Application Assignment - Journal - Week 1

In the latter half of the 19th century, a steel manager by the name of Frederick Taylor sought to bring about a “mental revolution” to a hostile relationship between management and employees.  Taylor established the practice of Scientific Management, where in his view, a worker’s selfish ambitions could be harnessed  by matching them to a job and then measuring that job scientifically.  Taylor also called for managers to buy into this revolution.  Taylor believed that managers should encourage the highest production at the cheapest costs and also “to secure the maximum prosperity of for the employer… as well as each employee” (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management).  While historians consider Taylor to be the most influential business guru of the 20th century,  one researcher says Taylor’s theory failed.  In Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto’s paper, “Scientific Management revisited.  Did Taylorism fail because of a too positive image of human nature?“, Tsukamoto answers his question with a yes.  Taylor considered the selfish ambitions of workers, but didn’t consider the true human nature of management.

Tsukamoto claims Taylor assumed Scientific Management would work based on a belief that managers would act on a “positive, behavioral model”, a view the author calls “utopian”. “Taylor failed to analyze how potentially self-interested or even opportunistic mangers could undermine cooperation with workers”, Tuskamoto writes.  As we know from this week’s reading assignment, discontent with Scientific Management resulted in strikes and subsequently, Taylor being called before Congress.  While researchers like Daniel Wren ascribe the strikes to the faulty implementation of Scientific Management, Tsukamoto argues it was Taylor’s failure, that he “could have uncovered and prevented such instances of myopic, managerial greed” (page 362).  What would motivate Taylor’s lack of investigation?  According to the author, it may have been Taylor’s Quaker upbringing that colored his views on human behavior or even a darker motivation to preserve and cash in on Scientific Management.

While Tsukamoto deconstructed Taylor’s Scientific Management, he may have been more accepting of Henri Fayol.  The French engineer rose to become a CEO around the same time Taylor was putting forth Scientific Management.  Rather than rely on managers to be good people, Fayol wanted his mangers to receive formal training.  In fact, he believed that all workers receive some managerial training.   While Taylor operated on a “Functional Foremen” system where specialists would be assigned to each component of manufacturing, Fayol wanted his managers to grasp a firm’s organic whole. 

He established organization charts but also allowed for “gang planks” where communication could cross lines of authority, rather than be restricted to the traditional top-down method.

Max Weber, on the other hand couldn’t be more different from Fayol or Taylor.  He believed bureaucracy was the best way to organize a company.  His vision of bureaucracy wasn’t what we would see today as something bloated and inefficient.  Weber saw bureaucracy as a structured management hierarchy, with a clear chain of command, where people would advance solely on merit.  Weber found this to be the best away to prevent the exploitation of workers.  In fact, as Wren pointed out in this week’s readings, all businesses today are going to have some elements of bureaucracy.

We’ve learned that at the end of the 19th century, we learned of at least  three management theories being advanced.  Taylor’s Scientific Management, which relied on a symmetrical relationship between worker and manger; Fayol’s principal that emphasized formal management training but also a more flexible organizational structure that encouraged workers to grasp the organic whole of a company; Weber who envisioned a more formal, black and white, rigid structure with clear lines of authority.  At the beginning of the 21st century, you can find companies putting these theories to work while others have opted for a whole new way of doing business.