Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement

By Judith A. Merkle

From its obscure beginning as a system for organizing machine shops, Scientific Management has grown into the major technocratic ideology of the twentieth century. Its development and international diffusion have influenced industrial productivity, the social fabric of industrial society, and even the nature of government. In this study of the movement's growth, Merkle compares the writings of the American, German, French, British, and Soviet vanguards of Scientific Management and finds that those who advocated efficiency engineering were considerably more than pragmatists seeking immediate technical solutions to production problems. Rather, they were visionaries who sought to reconcile class conflict, restructure government, and create a universal technocratic utopia by achieving efficient mass production and rationalized distribution. The call for a "mental revolution," which permeates their writings, found sympathizers among capitalists and socialists alike; that revolution affected not only the structure of modern industrialism but also the organization of the state itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520312104

Judith A. Merkle

Judith A. Merkle was Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. 

Book preview

MANAGEMENT

AND

IDEOLOGY

MANAGEMENT

AND

IDEOLOGY

The Legacy of the International

Scientific Management Movement

JUDITH A. MERKLE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1980 by

The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America

123456789

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Merkle, Judith A

Management and ideology: The legacy of the international scientific management movement Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Industrial management—History. 2. Comparative management—History. I. Title.

II. Title: Scientific management movement. HD30.5.M47 658’.009 78-59447

ISBN 0-520-03737-5

For my father —

he would have known why

Contents

Contents

Acknowledge ments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 The Origins of the Taylor System

THE ELEMENTS OF THE TAYLOR SYSTEM

LABOR, CAPITAL, AND POLITICS: THE SENATE INVESTIGATION OF 1885

TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT AND THE FAILURE OF AUTHORITY

SOURCES OF OPPOSITION TO AND ADVOCACY OF THE TAYLOR SYSTEM

THE ROLE OF TAYLOR’S PERSONALITY

CHAPTER 2 The National Crusade for Scientific Management

TAYLOR’S DISCIPLES

THE FIRST TAYLORIZED INDUSTRIES

MIDVALE STEEL: BIRTHPLACE OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

THE LESSONS OF TAYLOR’S EARLY FAILURES

BETHLEHEM STEEL: THE TURNING POINT

THE SHOWCASES OF TAYLORISM

THE EFFICIENCY FAD

A PERMANENT REVOLUTION IN EFFICIENCY ENGINEERING

TAYLORISM MOVES BEYOND THE FACTORY

THE ALLIANCE WITH HIGHER EDUCATION

TAYLORISM AND THE CHANGING RELATIONSHIP OF SOCIAL CLASSES

CHAPTER 3 A Passion for Order

THE APPLICATION OF SCIENCE TO INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION

A PATTERN OF PROFESSIONALIZATION

THE MACHINE AS A MECHANISM OF SOCIAL CONTROL

A TECHNOLOGY OF SOCIAL CHANGE

CHAPTER 4 The Taylor System in Soviet Socialism

LENIN DISCOVERS TAYLOR

FROM THE STA TE AND REVOLUTION TO THE DECREES OF WAR COMMUNISM

TROTSKY’S PROMOTION OF TAYLORISM

THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT ON SOVIET PLANNING AND LABOR DISCIPLINE

TAYLORISM AND STAKHANOVISM

THE LEGACY OF SOVIET TAYLORISM

CHAPTER 5 Romantic Rationalism and the Growth of French Scientific Management

THE PREREVOLUTIONARY TRADITION OF RATIONAL ADMINISTRATION IN FRANCE

ENGINEERING LOGIC AND THE EFFECT OF VAUBAN’S ROYAL TITHE

RATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

POSTREVOLUTIONARY BUREAUCRATIC RATIONALISM AND TECHNOLOGICAL UTOPIANISM

TAYLORISM AND FRENCH SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

THE WARTIME CONVERSION OF INDUSTRY

FAYOLISME: THE VIEW FROM THE TOP

TAYLORISM AND FRENCH TECHNOCRACY

CHAPTER 6 Scientific Management and German Rationalization

NEW AND OLD WORLD BUREAUCRACY

ADVOCACY OF A FUNCTIONAL CLASS ORDER IN THE INDUSTRIAL STATE

THE TRANSFER OF THE TAYLOR SYSTEM TO GERMANY

THE RATIONALIZATION OF THE CORPORATE STATE

AFTER EFFICIENCY

CHAPTER 7 Management and Traditionalism in Great Britain

RATIONAL MANAGEMENT AND STEAM ENGINE MANUFACTURE

SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION AND THE FOLK ENGINEERING TRADITION

