search for higher
History Lesson
rates of productivity. There was more interest in scientific management in Britain, where several influential advocates gained prominence, including Lyndall Urwick, a former manager with the Rowntree company of York, and Herbert Casson, an American writer and publisher. But there was suspicion of this new import right from the beginning. The Fabian socialist Sidney Webb pronounced himself cautiously in favour of scientific management, but argued that it would only work if managers and workers alike treated each other honestly and fairly. Greedy employers or unscrupulous workers could soon bring the system into chaos, he warned. And Urwick's former boss Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree believed that the system lacked checks and balances to prevent abuses. The older ‘British’ methods of profit-sharing and industrial democracy would, Rowntree believed, be more likely to result in industrial efficiency and harmony. Events proved Rowntree right. Industrial resistance to scientific management was widespread. The British consulting engineer Frank Watts, an opponent of the concept, detailed many cases of workers attempting to sabotage the system. Sometimes the resistance was passive: workers would slow their movement when they knew they were being observed by the time-and-motion men. But there were also cases of consultants and rate-fixers being threatened or even physically attacked. And unlike in the US, wider industrial unrest did result. Anger over Taylorist methods was cited as a factor by some unions for joining the General Strike of 1926. Watts summed up the views of many when he claimed that scientific management was inherently harmful: The psychological dilemma concerning the monotony of repetition-process work is this: either the worker employs all his powers on the task, in which case there is established an undesirable limi- tation and stereotyping of mental process so that the movements of his mind tend to become unduly circum- scribed and uniform, and this is bad for the worker; or the mechanical processes tend to be carried on automatically while the conscious attention is given to other things, which means that only a small portion of the worker’s energy is given to the work, and this is frequently bad for his employer.
As in France, it took decades for scientific management to find acceptance in even a modified form.
Theory into tragedy Nowhere did scientific management receive a more enthusiastic reception than in the Soviet Union. Strange though it may now seem, both Lenin and Trotsky were vocal admirers of Taylor. At Lenin's order, Taylor’s works were translated into Russian and serialised in Pravda . Scientific management was taught at places such as the Plekhanov Institute, where many of the new generation of managers and engineers were trained. But after Stalin’s rise to power, scientific management became what its detractors in the West always feared it could become: a tool for driving workers harder rather than a means of rewarding them for efficiency gains. In 1935, a team of coal miners led by foreman Andrei Stakhanov was given up-todate equipment and instructed to mine as much coal as possible in a single shift. On 31 August 1935, Stakhanov’s team reportedly produced 102 tons of coal in one six-hour shift, or 14 times the normal output. This phenomenal result gave rise to the Stakhanovite movement throughout Soviet industry. The Soviets professed to believe that if properly motivated and trained, all workers could increase production far beyond current levels. Stakhanovism became the dominant management model of the Soviet Union through the rest of Stalin’s rule and entered languages around the world as a metaphor for hard work. In fact, the movement degenerated into arbitrary quota-creep, and Soviet workers soon began to suffer. Workers were expected to achieve superhuman performance targets often with only the crudest tools and little training; coal miners equipped only with picks and shovels were forced to aim for the same targets as Stakhanov's original team. Workers and
their families were threatened with the gulag if they failed, and often these threats were carried out. It is not known how many workers and their families were sent to labour camps for failing to meet their inflated quotas, but even conservative estimates suggest several hundred thousand. Most never returned. In 1988, an investigation by Russian journalists revealed the foundation of the movement as a fraud; Stakhanov and his colleagues had added together production figures from several teams to achieve their record-breaking figure. A movement which had begun based on high ideals and science was a cruel sham. Why did a movement that was, broadly speaking, successful in the US fail when introduced into Europe? Cultural relativism was cited by many at the time. Rightly or wrongly, scientific management was seen by many as alien, incompatible with European culture. But there was also a recognition, much more widespread in Britain and France than in the US, that scientific management changed the balance of power. Scientific management moved the focus to the individual. The onus was now on the worker to produce, and the company had the right to impose sanctions if he or she failed to do so. Wiser heads in Britain such as Webb and Rowntree saw the dangers of this, and rejected the system. And just how dangerous the system could be when the power of the company was transferred into the hands of a tyrannical state was demonstrated in the Soviet Union. Was Taylorism simply too clever? Should Taylor and his colleagues have been satisfied by a simpler, less scientific and more humane system, one that might be imperfect but allowed room for adaptation? Or was the attempt to find ‘one best way’ doomed to failure in a world where diversity was, and remains, an inherent feature of business and management? The debate goes on. Scientific management itself has given way to softer theories such as ‘empowerment’, the belief that employees seek fulfilment rather than money. But its legacy remains in many forms because in the end productivity per person must be measured in order to improve.
Morgen Witzel is Honorary Senior Fellow at the School of Business Economics, University of Exeter
