United States 's speed-and-feed slide rules •
Carl G. Barth helped Taylor to develop
speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard. •
H. L. Gantt developed the
Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work. •
Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the
railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of
staff versus
line employees, with the former advising the latter. •
Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations. •
Hugo Münsterberg created
industrial psychology. •
Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies. •
Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor's time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became
time and motion study. •
Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor's scientific management. •
Harlow S. Person, as
dean of
Dartmouth's
Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management. •
James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the
University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.
France In
France,
Le Chatelier translated Taylor's work and introduced scientific management throughout government owned plants during
World War I. This influenced the French theorist
Henri Fayol, whose 1916
Administration Industrielle et Générale emphasized organizational structure in management. In the classic
General and Industrial Management, Fayol wrote that "Taylor's approach differs from the one we have outlined in that he examines the firm from the 'bottom up.' He starts with the most elemental units of activity – the workers' actions – then studies the effects of their actions on productivity, devises new methods for making them more efficient, and applies what he learns at lower levels to the hierarchy " He suggests that Taylor has staff analysts and advisors working with individuals at lower levels of the organization to identify the ways to improve efficiency. According to Fayol, the approach results in a "negation of the principle of unity of command." Fayol criticized Taylor's functional management in this way: In
Shop Management, Taylor said « ... the most marked outward characteristics of functional management lies in the fact that each workman, instead of coming in direct contact with the management at one point only, ... receives his daily orders and help from eight different bosses... these eight were (1) route clerks, (2) instruction card men, (3) cost and time clerks, (4) gang bosses, (5) speed bosses, (6) inspectors, (7) repair bosses, and the (8) shop disciplinarian. » Fayol said that this was an unworkable situation and that Taylor must have reconciled the differences in some way not described in Taylor's works. Around 1922 the journalist
Paulette Bernège became interested in Taylor's theories, which were popular in France in the post-war period. Bernège became the faithful disciple of the Domestic Sciences Movement that
Christine Frederick had launched earlier in the United States, which Bernège adapted to French homes. Frederick had transferred the concepts of Taylorism from the factory to domestic work. These included suitable tools, rational study of movements and timing of tasks. Scientific standards for housework were derived from scientific standards for workshops, intended to streamline the work of a housewife. The ''Comité national de l'organisation française'' (CNOF) was founded in 1925 by a group of journalists and consulting engineers who saw Taylorism as a way to expand their client base. Founders included prominent engineers such as
Henry Louis Le Châtelier and
Léon Guillet. Bernège's Institute of Housekeeping Organization participated in various congresses on the scientific organization of work that led up to the founding of the CNOF, and in 1929 led to a section in CNOF on domestic economy.
Great Britain Older historical accounts used to suggest that British industry had less interest in Taylor's teachings than in similarly sized countries. More recent research has revealed that British engineers and managers were as interested as in other countries. This disparity was largely due to a trend that historians have been analyzing: recent research has revealed that Taylor's practices diffused to Britain more through consultancies, in particular the
Bedaux consultancy, than through institutions, as in Germany and to a lesser extent France, where a mixture was most effective. Particularly enthusiastic were the
Cadbury family,
Seebohm Rowntree,
Oliver Sheldon and
Lyndall Urwick. In addition to establishing a consultancy to implement Taylor's system,
Urwick, Orr & Partners, Urwick was also a key historian of F.W. Taylor and scientific management, publishing
The Making of Scientific Management trilogy in the 1940s and
The Golden Book of Management in 1956.
Switzerland In Switzerland, the American
Edward Albert Filene established the
International Management Institute to spread information about management techniques.
Lyndall Urwick was its director until the IMI closed in 1933.