SYSTEMATIC MANAGEMENT AS WELFARE MANAGEMENT

BRITISH SLOWDOWN AND AMERICAN SPEEDUP: THE ATTACK ON TAYLORISM

BRITISH SOCIALISM PRE-EMPTS SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT REFORMISM

THE BRITISH HUMAN RELATIONS SCHOOL

TRADITIONAL FORCES IN CONTEMPORARY MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER 8 Beyond Scientific Management

THE POLITICS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

THE FANTASY OF MANAGERIAL CONTROL OF THE STATE: TECHNOCRACY, INC.

THE REALITY OF MANAGERIAL INFLUENCE: SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AND NEW DEAL BUREAUCRATIZATION

CHAPTER 9 Democratic Government and the Technology of Administration

MODES OF ADMINISTRATIVE INFLUENCE AND THE TECHNIQUES OF POLITICAL CONTROL

THE VALUE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

THE PERSISTENCE OF ADMINISTRATIVE VALUES

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledge ments

During the time spent in the preparation of this book, I have been fortunate to possess friends, critics, and family who have been consistently insightful, enthusiastic, and kind. While they should not be blamed for the flaws in the manuscript, they certainly deserve credit for its existence. I am especially indebted to Dwight Waldo for his extensive and critical review of the manuscript and his generous concern for the project, and to Thomas Blaisdell, Jr., for his detailed reading of the manuscript and thoughtful advice. I also owe special thanks to Martin Landau, whose encouragement and assistance meant so much.

I am very grateful to Val Lorwin, the Council for European Studies, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for giving me an opportunity to complete necessary research in the Federal Republic of Germany. I must also thank Vicki Van Nortwick for the careful effort she spent in typing the draft.

I owe more than I can say to the intellectual companionship and loving support of my husband, Parkes Riley.

Introduction

It is a commonplace assumption of our times that modern technology and highly developed industrialism have created a sort of universal culture marked by both the benefits of mass production and the burden of alienation, depersonalization, excessive specialization, and bureaucratization. This technocratic, materialist, time-pressed, and fragmented society is seen as the inevitable by-product of the machine in modern life; it is international in scope and its negative characteristics are the unavoidable price paid for the abundant life.

As the effects of the negative side of modernization on the entire edifice of industrialism become more apparent, a host of critics have come forward to offer a wide range of solutions. These cures for low productivity, low morale, high error rates, and high wastage of human and material resources range from the redivision of labor to the advocacy of pure democracy in the place of work, from the rebuilding of community in society to the attempt to re-create a romanticized pre-industrial past.

Yet many of these proposals for change run headlong into the inescapable fact that their suggested plans for the amelioration of industrial malaise require the dismantling of the massive administrative and organizational structures that surround and control machine technology. These structures, it is often assumed, are the natural result of machine rationality in society. This idea of the spontaneous generation of the social order by the machine lends an often spurious aura of inevitability and permanence to many of the organizational traits of advanced industrialism. It is the theme of this work that these organizational structures are not, in fact, simply natural by-products of machine rationality in society, but are in large part the legacy of a systematic and massive industrial engineering crusade, the international Scientific Management movement, carried out in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Scientific Management was a name invented in 1911 to describe a new movement in factory organization which had previously been known by the name of its originator, Frederick W. Taylor, as the Taylor system. Although discovered in the 1880s, the system was not a single invention, but a series of tools, methods, and organizational arrangements designed by Taylor and his associates to increase the efficiency and speed of machine shop production. It began with a system of timing work that was to eliminate once and for all the struggle between workers and owners over the appropriate returns to capital and labor by establishing a scientific measure of what constitutes a fair day’s work.1 It included various bookkeeping and accounting techniques, an array of techniques for measuring work input, and various methods of organizing storerooms, tool repair, and other potentially time-wasting elements of the work process. It also included a method of charting work and waste and a managerial bonus plan devised by Henry Laurence Gantt, a slide rule for the calculation of machine speeds by Carl G. Barth, and the science of motion study and all its branches developed by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

The system was unified not by the uniqueness of its managerial devices, but by the manner in which they were organized, by the way it fragmented work and invested control or the organization of a planning process in the hands of a technical elite, and by the obsessive and puritanical style of F.W. Taylor himself. Taylor’s system was an entrepreneurial scheme for selling organizational methods as science, and it contained a powerful social message. He promised to use science to increase profits, get rid of unions, increase the thrift and virtue of the working classes, and raise productivity to the point where society could enter a new era of harmony based on the high consumption of mass-produced goods by the previously deprived laboring classes.2 The movement that he started was a new kind of efficiency evangelism that swept through the world from Petrograd to Tokyo. Taylor himself called his system a mental revolution, and it is the contention of this book that this description was not altogether inaccurate.

