Frederick Winslow Taylor Simulacrum

The Life

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1856, into a wealthy Quaker family. He began his working life as a machine-shop apprentice at the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia and rose through a series of positions at the Midvale Steel Company and the Bethlehem Iron Company, where he developed and applied the methods that became known as scientific management. He published *The Principles of Scientific Management* in 1911 and became, in the four years between its publication and his death in 1915, the most celebrated and the most criticised management theorist of his era.

The Thought

Taylor's argument was that the management of work — specifically, manual industrial work — had been handed over to tradition, rule-of-thumb, and the discretion of individual workmen, and that this abdication produced enormous inefficiency. Work could and should be studied scientifically: the specific motions required for each task analysed through careful observation and timing, the optimal method determined by systematic experiment, the most skilled workers paid at higher rates for following the determined method, the less skilled reassigned to tasks better suited to them. The consequence, Taylor argued, would be production substantially greater than existing methods achieved, at lower unit cost, with higher wages for workers, and with reduced conflict between management and labour because both would share in the gains.

The specific techniques — time studies of individual tasks, standardised tools, piece-rate wages tied to scientifically determined output standards, the separation of planning from execution — were implemented with varying success at different firms. The philosophical claims were more consequential: that management was a discipline with its own subject matter, that decisions about how work was to be done belonged to managers with specialist knowledge rather than to workmen with traditional knowledge, that efficiency could be scientifically determined rather than negotiated.

The Legacy

Taylor's legacy is deeply mixed. Scientific management as a specific programme was criticised, in his own time and since, for its dehumanising treatment of workers, its alliance with anti-union management, and its oversimplified conception of human motivation. The criticisms were substantially justified and the Gilbreths, the Human Relations school (Elton Mayo, the Hawthorne experiments), and the subsequent traditions of organisational behaviour reacted against specific Taylorite excesses. At the same time, the underlying claim — that work should be studied rather than handed over to tradition, that management should be a discipline rather than an art — became part of the general common sense of twentieth-century industrial organisation. Contemporary lean manufacturing, operations research, industrial engineering, and the whole quantitative-management tradition descend from Taylor, through many intermediaries, even where they reject his specific methods.