Mind, Method and Motion: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

Bernard Mees (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

The American industrial engineers Frank (1868–1924) and Lillian (1878–1972) Gilbreth
first met in Boston in 1903 while the Oakland-born, Berkeley-educated Victorian (born
Lillie Evelyn Moller) was preparing to undertake a chaperoned European tour. Frank
Bunker Gilbreth was a Bostonian building engineer and as unlike Lillian Moller in
temperament and upbringing as a former bricklayer could be. Frank Gilbreth was a
rambunctious, self-made man who wished to live life as energetically and successfully as
he possibly could. Lillian fell in love with the businessman in the flamboyant Winton Six
touring car that met her at Boston railway station, the cousin of the chaperon who was
leading her European tour. The meeting transformed the reserved and studious
Californian, the two forming a twenty-year partnership that has proven unique in the
history of management thought (Price 1987; Lancaster 2004).
Frank Gilbreth had already begun writing his first book before he met his future wife,
but all of the writings of the Gilbreths collected by Spriegel and Myers (1953) were either
joint compositions or were solely written by Lillian Gilbreth. Holding a masters degree in
literature from the University of California, Lillian was much better suited to written
work, Frank being proud of the fact that he could not even spell accurately. Lillian
worked on the drafts of Frank’s first book Field System (1908) before the two were even
formally engaged, and it is not always clear how much of the five books which appeared
under Frank Gilbreth’s name were written by Lillian. Such drafts as have survived
suggest that most of the works which bear her husband’s name were more or less ghost
written by Lillian—hence she is often assumed to have been his intellectual superior and
the major contributor to the partnership. Yet it is clear that Lillian had no experience of
industrial management before she first met her future husband in 1903 and that Frank
Gilbreth was the dominant intellectual figure in their management partnership.
The nature of the relationship between the husband and wife team is a major theme in
Jane Lancaster’s laudatory biography of Lillian Gilbreth (Lancaster 2004). Lillian always
made it quite plain that it was ‘Frank’s work’ that she was principally involved with, not
the other way round, but there have been many who have doubted how reliant Lillian was
on her opportunistic and exuberant husband, regarding her constant claims to the contrary
as a sign of intellectual demureness (cf. Graham 1994). Before meeting Frank, Lillian
was a quite shy and reserved figure with no apparent interest in the commercial world;
falling in love with Frank transformed her and made her life. Even before coming to
Boston, Lillian clearly aspired to make more of her years than that which a woman of her
education and background would be expected to—her Berkeley commencement address
made as a graduating student in 1900 already alludes to a wish to live a more engaged
and purposeful life than that to which even a university graduate of her social standing
would normally seem to have been destined (Lancaster 2004: 52–53). Yet however more
educated or studious than her husband, ascribing her repeated statements that their
management partnership was essentially a work of Frank’s to Victorian wifely reticence
seems rather to mask how dependent Lillian so evidently was on Frank during their
lifetimes.
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Frank Gilbreth was always a blur of activity. Losing his father as a boy, Fairfield,
Maine-born Frank took a bricklayer’s apprenticeship (with Bostonian building
contractors Whidden & Co.) as soon as he finished school in order to free his mother
from having to work to support her family. Frank Gilbreth witnessed his relatives beggar
his mother, and rather than take up a college education, he instead vowed to move into a
commercial career as soon as he could as a teenager. Working his way quickly through
his apprenticeship, Frank set up his own contracting business in his late 20s, liberating his
mother from the boarding house that she had been forced to set up after the death of her
husband. The misfortune of his mother spurred Frank into action, to create in him a
restlessness that he would later describe as a search for a ‘strenuous life’. Frank wanted to
live life to the full and seemed to have little time for the bookishness that characterised
the upbringing of the young Lillie Moller.