The continuity and extent of the Scientific Management movement have often been underestimated by all but its practitioners. Because Scientific Management presented itself as a management technique, its content and influence have rarely been considered fit subjects for intellectual journals or the interest of professional social scientists and historians. Because its most visible manifestations date from the first part of the century, it was easy to dismiss it as a dead administrative fad. Because, for various political and tactical reasons, its techniques were often renamed, it was extraordinarily difficult to make a full accounting of their influence on industry, government, and general administration.

The underestimation of the international Scientific Management movement has led to a misestimation of the unity, direction, and harmony of industrial culture. The accurate estimation of the balance of social forces built into many of the central processes of modern industrial society requires the understanding of the profound effects that Scientific Management had on both the management and the ideology of the modern state and its industrial and business enterprises. While the development of Scientific Management was not the only or the most influential event in the evolution of the twentieth century state, it is distinguished by being one of the most pervasive and invisible of the forces that have shaped modern society. Through the media of technical exchanges, machinery purchases, and engineering journals it spread both at home and abroad not just a management technology, but an ideology about management and for managers. Indeed, the influence of Scientific Management has been such that any major attempt to change the nature of industrial organization must deal with it not just as a series of techniques, but as a way of thinking about the organization and goals of technology.

It is, perhaps, curious to discuss an objective management technology as ideology, but then, Scientific Management is a curious ideology. Taking ideology in its most common sense, as the shared beliefs of a group about the proper goals of a society and the appropriate distribution of power and benefits within that society, it is apparent that most ideologies are transmitted with a large proportion of words and a small proportion of objects. Many of these objects, such as banners, pamphlets, and mimeograph machines, themselves have to do with words. Scientific Management, on the other hand, was transmitted with a large proportion of objects and a relatively small proportion of words. The relations between objects—machine tools, materials, and work stations—and the paper analogues of these relations—flow charts, planning documents, and work blanks—were used to symbolize idealized social relations, that is, the appropriate relations of the individual to hierarchies of specialization, to authority, and to other people, as well as the correct attitude toward work and the reward for work.

This is not to say that successful ideologies do not often possess a large number of impressive physical objects with which to transmit their message, as witness the great cathedrals of Europe. But the binding of an incipient or new ideology to the systematic use of extensive material rituals had not been accomplished before. The technical rituals of interdependence devised by Père Enfantin for the Saint-Simonian cult are but the frailest predecessors of the powerful symbolism of the modern mass-production process, timed and attended by its white-robed adepts. Scientific Management’s message, tied to the rituals of time-and-motion study, Gantt charting, differential piecework, and high-speed steel, was not presented as social philosophy, but as Truth. Its proof was presented in material objects. Its social goals were modeled in the realities of factory organization. It was indeed an odd ideology, for it tended to export objects first, and to follow them with its message, rather than the reverse. It was a faith designed for pragmatists.

The chapters that follow will describe the Scientific Management movement as it took form in the United States and as it spread, with varying degrees of success, through France, England, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Scientific Management was by no means limited to these nations, but the wide variety of regimes, social structures, and pre-existing political ideologies in this small sample will show clearly the kinds of social, economic, and intellectual factors that advanced Scientific Management or retarded its influence; it will also demonstrate the extraordinary ability of the scientific managers to cross political barriers as they affected national planning, work organization, and social control. The portrait that emerges of Taylor’s mental revolution at work shows how Scientific Management’s solution to the technical and social problems of turn-of-the-century mass production became the common cultural legacy of modern industrial nations. If it is sometimes difficult to avoid the conclusion that yesterday’s solution may have become today’s problem, it is also impossible to fault the brilliance with which Scientific Management created a lasting technocratic formula to resolve the social problems of industrial organization.

