Is Scientific Management progressing today.
The notion that science of management can be developed and used in very much in use today.
But the focus of scientific management, as captured by Taylor was work of individuals. That focus is not any more popular. The discussion regarding individual work is researched by HRM, Ergonomics and OB disciplines. Even in IE field, attention to individual's work has come down
Henry Lawrence Gantt
Henry Lawrence Gantt was a teacher of natural science and mechanics, and later a mechanical engineer. In 1887 he joined the Midvale Steel Co. as an assistant in the engineering department. He met Frederick Taylor there, and they shared a common interest in their quest for science in management and developed a deep mutual admiration for each other's work. In Gantt's teaching the worker, Gantt felt the supervisor should do more than to increase the worker's skill and knowledge; he added another ingredient to industrial education called the "habits of industry". These habits were industriousness and cooperation, which would facilitate the acquisition of all other knowledge. The habits that had to be taught to the worker were those of, "doing promptly and to the best of his ability the work set before him". Gantt was oriented toward the dramatization of data through graphic means. It thus allowed management to see how plans were progressing and take whatever action was necessary to keep projects on time or within budget authorizations. Gantt never patented the concept, nor profited from it, but his achievement did earn him the Distinguished Service Medal from the Government.
Gantt is often seen as a disciple of Taylor and a promoter of the scientific school of management. In his early career, the influence of Taylor - and Gantt's aptitude for problem-solving - resulted in attempts to address the technical problems of scientific management. Like Taylor, Gantt believed that it was only the application of scientific analysis to every aspect of work which could produce industrial efficiency, and that improvements in management came from eliminating chance and accidents. Gantt made four individual and notable contributions.
Henry Laurence Gantt's legacy to management is the Gantt chart. Accepted as a commonplace project management tool today, it was an innovation of world-wide importance in the 1920s. But the Chart was not Gantt's only legacy; he was also a forerunner of the Human Relations School of management and an early spokesman for the social responsibility of business (Management & Business Studies Portal of British Library).
Henry Laurence Gantt (1861-1919) - Industrial Engineer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Gantt
Carl G. Barth, a mathematics teacher, was recruited by Taylor for the purposes of handling the complex mathematical problems in Taylor's metal cutting experiments. When Taylor left Bethlehem, Carl Barth went with him and then assisted in the first installations of scientific management at the Tabor Manufacturing Co., The Link Belt Co., Fairbanks Scale, Yale and Towne, and at a later time, Watertown Arsenal. Mr. Barth also assisted George Babcock in installing scientific management in the Franklin Motor Car Co. His slide rule was unique and helpful. In 1905 Barth began work as an independent consultant. For two decades he traveled to various plants, including the United States Arsenal at Watertown, Massachusetts (1909), installing his slide rule systems. Though officially retired in 1923, Barth continued to make slide rules. In addition to feed-and-speed slide rules, Barth created slide rules for calculations related to gears, belts, helical springs, and more (Collections of Historical Scientific Instruments / Harvard University).
In 1904, Mr. Harrington Emerson installed better methods and equipment, centralized the manufacture of material and tools, and installing an individual reward system in Santa Fe Railway. Mr. Emerson's methods were praised as an example of what scientific management could do for the railroads. Waste and inefficiency were the evils that Mr. Emerson saw pervading the entire U.S. industrial system. Mr. Emerson made other contributions in cost accounting. In using Hollerith punch-card tabulating machines for accounting records, and in setting standards for judging worker and shop efficiency.
Emerson efficiency methods were applied to department stores, hospitals, colleges, and municipal governments. Between 1911 and 1920 Emerson's firm averaged annual earnings of over $100,000.00. Emerson occupied himself with soliciting business and managing the financial affairs of the company, leaving the consulting work to his associates. Branch offices were established in New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. In addition to business success. Emerson enjoyed growing stature in the engineering profession. He was identified as one of the pioneers of modern management and industrial engineering, along with Taylor, H. L. Gantt, and Frank Gilbreth. Emerson joined these and other progressive engineers in founding the Society of Industrial Engineers in 1917. Emerson also participated in the engineering profession's defense of scientific management against public misconception and antagonism from labor organizations. He testified in 1912 before a U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the impact of scientific management on labor. He also submitted a statement in 1914 to the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, later undergoing cross-examination as well (Harrington Emerson Papers, Emerson, Harrington, 1853 -1931).
Morris Llewellyn Cooke went to work in industry after having received a B.S. Degree in mechanical engineering and was soon applying a "question method" to the wastes of industry long before he met, or heard of, F.W. Taylor. To scientific management, Morris Cooke had brought new ideas to develop harmonious cooperation between labor and management. He wanted more participation by workers, but most of all he sought to enlist aid of the leaders of organized labor. If scientific management was to make any headway in the Twentieth century, it required someone like Mr. Cooke to open new vistas in nonindustrial organizations and gain the support of the U.S. labor movement.
During Roosevelt's first term as Governor of New York, he appointed Cooke to the Power Authority of the State of New York. Later, in March 1935, Roosevelt selected Cooke to head the Rural Electrification Administration which he funded through the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of that year.
