Scientific management / Taylorism

Taylor began developing his methods at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia in the early 1880s, where he rose from clerk to foreman. He was struck by what he considered workers' deliberate restriction of output, estimating they produced about one-third of what he deemed a good day's work. In the fall of 1882, he initiated the first systematic time studies, breaking each task into its smallest components and timing them with a stopwatch. His goal was to discover the single most efficient method for every operation and then enforce it as standard practice.

The term "scientific management" was coined not by Taylor but by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis during the Eastern Rate Case before the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1910. Taylor adopted the term for his 1911 monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management, which the Academy of Management later voted the most influential management book of the twentieth century. The book's four principles required managers to develop a science for each element of work, scientifically select and train workers, ensure cooperation between management and labor, and divide responsibility so that managers planned while workers executed.

Opposition came quickly. When scientific management was introduced at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts in 1911, workers walked out. Congressional hearings followed, and Taylor testified before a special committee in January 1912. The hearings resulted in a ban on the use of time studies and pay premiums in government service. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, led organized resistance to a system critics described as turning workers into automatons.

Taylor died on March 21, 1915, at age fifty-nine. By then his methods had spread to factories across Europe and Japan, and the resistance they generated had helped catalyze the modern labor movement. The principles of task optimization he formalized remain embedded in industrial engineering, management consulting, and performance management systems, even in organizations that have never heard his name.