PARTI

FROM TAYLORISM

TO SCIENTIFIC

MANAGEMENT

Throughout my apprenticeship, I had my eye on the bad industrial conditions which prevailed at the time, and gave a good deal of time and thought to some possible remedy for them.

FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR

1 Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Isted., 1911; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), p. 143. Taylor clearly relates the increase in productivity and wages to an expansion of the market for manufactured goods, the necessities and luxuries of life, and continued employment even in dull times.

2 Ibid., pp. 27, 138.

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of the Taylor System

Scientific management will mean, for the employers and the workmen who adopt it … the elimination of almost all causes for dispute and disagreement between them.

FREDERICK W. TAYLOR1

In 1895, an engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor presented a paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, titled A Piece-Rate System: A Step Toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem.2 This was the first formal presentation of a system of management which he had devised and applied in several factories in the course of his engineering work. It was not the first paper dealing with new systems of incentive payments that had been presented to the society, but it was the first of its type: unique in a number of ways, the paper was the first of a series of statements which would later be called Taylorism, The Taylor System of Scientific Management, or, simply, Scientific Management, and whose practice and theory would spread throughout the industrial establishments of the world.

Taylor’s paper followed a series of papers based on collective benefit plans: Kent’s A Problem in Profit Sharing (1887), Towne’s Gain-Sharing (1889), and Halsey’s The Premium Plan of Paying for Labor (1891).3 Taylor’s A Piece-Rate System took to task all the schemes previously presented, although Towne was, in many ways, Taylor’s benefactor. For Taylor’s was the first plan to stress individualism, to discard utopian ideas such as profit-sharing, to appeal directly to individual desire for higher wages in a way expressly designed to break up groups, combinations, and classifications of workers leading to soldiering and trade unionism, and to do this by a process which was scientifically based on records of labor productivity, thus eliminating the guesswork in rate-setting on the part of the management.

The system set out in this first paper was a finished plan, whose details had been worked out in the years prior to its formal presentation, when its author changed from the practice of engineering to what might be called engineering management. In essence, the system was the outcome of twelve years of work at the Midvale Steel Company, was based on direct observation and practice, as had been Taylor’s engineering education, and was a curious combination of technology and organization which could only have resulted from Taylor’s peculiar background and training. As the system evolved through its application in other plants, it first multiplied technical applications and then gradually divested itself of its technical origins, for it was, as its author claimed it to be, a state of mind rather than a series of specific techniques. The system gained mathematical sophistication when Taylor gained college-trained assistants; Taylor himself, in spite of his night-school engineering training, admitted that he lacked the background in mathematics to do more than the logical outlines of the system and to apply them by force (both figuratively and literally—he received death threats in the course of his reorganization work) to practical organizational situations based on technological problems.

After Taylor’s death, Scientific Management became somewhat softened in the hands of his followers: the harshest penalties of the piecework system were eliminated in the face of heavy union opposition, for his followers knew how to compromise when Taylor had not. In a like fashion, the different influences of his various successors became evident in the directions that Scientific Management took after 1915: Henry Laurence Gantt’s work developed further many of the political implications of the system; the hand of Lillian Gilbreth, humanistically trained, could be seen in a shifting emphasis from work studies to fatigue studies, and in the branching out of Scientific Management to deal with efficiency in personal affairs and efficiency in the home.

In spite of the fact that Scientific Management became, after its sensational public debut in the Eastern Rates case of 1911, the most widely known and influential system of factory management in the industrial world, it is difficult to define Taylorism in terms of content alone. Even before the name Scientific Management was chosen for the Taylor system, the precise content of the management formula had begun to change, and, as indicated above, its evolution did not cease with the death of its inventor. We must ask, then, what exactly did Scientific Management mean?

In 1912, the Senate Committee on Education and Labor arrived at a definition of Scientific Management in relation to the passage of regulatory legislation. It was, said the committee, a generic term for several systems of shop management now upon the market which have been invented by efficiency engineers. They are severally known as the Taylor system, the Stimpson system, the Emerson system, the Gantt system, etc., all of which have practically the same basic principles of operation but which differ somewhat as to details.4

Many of those systems have much in them that is commendable and proper, since a large portion of their details consists of a compilation of business methods and shop practice which have proven successful and not harmful to the workman; such as the proper grouping of machines, standardizing tools and equipment and methods of doing work, elimination of waste, modern methods of issuing materials and cost keeping, etc. On the other hand, in the effort to get the utmost amount of work out of the employees, excesses are committed which should be curbed.5

Clearly, then, Scientific Management was not simply a set of rapidly outmoded ideas on factory belting and typed orders. Nor was it only a popular phrase justifying any and all management efficiency reorganization. And, although used as such, it was not just a vaguely defined commodity readily marketable by private consultants to manufacturers eager for a definitive solution to problems of competitive production and sales.