As Lillian often recounted, even on his first day at Whidden & Co., Frank was looking
to find a better way. He would later claim that the different bricklaying techniques
followed by master bricklayers whether working quickly or when training apprentices
inspired him to endlessly search for improvements in bricklaying technique such as
would increase speed and efficiency. Already in 1892 he had patented a scaffold that
alleviated the need for bricklayers to stoop when constructing walls, and through close
observation and experimentation he developed various other kinds of bricklaying
efficiencies (including his invention of patented devices such as new forms of cement
mixers) while growing his contracting business. By the time that Lillian first met Frank,
Gilbreth & Co. had won dozens of commissions throughout the Boston area. Lillian was
evidently amazed and inspired by the successful and conspicuously driven management
pioneer she met that fateful Boston day.
Lillian and Frank Gilbreth both came of age during the belle époque, a time when
American industry and ways were first threatening to become internationally
predominate. Lillie Moller grew up in a California that was still substantially a frontier
region, her alma mater the University of California at Berkeley still a rather makeshift
affair. Red-headed Lillie (who changed her name to a less girlish-sounding Lillian while
at Berkeley) was raised in a determinedly genteel environment and she never lost her
valuing of proper, upper-middle-class ways, preferring to avoid confrontation, to keep her
temper quite under control and to avoid putting her name to product endorsements or to
engage in other forms of conspicuous self-flattery (Lancaster 2004). Frank represented all
the values instead of a respectable middle-class New England family, his father owning a
hardware store, but with Frank becoming the man of the family while he was still a child.
Frank’s almost pathological devotion to his mother seems to have been reflected in his
unconventional encouragement of the career aspirations of his young wife. But as willing
as he was to embolden Lillian in her academic and industrial endeavours, Frank seemed
to be ever on the road investigating new business opportunities while Lillian was left to
tidy up the less admirable aspects both of his personal life and (increasingly) even the
incomplete business contracts he left behind closer to home.
Part of Frank Gilbreth’s unconventional and pugilistic approach to business could be
seen in his seemingly endless legal embroilments. Gilbreth & Co. proudly did most things
differently and it seemed that Frank was always in disputes with one or other of his
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clients. He had a well-earned reputation as a salesman, an opportunist and a huckster,

someone who sought to exploit every end to the fullest, someone who would try almost
anything in order to gain a business advantage. Indeed his first publications clearly
represent part of this pattern of constant self-promotion, of advertising the uniqueness and
excellence of the management of his contracting firm.
Frank Gilbreth’s books from 1908–9—his Field System, Concrete System and
Bricklaying System—all extol practices that he had developed since first going into
business by himself in 1895 and that he saw as unique to his firm. His ‘field system’ he
developed in response to having to manage several contracts at once, each in a different
location. Rather than advocating decentralised decision-making, however, Gilbreth’s
system was largely one of control. All foremen were required to carry a copy of a manual
which detailed his field system, and report and act according to its rules. Matters of
initiative were largely to be referred to Frank at head office; everything else was to fit a
standard pattern. This included some practices which would be reflected in his later
writings, however, such as having a preference for hiring union members (he had been a
unionist while working at Whidden & Co. himself) and trying to manage and engage his
employees positively. Gilbreth recognised that a large commercial enterprise necessarily
meant a reduction in the number and manner of personal relationships between him, the
owner, and his workmen. He proposed to overcome the distance between front-line staff
and senior management concomitant with running a large enterprise (or at least one that
was quite geographically dispersed) by having staff send written suggestions for
improvement to him (with monetary prizes offered for the best suggestions) and the
issuing of what he styled ‘white list cards’ to good quality workers that Gilbreth & Co.
could not afford to retain on staff between construction contracts. Gilbreth’s ‘white card’
was envisaged in opposition to the ‘black lists’ of the day which were used to
discriminate against industrial workers who had developed reputations as troublemakers.
Gilbreth’s Concrete System is a more technical work (cf. Morley 1990) and his mooted
Cost Reducing System (frequently referred to in Lillian Gilbreth’s first book from 1914)
never appeared. But his Bricklaying System is another matter entirely. Here he lays out
for the first time what was later to be recognised as his most essential contribution to
modern management thought: motion study. The book outlines the refinements he had
developed in the training of apprentice bricklayers, his two patented scaffold designs
(both developed to speed up bricklaying) and his principle that the first thing for an
apprentice to learn is speed work, and only later quality. He advocates putting workers in
teams and pitting them against each other in contests reminiscent of the worker games of
Nazi Germany or even the later Stalinist practice of ‘socialist emulation’ (Deutscher
1952; Hau 2008). But Frank Gilbreth’s most important contribution in Bricklaying
System is his explanation (and tabular representations) of how he had reduced the amount
of motions required when laying bricks from 18 to 4 1/2. All this he had learned and
developed before he met Frederick W. Taylor in 1907.