USSR In the
Soviet Union,
Vladimir Lenin was very impressed by Taylorism, which he and other
Bolshevik leaders tried to incorporate into Soviet manufacturing. When
Joseph Stalin took power in the 1920s, he championed the theory of "
Socialism in one country" which denied that the Soviet economy needed foreign help to develop, and open advocates of Western management techniques fell into disfavor. No longer celebrated by Soviet leadership, Taylorism and the mass production methods of
Henry Ford remained silent influences during the
industrialization of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, "[...] Frederick Taylor's methods have never really taken root in the Soviet Union." The voluntaristic approach of Stalin's
Stakhanovite movement in the 1930s, fixated on setting individual records, was intrinsically opposed to Taylor's systematic approach and proved to be counter-productive. The stop-and-go of the production process – workers having nothing to do at the beginning of a month and 'storming' during illegal extra shifts at the end of the month – which prevailed even in the 1980s had nothing to do with the successfully taylorized plants e.g., of
Toyota which are characterized by
continuous production processes (
heijunka) which are
continuously improved (
kaizen)."The easy availability of replacement labor, which allowed Taylor to choose only 'first-class men,' was an important condition for his system's success." The situation in the Soviet Union was very different. "Because work is so unrhythmic, the rational manager will hire more workers than he would need if supplies were even in order to have enough for storming. Because of the continuing labor shortage, managers are happy to pay needed workers more than the norm, either by issuing false job orders, assigning them to higher skill grades than they deserve on merit criteria, giving them 'loose' piece rates, or making what is supposed to be 'incentive' pay, premia for good work, effectively part of the normal wage. As Mary McAuley has suggested under these circumstances piece rates are not an incentive wage, but a way of justifying giving workers whatever they 'should' be getting, no matter what their pay is supposed to be according to the official norms."Taylor and his theories are also referenced (and put to practice) in the 1921
dystopian novel
We by
Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Canada In the early 1920s, the Canadian textile industry was re-organized according to scientific management principles. In 1928, workers at Canada Cotton Ltd. in
Hamilton, Ontario went on strike against newly introduced Taylorist work methods. Also,
Henry Gantt, who was a close associate of Taylor, re-organized the
Canadian Pacific Railway. With the prevalence of US branch plants in Canada and close economic and cultural ties between the two countries, the sharing of business practices, including Taylorism, has been common.
The Taylor Society and its legacy The
Taylor Society was founded in 1912 by Taylor's allies to promote his values and influence. A decade after Taylor's death in 1915 the Taylor Society had 800 members, including many leading U.S. industrialists and managers. In 1936 the Society merged with the Society of Industrial Engineers, forming the
Society for Advancement of Management, which still exists today.
Criticism of Taylor Many of the critiques of Taylor come from
Marxists. The earliest was by
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist, in his
Prison Notebooks (1937). Gramsci argued that Taylorism subordinates the workers to management. He also argued that the repetitive work produced by Taylorism might actually give rise to revolutionary thoughts in workers' minds.
Harry Braverman's work
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, published in 1974, was critical of
scientific management and of Taylor in particular. This work pioneered the field of
Labor Process Theory as well as contributing to the
historiography of the workplace. Management theorist
Henry Mintzberg is highly critical of Taylor's methods. Mintzberg states that an obsession with efficiency allows measurable benefits to overshadow less quantifiable social benefits completely, and social values get left behind. Taylor's methods have also been challenged by
socialists. Their arguments relate to progressive defanging of workers in the workplace and the subsequent degradation of work as management, powered by capital, uses Taylor's methods to render work repeatable and precise yet monotonous and skill-reducing. James W. Rinehart argued that Taylor's methods of transferring control over production from workers to management, and the division of labor into simple tasks, intensified the alienation of workers that had begun with the factory system of production around the period 1870 to 1890. Criticism of Taylor and the Japanese model, according to
Kōnosuke Matsushita:"We are going to win and the industrial west is going to lose out. There’s nothing you can do about it, because the reasons for failure are within yourselves. Your firms are built on the Taylor model. Even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking while workers wield the screwdrivers, you're convinced deep down that it is the right way to run a business. For the essence of management is getting ideas out of the heads of the bosses and into the heads of labor. We are beyond your mindset. Business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilization of every ounce of intelligence."Frederick Taylor has been criticized by his approach to management, which focused on maximizing efficiency and productivity by breaking down tasks to simplest components often resulted in the dehumanization of workers. By breaking down tasks into the smallest possible units and timing workers to ensure they met strict quotas, Taylor's methods treated workers more like a machine and neglecting the social and psychological needs of workers such as the sense of belonging and creativity which can impact workers morale and willingness to work hard. ==Tennis and golf accomplishments==