The historical record has been obscured when it comes to a more precise definition of Scientific Management and its influence. In part, this represents the legacy of the violent internecine quarrels of the first little band of Taylorites. In addition, the vast extent of the movement and the ephemeral quality of many of its documents render the record unclear. And, finally, this obscurity is to some extent the product of political motives in the organizations and nations that used Taylorism not only as a technique of speeding work but as a method of social pacification.

For many practical reasons, then, the users of Scientific Management have found it advantageous to define it as a series of its own component parts. The general result is to dispel the reputation of Taylorism and its inventor as a myth produced by the nineteenthcentury enthusiasm for great men, or as a quaint tum-of-the-century fad in management which has happily long disappeared. Yet it may be argued that the very elements which obscure the origins of Scientific Management constitute evidence of the importance and extent of this system of industrial control.

The claim that Taylorism was simply a series of common-sense techniques was motivated by everything from the fear of patent infringements to professed adherence to Marxist principles of workers’ control. For example, because Taylorism began its life as the arch-enemy of unionization, a professed concern for organized labor was felt to be incompatible with the formal acknowledgment of the influence of Scientific Management on industrial and political organization. In addition, because Scientific Management was a commodity sold by efficiency engineers, a great deal of rivalry was generated by competing claims to the invention of specific Scientific Management techniques. When rivals downgraded each other’s originality, they added to the general impression that there was in fact nothing new in the system. So, while the internecine wars among various kinds of efficiency experts have died, the legacy of anonymity and of multiple names for single ideas has persisted.

What gave Taylor the title of Father of Scientific Management in the estimation of his contemporaries was not his invention of all of the techniques of Scientific Management. Taylor’s works introduced a complex of technical, organizational, and ideological elements which can be traced to specific currents of thought in his time, and which proved to have differential decay rates during the years that followed his death. The synthesis of ideas that he put forward was the original development. It is this synthesis rather than the ideas alone that has been acknowledged as the identifiable body of Taylorism. This new type of linkage between pre-existing ideas accounts for the unique social reaction to Taylorism, not aroused by its neglected and forgotten predecessors. Other innovators had offered partial answers, but only Taylor’s synthesis answered simultaneously problems of production and organization, at the same time that it responded with solutions to the industrial disruption of American society. Taylor’s idea seemed to many the perfect solution; projected by the force of his personality, it set off a genuine social movement with broad political ramifications. This movement affected factory owners, workmen, and government employees alike, gathered serious disciples, and set the American image of efficiency engineer permanently in the national consciousness.

Scientific Management, then, must be defined principally in terms of a specific relationship between ideas. It was not a single invention or series of inventions, but a complex system devised of elements in large part pre-existing and well known. In tracing the history of industrial organization technologies, we find Scientific Management, regardless of nomenclature, a clearly marked complex that ties together patterns of technological innovation with techniques of organization and larger designs for social change, unifying its entire structure with an ideology of science as a form of puritanism, or impersonal asceticism. The details of this overarching pattern of relationships grow out of its personal and historical origins. Its longevity has been the result of great social forces pressing toward the total control of industrial society.

THE ELEMENTS OF THE TAYLOR SYSTEM

Taylor himself dated the formal origins of his system from that period in the early 1880s when, as a young engineer at the Midvale Steel Company, he began a series of time studies designed to increase the productivity of the machine shop.6 The Taylor System of Scientific Management that grew out of these experiments appeared, at first glance, to be a collection of new and made-over techniques both in production engineering and organization which had the direct outcome of raising the tempo of production and thus lowering the costs per unit. The first link in the chain of developments that unfolded into an entire management system was the investigation of machine speeds for metal cutting.7 These investigations led to the discovery of high-speed steel, which could hold its cutting edge while red hot, permitting a vast increase in machine speeds.