Gilbreth’s meeting with Taylor (while attending the annual meeting of the American
Society of Mechanical Engineers in December 1907) transformed his life (Price 1987:
41–44). Gilbreth soon became such an ardent admirer of Taylor and his system of shop
management (Taylor 1903) that Taylor’s influence on Gilbreth has often been described
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as if it were akin to that of a devotee of a cult. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth quickly became
the most eloquent of the new preachers of Taylorism, the gospel of industrial efficiency,
their subsequent works being full of wonderment and praise for the contribution of Taylor
to management. Scientific management (as Taylorism would come to be known from
1911) represented an influence on both of the Gilbreths that seems quite akin to that of an
ideology (cf. Taksa 1992): it drove them, inspired them and often even rendered them
unable to respond reasonably otherwise to criticism which arose from outside the
movement. The urgent and driving need for efficiency that the Gilbreths were to extol for
the rest of their lives seems to represent much more than merely an extension of the
inherited protestant tradition of pragmatism and thrift. To audiences today the life and
work of the Gilbreths seems to epitomise not only rationalisation, but also a veritable
efficiency craze. Yet the Gilbreths obviously saw their work as one of personal (if not
national) salvation as Victorian modes and values waned in the face of a growing
modernism.
Although products of the nineteenth century, Frank and Lillian can both be seen as
very much intellectually in tune with the movement of social and political reform known
in their day as progressivism. This mixture of political liberalism and social concern often
associated progress with a form of technological positivism that seems to transcend
present-day political notions of left and right. Its characteristic feature was modernism—a
rejection of traditional explanations for entrenched inequality as well as notions of class
struggle or the efficacy of traditional sources of authority. As such the Gilbreths were
staunch democrats who believed in social betterment, but rejected all forms of social
radicalism. Instead they believed in a future that was democratic, capitalistic, efficient,
pragmatic, overwhelmingly middle class—and most of all supremely practical, scientific
and modern.
The most striking image of the Gilbreths today stems from their usage of film and
photography (Mandel 1989; Lalvani 1996: 152–68; Lindstrom 2000; Brown 2005;
Sammond 2006). Frank had already experimented with photographic reproduction of
work methods before his conversion to Taylorism, but his infatuation with scientific
management transformed his approach to photographic reproduction. Some of the uses to
which he put film seem to have the air of chicanery about them today, appearing to
represent as they no doubt did a reflection of his relentless self-promotion (Price 1989).
And clearly the Gilbreths celebrated their use of film and photography in motion study as
a sign of how very modern (and superior) their approach to work design was. As they
were to claim in Advanced Motion Study, the problem with the use of stopwatches in
orthodox Taylorist time study was that the method was less reliable and precise than
actually filming workers. In this sense the Gilbreths took the rationalist grist of Taylorism
and developed it to its most logical apogee—no longer reliant on the reflexes and
personal observations of the more orthodox Taylorists, photographic motion study
represented an invocation of true modernity, with workers’ movements captured perfectly
(and moreover permanently) in black and white for any industrial engineer to analyse and
see.
Gilbreth’s motion study had evolved from the mere observation and experimentation
that he had employed as a bricklayer to an advanced state which he called micro-motion
 5

study. Much as photography was already being used to explain the motions and
techniques adopted by leading sportsmen, photographic reproduction would be used to
improve work design. Frank even developed new photographic technology to aid in his
supremely modernist motion study. His basic method was to film workers—i.e. to use a
hand-cranked motion-picture camera with the worker sitting in front of a white grid on a
black background (to aid precise measurement) along with a micro-chronometer (with
‘Gilbreth’ proudly emblazoned on it) to indicate elapsed time. Later he would add a light
globe to the worker’s hand in order better to track their motions using time-lapse
photography. Later still Gilbreth would add a regular interrupter to the current in order to
break the photographic traces up into broken lines—and a more developed form of this
‘chrono-cyclograph’ (as Frank styled the micro-motion images) would even include the
use of lights with thick filaments which would convert the dashes into tapers in order
better to indicate the direction of the worker’s actions. The experimentation and invention
associated with Frank Gilbreth’s motion study represented a specialisation and
development on the chronographic work design advocated by Taylor and it seems very
much to represent the most iconic of the images to be associated with the industrial
efficiency movement of the day.