Harlow S. Person introduced the first opportunity for college training of employment managers at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance as early as 1915. Those at Tuck whom wished to become employment managers had the opportunity to take a "special course in employment management and (prepare) a thesis which is the solution of a specific problem of management in a specific plant". Through his role in the Society for the Promotion of the Science of Management (SPSM), later was renamed the Taylor Society, Person was able to promote the study of employment management from a systematic point of view. Under Harlow Person's presidency, the Taylor Society from 1914 through 1919 was increasingly receptive to the consideration of social ideals and to the participation of social scientists and reformers. Harlow Person, and Henry Dennison, Van Kleeck in the 1920s helped to make the Taylor Society an imaginative forum for the discussion of scientific management's relation to problems of macroeconomic coordination (Person, "The Manager, the Workman, and the Social Scientist"; Haber, Efficiency and Uplift, chap. 3; Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor, chap. 7; Noble, America By Design, chap. 10; Schachter, Taylor and the Public Administration Community, chap).
Hugo Munsterberg was the creator of industrial psychology. In 1892, Munsterberg established his psychological laboratory at Howard University. It was to become the foundation stone in the industrial psychology movement. Munsterberg's Psychology and Industrial Efficiency was directly related to Taylor's proposals and contained three broad parts, 1.) "The Best Possible Man", 2.) "The Best Possible Work” and 3 "The Best Possible Effect". Munsterberg's focus on the individual, the emphasis on efficiency, and the social benefits to be derived from application of the scientific method, had been what F.W. Taylor and others had envisioned as contributions from Psychologists to research into the human factor.
His paper Psychology and the Market (1909) suggested that psychology could be used in many different industrial applications including management, vocational decisions, advertising, and job performance and employee motivation. In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913) Münsterberg addressed many different topics. His objective was "to sketch the outlines of a new science which is to intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry." (Münsterberg, Hugo. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913. Print (3). He selects three points of view that he believes are of particular importance to industrial psychology and seeks to answer those questions. These three questions include "how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business." In other words, we ask how to find "the best possible man, how to produce the best possible work, and how to secure the best possible effects." (Münsterberg, Hugo. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913. Print (23-24).
Whiting Williams, vice president and director of personnel for the Hydraulic Pressed Steel Co. located in Cleveland, shed his white collar and headed out disguised as a worker to study industrial conditions firsthand. He felt that the only way to discover the human problems of industry would be to become a participant-observer because "men's actions spring from their feelings rather than their thoughts, and people cannot be interviewed for their feelings". Mr. Williams' view was unique in that he established earnings as a means of social comparison - that is, the pay a worker received was considered not in absolute, but in relative, terms to what others received. In addition, he was active as a writer and speaker on the subject of employee-management relations across the country (Oberlin College Archives).
Robert. G. Valentine was one early revisionist who attempted a rapprochement between unions and scientific management as represented by the Taylor Society. He argued that the labor-management relationship was properly one of "consent". Consent was based on workers participation, and especially union participation, in reaching all decisions affecting labor.
Russell Robb, gave series of lectures on organization at the newly formed Harvard Business School, Mr. Robb was heavily influenced by scientific management and the need for systematization, but he looked beyond that to see the organization as a whole.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor
http://dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu/emuseumdev/code/emuseum.asp?action=advsearch&newsearch=
1&profile=people&rawsearch=constituentid/,/is/,/964/,/false/,/true&style=single&searchdesc=Ca
rl%20G.%20Barth
http://www.mbsportal.bl.uk/taster/subjareas/busmanhist/mgmtthinkers/gantt.aspx
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/findingaids/1541.htm
http://newdeal.feri.org/bios/bio10.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_M%C3%BCnsterberg
http://www.oberlin.edu/archive/holdings/finding/RG3/SG2/biography.html
Source of the paper
https://www.academia.edu/9120152/The_Advent_of_Scientific_Management
Implementation of Scientific Management by Taylor's Followers
FIRM PRINCIPAL TAYLOR EXPERT( S) DATES
1 Tabor Mfg., Phila. Barth, Hathaway 1903-
2 Stokes and Smith, Phila. Gantt 1902-03?
3 Link Belt Engr., Phila. Barth 1903-07
4 Sayles Bleachery, Saylesville, R.I. Gantt 1904-08
5 Yale & Towne, Stamford, Conn. Barth 1905-07
6 Santa Fe Railroad, Topeka, Kan. Emerson 1904-07
7 Brighton Mills, Passaic, N.J. Gantt 1905-08
8 Ferracute Machine, Bridgeton, N.J. Parkhurst 1907-10
9 H. H. Franklin, Syracuse, N.Y. Barth 1909-10, 1911
10 Canadian Pacific Railroad, Montreal Gantt 1908-11
11 Smith & Furbush Machine, Phila. Barth 1908-10
The key features of Taylor's system.
( 1) the preliminary technical and organizational improvements, such as changes in machinery and machine operations ( including the introduction of high speed tool steel in machine shops), better belting, cost accounting procedures, systematic purchasing, stores and tool room methods - in short, Taylor's basic refinements of systematic management techniques; ( 2) a planning department; ( 3) functional foremanship; ( 4) time study; and ( 5) an incentive wage system. Study by Nelson indicates that Taylor's colleagues were generally faithful to his teachings. They typically introduced major changes in three or four of the categories. The principal exceptions were functional foremanship, which most of them apparently considered impractical, and to a lesser extent, the incentive wage, which they advocated but often did not have an opportunity to introduce. The usual effect of their work, then, was a wide-ranging revision of the physical organization of the plant, a less thorough alteration of the foreman's functions, and a modest change in the average workman's activities.
In every company there was evidence of preliminary reorganization: materials were classified and standardized, tool and store rooms revamped, machinery adjusted, and the plant layout improved. The only major exception to Taylor's approach was in accounting procedure, where the "experts" often made only minor changes.
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