The utilization of the benefits of these increased machine speeds required a speeding of the work process to and from the machine, and this necessitated a further division of labor. One of the first tasks of Scientific Management was, therefore, the analysis of the work process around the machines with the aim of subdividing tasks into their component parts, and then timing the components to discover in what manner the whole job could be speeded up. For example, machinists performed many subsidiary duties which took them from their primary task and varied what might otherwise be monotonous labor; they sharpened their own tools (more or less according to their own judgments about maintenance), and frequently went hunting about in disorganized stockpiles and storerooms to find the materials needed to complete a job. Taylorism subdivided these tasks, giving the greater part of them to unskilled or semiskilled laborers, in order to keep the higher-priced or skilled workers directly at their most productive tasks.

The coordination of this subdivided work pattern was more difficult: breakdowns at any one point jeopardized the operations of the whole system. For this reason, Taylor had written work orders prepared for each job, and all the elements tending to interrupt the process were reorganized. Machines were run from a central power source by means of overhead belting. A break in the belting due to incorrect maintenance stopped the work process. In response to this problem, Taylor wrote his Notes on Belting. The disorganization of stockrooms and toolrooms made it difficult to know what was on hand, or to find it in case of emergency. Hence the reorganization of stocks and tools, and the derivation of the Taylor mnemonic system to designate machine parts. The use of tools of different sizes (frequently because they were owned by the workers who used them) made it difficult to standardize the time for the accomplishment of tasks which coordination of a speeded-up work system required. Therefore, Taylor and his associates experimented to find the best tools for each job; then they required the factory to supply and the worker to use them.

Maintaining the degree of speed required in each subdivided task made necessary further control of the incentive system and, to prevent the gradual exhaustion of the workers, closely timed rest periods at regular intervals were established.⁸ Continual time-and-motion studies broke down jobs into their component parts with a view toward selecting the fastest methods for the completion of whole jobs. They also determined the most efficient spacing of rest periods. Not only were the workers thus to be tuned up to machine speeds, as the physical analogue of the machines in the system, but their will power and zest were to be enlisted by a differential piecework rate that would clearly demonstrate the connection between increased output and increased financial return, as well as by the excitement that would be generated by the chance to participate in a scientific endeavor. Of course, there had to be sanctions in the system as well. The piecework rate was also punitive in the case of below-speed work. Taylor tolerated only first-class men in his system. Likewise, the true differential in the value of inceased output was not reflected in the bonus plan. Taylor believed that anything over a 30 to 60 percent increase in a worker’s pay would be spent on drink, which would indirectly break down the productive process.

The importance of keeping accurate records for a complex incentive plan, and of measuring the benefits of much of the work of reorganization required an improvement in the accounting system. (After all, if management did not know what supplies were in storage, how could it know that money had been saved by the expensive process of organizing such supplies?) In spite of his longstanding hatred of accounting,9 Taylor was forced to devise new financial measures of efficiency. This specialized accounting system makes it clear that the power to define categories of classification in terms of the prevailing standard of worth (money, in this case) is the power to convince. In this way, accounting itself can become a form of ideology, in that it depicts systems, which may in fact be partisan, in terms apparently impartial. One might even propose that no reorganization or reform can long exist in terms of an old accounting system, but must be accompanied by the kind of redefinition of the rules of the game that only an accounting reform can bring.

The Taylor system of speeding work by subdividing it effectively removed the element of personal judgment from factory tasks and, in doing so, removed the forms of built-in work coordination which such judgment provided. Thus, a substitute coordinative process had to take the place of individual judgment. This coordinative element was supplied by science, in the form of an elaborate system of records, mathematical formulae and slide rules for determining machine speeds, and systematic production planning, both short and long range. Many of the specific planning techniques were worked out by Taylor’s assistants, who had more formal engineering training than he. The Taylor contribution was the overall conception of the planning system, and its integration with the continual technical and organizational experimentation that time-and-motion studies represented; he also symbolically separated this mental function from the rest of production by insisting that Scientific Management specialists have a separate planning room within the plant itself.