Micro-motion study—or motion economy as it would later be called—also led to the
use of film in worker education and training (Gilbreth 1928a). Indeed when the United
States entered World War I, Frank Gilbreth enlisted, his role being to produce training
films for US servicemen. It was during this time that the somewhat obese Major Gilbreth
would contract rheumatic fever, however. His heart weakened by the attack, he would die
suddenly of heart failure while talking to his wife at a railway station on the telephone in
1924.
Other idiosyncrasies in the Gilbreths’ development of micro-motion study included
their proposal that standard movement icons called Therbligs should be used in work
study. These simplified movements such as ‘find’, ‘grasp’ and ‘use’ were named by a
term which represented little more than ‘Gilbreth’ spelt backward and although employed
by later authors (e.g. Fairchild 1930), do not feature in any of their key works (although
cf. Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1917: 137–39 and Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1920: 29–33 for
adumbrations of the concept). The Gilbreths also developed motion models—wire
simulacrums (painted with dashes) that workers could use to help them learn the new
techniques established by the use of chrono-cyclegraphs. Frank furthermore developed a
fascination with making workers ‘champions’ (as he put it) at their jobs, a nomenclature
which never made it past Lillian’s editorial pen into any of their final works, but that
seems likely to have provided some impetus to the use of motion study in 1930s German
sport science (cf. Hau 2008). Yet it was not his wife’s ethnic background (her maternal
grandparents were German and she was a fluent German speaker) that was to make Frank
Gilbreth one of the leading Taylorists to actively pursue the evangelisation of scientific
management in Europe.
Gilbreth saw himself principally as a disciple of the Taylorist movement. Indeed
Gilbreth was so taken by Taylor that he proved the figure most instrumental to the
establishment of the Taylor Society (which was originally styled the Society for the
Promotion of Management as Taylor had objected to an eponymous name for the
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Society). As the Taylor Society’s secretary Robert Kent (1932) reflected some twenty
years later in its Bulletin, Frank regarded Taylor a man of such greatness, he deemed it
necessary to establish a formal grouping in which Taylor’s many disciples could discuss,
publicise and develop upon the master’s ideas. Taylorism did not seem to be accepted by
the mainstream of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at the time, so at
Gilbreth’s urging most of the major names in the industrial efficiency movement began to
hold regular monthly meetings where papers concerning scientific management would be
discussed around dinner. Gilbreth was so ardently Taylorist, he wanted to celebrate the
work of the founder of scientific management and formalise the Taylorist movement with
the establishment of a gentlemen’s scientific club.
Yet in 1912 Frank Gilbreth decided to leave the building industry and go into
management consulting himself. The main spur seems to have been the publicisation of
Taylorism which emerged during the Eastern Rates shipping case of 1910. The Eastern
Rates case argued before the Interstate Commerce Commission saw later US Supreme
Court judge Louis Brandeis, acting for the shippers, argue that the introduction of the
Taylor system to railway companies would see such efficiencies achieved that wages
could be increased without the need for changes to be applied to the rates charged to
clients (Oakes and Miranti 1996). Taylor’s system was popularised by Brandeis’
promotion of it so thoroughly that Gilbreth (who even appeared as a witness in the
proceedings) saw an opportunity to go into consulting by himself. Indeed Taylor had
been so overwhelmed with inquiries after his system had been popularised by Brandeis in
this manner, he requested that Frank Gilbreth respond to the many inquiries he was
receiving at the time by means of a question-and-answer book. Frank had been
instrumental in persuading Taylor to publish his Principles of Scientific Management
(which includes an acknowledgement of motion study) and Gilbreth’s own Primer of
Scientific Management from 1912 is avowedly orthodox, faithfully representing Taylor’s
mental revolution, patiently explaining the division of labour epitomised in Taylor’s
system of functional foremen, even taking time to explain Gilbreth’s own contribution of
motion study merely as an adjunct to the greater man’s work (Price 1987: 104; Dean
1997; Kanigel 1997). The book is full of quotations attributed to Horace King Hathaway
and the other leading Taylorists of the time (as well as the seemingly obligatory
references to bricklaying which fill all of the Gilbreths’ works). Indeed Frank Gilbreth
had been one of the Taylorists who had first proposed the description ‘scientific
management’ for the Taylor system as it was to be promoted by Brandeis (as Taylor,
characteristically, did not want his management system to be named eponymously). The
description ‘scientific’ seemed particularly appropriate to a relentless champion of
modernisation such as Gilbreth. Indeed the characterisation of the Taylor system as
‘scientific’ seemed particularly suited to Gilbreth’s remodelling of the Taylorist notion of
‘setting standards’ upon more strictly accurate, technically modern and observable
grounds.
Gilbreth had been busy bringing Taylorist methods to bear in his construction
business, becoming ever more enthralled by the new management system at each attempt.
Indeed his parcel system for bringing bricks to a work site in an ordered manner was
clearly inspired by Taylor’s famous pig-iron experiment at Bethlehem Steel (Price 1987:
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51–53). Gilbreth’s book Motion Study from 1911 was consequently written as an
extolling of the need for the nationwide acceptance of the principles of scientific
management using the case of bricklaying (the one he of course new best) as an example
of best practice in the field. But Gilbreth Inc.’s very first consultancy—at foundry and
braiding-machines-maker New England Butt—led frictions to arise between the Gilbreths
and the other Taylorists that would become particularly prominent after Taylor’s death in
1915.
The Gilbreths applied themselves to the New England Butt contract with all of Frank’s
typical idiosyncrasy and verve partnered by Lillian’s more patient, both clerical and
intellectual support (Price 1987: 153–225; Lancaster 2004: 133–42). Frank was an
industrial maverick, both in thought and in action, and although Lillian loved his energy,
she seems to have spent much of their time together both inspired and mortified—not to
mention pregnant. As they were to demonstrate so clearly during the time of their
contract at New England Butt, Frank was a hive of ideas, Lillian his more cautious
sounding board. But Lillian’s unique intellectual contribution to the partnership had
already come to prove to be of particular use sometime before Frank had left the building
industry and the two had consequently arrived as management-consulting neophytes at
New England Butt.
Lillian had first come to New York in 1902 to pursue doctoral studies in psychology
under Edward Thorndike at the University of Columbia, but had returned to California
homesick a few months later (Lancaster 2004: 55-56). A background in psychology
would clearly have made a useful contribution to Lillian’s resume at the time which
seemed ideal for a career in secondary-school teaching—she excelled at literature and
modern languages, the topic of her master’s thesis being a study of English renaissance
poet and dramatist Ben Jonson’s Bartholemew Fair (Moller 1902). After their marriage,
however, Frank encouraged Lillian to use her background in psychology to enhance their
proposed future work in management consulting and from 1910 Lillian began to prepare
a doctoral thesis on the use of the new science of psychology and how it might be
employed in management. The University of California would not agree to confer a
doctorate on Lillian (a credential which Frank thought would add prestige to Gilbreth
Inc.’s letterhead) unless she completed a year’s worth of graduate subjects in residence at
Berkeley, however, so her unexamined dissertation was published instead in 1914 as the
Psychology of Management. Written while raising their substantial family, the book
would make Lillian a very famous woman—a pioneer in all sorts of endeavours and
fields that had previously been regarded as unsuited to members of her sex.
Part of Frank’s embracement of the ‘strenuous life’ was his acceptance of
eugenics—particularly the fear that the relative infertility of middle-class families
threatened to reduce America to a nation of drunkards and imbeciles (Merkle 1980:
203–4, n. 58; cf. Bedeian and Taylor 2009). As a result the Gilbreths decided that they
would do their best for the racial good by producing as many offspring as they could: the
Gilbreths had twelve children, Lillian only undergoing a hysterectomy for health reasons
shortly before Frank’s death in 1924.