Yet Scientific Management comprised considerably more than the techniques of industrial engineering, or the systematic planning of work; in many ways its most characteristic elements resembled a consciously propagated evangelical faith. Or, to use the words of Taylor and his followers, the essence of Scientific Management was a mental revolution. As Taylor himself said:

Scientific Management is not an efficiency device, nor is it any bunch or group of efficiency devices. It is not a new system of figuring costs; it is not a new scheme of paying men; it is not holding a stop watch on a man and writing things down about him; it is not time study; it is not motion study nor an analysis of the movements of men; it is not the printing and ruling and unloading of a ton or two of blanks on a set of men and saying, there’s your system; go to it. It is not divided foremanship or functional foremanship; it is not any of the devices which the average man calls to mind when Scientific Management is spoken of …

Now, in its essence, Scientific Management involves a complete mental revolution on the part of the workingman engaged in any particular establishment or industry—a complete mental revolution on the part of these men as to their duties toward their work, toward their fellow man, and toward their employers. And it involves the equally complete mental revolution on the part of those on the management’s side—the foreman, the superintendent, the owner of the business, the board of directors—a complete mental revolution on their part as to their duties toward their fellow workers in the management, toward their workmen, and toward all of their daily problems. And without this complete mental revolution on both sides, Scientific Management does not exist.

The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under Scientific Management is that both sides take their eyes off of the division of the surplus as the important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus. …10

The core of Taylorism was clearly an explicit call for reconciliation between capital and labor, on the neutral ground of science and rationality. The bribe was higher productivity, by as yet to be discovered means. Science would replace the old relations of tyranny and resistance in industrial society—but the reconciliation, quite obviously, was to be made on the terms of neither party, but in terms of rationality as interpreted by Taylor himself That is, power in the production process was to be transferred to the hands of those custodians who knew more about the system, and what was really good for it, through the aid of their scientific insight. In short, power would be in the hands of Taylor, the scientific managers, and the category of well-intentioned, rational, public-spirited, virtuous, middle-class technicians that they represented. This power was the essential condition for the imposition of their world-view upon the production situation. The violent nineteenth century world of conflict between the upper and lower classes could become peaceful and productive only if it conformed to the middle-class image of reality. Only power could create such conformity, and, once created, it would continue to reinforce and enlarge that power. Taylorism, devised in an era of industrial unrest, demanded middle-class ascendancy in the form of management control over both owners and workers as the payment of the piper for ridding the industrial system of its growing social and productive dysfunctions.

Examination of the historical conditions under which Taylorism was devised makes it apparent that the Taylor System of Scientific Management, which was to become the foundation of modern industrial management practice, was far more than a technique of organization. In an industrial society whose members were increasingly subscribing to theories of inevitable class conflict, Taylorism represented a technically based ideology. It painted a picture of a conflict-free, high-consumption utopia based on mass production; it presented techniques for the suppression of class conflict and advocated a new unity of social interest; it provided an avenue for middle-class mobility and the growth of a new professionalism. While the competition between industrial organizations and industrial nations explains the immediate popularity of Taylor’s efficiency engineering, the long-lasting and profound influence of Taylorism as a social philosophy can be shown to be a product of general historical and social conditions growing out of the industrial revolution itself. Taylorism’s strength lay not in its patented mechanisms, its mnemonic and accounting systems, but in its applications as a device for social control and a strategy of social action in times of unrest. The proposals of the scientific managers became basic tenets of modern American organizational life: the destruction of ideologies of class warfare by the establishment of control according to neutral expertise in the hands of a nonowning, nonlaboring, professional, middle class. This was to become the American One Best Way.

LABOR, CAPITAL, AND POLITICS:

THE SENATE INVESTIGATION OF 1885

Q. What do they apprehend?—A. They apprehend a revolution.

Q. From what source do they apprehend this revolution?

—A. From economic causes.

SENATOR HENRY W. BLAIR, questioning CHARLES LENZ, editor of a labor newspaper, August 1883.11

Taylorism did not come unbidden into the industrial world of the 1880s. From the time of the Paris Commune of 1870, the fear of labor unrest and the agitation of foreign anarchists had occupied many members of the government and of the merchant and manufacturing classes. Only the most knowledgeable distinguished between trade unionism, socialism, anarchical socialists, and communists. The threat to property, to the state, and to the free market for labor were equally dangerous products of the new industrial economy of the Gilded Age; for this reason, the authorities sought new methods that would control labor and reduce the attraction of agitators and the theorists of revolution.

In 1878, the House Committee on Education and Labor, apparently worried by the political threat posed by labor radicalism, investigated the condition of European labor in order to ascertain the causes of European socialism, and to contrast unfavorable conditions abroad with the wealth of American labor, for purposes of propaganda. States one of the authors of the report,

We are not a nation of capitalists and laborers; we are a nation of republican citizens. Let us, then, ignore these dividing lines, and, each accepting that position for which his capacity best fits him, work upward and onward in the scale