The yet-to-be Dr Gilbreth brought her new focus on psychology to the consulting
contract at New England Butt. It was largely Lillian’s reputation as a homemaker that
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would lead to her later fame, but Frank agreed that there were better ways to introduce
scientific management to a machine plant other than in the manner proposed by Taylor
and his most orthodox followers. The Gilbreths were advocates of industrial betterment
which included improving ventilation and lighting, and providing rest rooms and reading
materials for workers. They also used Lillian’s understanding of psychology to promote
acceptance of their industrial reforms, beginning, for example, with a motion study of the
Butt Company offices rather than with the shop floor. Frank also engaged New England
Butt staff in trying to develop more efficient ways to do their jobs, using film to help
educate workers in the new methods devised. As such the Gilbreths were pioneers in
using psychological insights to help manage change, discovering that involving staff in
developing new processes could help managers gain staff acceptance of change. Indeed
Lancaster (2004: 156–57) even credits Lillian Gilbreth (albeit somewhat unconvincingly)
with discovering the Hawthorne Effect. Taylor’s other disciples such as Carl Barth and
King Hathaway were not impressed by the wilful management innovations of the
Gilbreths, however, and Taylor also let his displeasure with what the Gilbreths were
trying to achieve at New England Butt be known. The opportunism of Frank Gilbreth and
his unorthodox management methods led to the development of a rift between the
Gilbreths and Taylor’s closest followers (Nadworthy 1957).
Although the Gilbreths tried later to reconcile with Taylor, they increasingly came to
regard him as a prima donna, and saw themselves (along with their good friend Henry
Gantt) as the ‘good exception’ to the condescendingly anti-union and patronising Taylor,
Hathaway and Barth (Lancaster 2004: 143–51). Taylor and the Norwegian Barth were
both widely known to be irritable and unyielding characters, and Taylor’s longstanding
antipathy to organised labour (albeit moderated later in his life) seemed increasingly only
to be matched by his constant public flagellation of what he saw as debased forms of
scientific management. Taylor’s own ghost writer Morris Cook would work harder to
reconcile workplace democracy with Taylorism as the Taylor Society began to
investigate a more collaborative approach to organised labour in the 1920s (Trobley
1954; Nyland 1998). But another bout of antagonism would soon break out between the
Gilbreths and the other Taylorists that would never be resolved. Hathaway seemed
especially disdainful of the Gilbreths’ work at the Hermann-Aukam handkerchief
company in 1914, a criticism which would lead to an accusation by Frank Gilbreth that
Hathaway and Barth were so wedded to time study mainly because of their interest in
selling stopwatches (Price 1992). The Gilbreths went on to develop their motion study
techniques in the group of essays published as Applied Motion Study in 1917 as well as in
their pioneering Fatigue Study (1916) and would continue to dismiss time study publicly
as a substandard practice (Gilbreth and Gilbreth 1920; Gilbreth 1928a). But their
movement into fields that seemed to many at the time to transcend classic Taylorism had
already begun while they were completing their first management-consulting contract at
New England Butt.
Part of the reason why Frank Gilbreth subsequently became interested in contracting
outside the US seems to have been due to the blackening of his name by Taylor’s more
orthodox followers. The implementation of Taylorist techniques had originally been
restricted largely only to 100 or so firms in New England, and although figures such as
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chemistry professor Henri Le Chatelier supported scientific management in France (Letté

2001), Frank Gilbreth proved particularly important in terms of the introduction of
Taylorism to Central Europe. Gilbreth’s work at gas- and electric-light-manufacturers the
Auergesellschaft in Berlin and microscope- and camera-makers Carl Zeiss in Jena not
only put him into contact with early German Taylorists, however, but also introduced him
to an understanding of issues which arose with the growing number of incapacitated
veterans that were a particularly challenging and very public social feature of the First
World War. A large number of wounded and permanently disabled veterans became a
fact of everyday life in all Western countries after the war. The Gilbreths’ response was
their 1920 collection of papers Motion Study for the Handicapped and the development of
a growing desire to see motion study employed in hospitals (Gilbreth 1914; Gotscher
1992; Baumgart and Neuhauser 2009). The Gilbreths’ involvement with the disabled
would continue for the rest of both of their respective lives. Frank’s frustrations with
surgeons who would not let him film them, however, led to perhaps the crassest of all his
plans and actions when he organised for his children to have a mass tonsillectomy which
he had filmed in order to further his work in the management of surgery (Lancaster 2004:
168–70).
The German Taylorist Irene Witte, who Gilbreth met in Berlin (and who would act as
the Gilbreths’ translator in Germany), became (with Le Chatelier) one of the few
international members of the Taylor Society (Pokorny 2003). Lillian Gilbreth also set up
a private scientific management training school whose students were to include Yoichi
Ueno, the main figure in the introduction of scientific management to Japan. Ueno’s form
of scientific management drank deeply from the more psychological approach
recommended by Lillian Gilbreth, wedding the Taylorist notion of a mental revolution
with traditional Japanese Buddhist values (Tsutsui 1998, 2001). Frank Gilbreth’s
European contacts would also see him lead the efforts to promote the first international
conference on scientific management in Prague in 1924, while Ueno would host Lillian in
Tokyo during the first International Engineering Congress in 1930. Frank’s death in 1924
just weeks before the Prague conference was due to begin saw Lillian travel there in his
stead, but this time her involvement served more to celebrate her late husband’s work
than it was to search for more clientele.
Much of the work of the Gilbreths has a promotional or evangelical quality to it.
Lillian Gilbreth’s Psychology of Management, for instance, has very little to say about
psychology per se, but rather more about how wonderful, progressive and imperative the
adoption of Taylorism was. Every chapter compares traditional approaches to
management with those which obtain under the Taylor system, with a few psychological
insights brought in occasionally where appropriate. The book (which like most of their
later works is written as a formal argument) spends at least as much time citing Taylor or
Frank Gilbreth as it does key works of psychology. Indeed it even cites Harvard’s Hugo
Münsterberg several times in a manner which rather puts the lie to claims that the
serialisation of the Psychology of Management in Industrial Engineering and The
Engineering Digest in 1912-13 before its monographic publication means that it precedes
Münsterberg’s 1913 publication on Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (which was a
revised English edition of his Psychologie und Wirtschaftsleben from 1912). Münsterberg
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was clearly involved in industrial psychology well before this time (Landy 1992). Indeed
Lillian Gilbreth’s claim that the focus of (behavioural) psychology on individuals
validated Taylor’s emphasis on individual incentives seems rather less well founded than
the behavouralist tradition she ascribed to would seem necessarily to require, while her
connection of psychological experiment and observation with the methods of scientific
management seems somewhat self-serving—more a criticism of time study than a
validation of Taylor’s other claims. Many of the psychological insights of her Psychology
and Management focus on habit formation and how best to train workers in the new
methods brought to the workplace by industrial consultants (i.e. the book is largely
concerned with educational psychology). And despite the claim that the Gilbreths
represented the ‘good exception’ in management, there is a decided lack of recognition of
the merits of trade unions or industrial democracy in her 1914 work.
Perhaps the most original of the Gilbreths’ books, though, remains 1916’s Fatigue
Study. Here the Benthamite notion of ‘happiness moments’ is linked into an argument for
industrial betterment that revolves around the need to reduce injuries and the other ill
effects of fatigue. What would now be considered genuflections to Occupational Health
and Safety are woven into a (sometimes rather tendentious) argument that fatigue was
one of the great ills of industrial life, causing both a greater number of mistakes by
workers as well as adversely affecting their general (moral) character. Ergonomic chairs
are advocated in Fatigue Study as are designated rest breaks (e.g. for morning and
afternoon tea) along with the notion that industrial betterment through, for example,
better ventilation or through well-planned fire evacuation procedures, ensures higher
workforce productivity and hence leads to greater profitability. The Gilbreths’ support for
uniforms (to replace fatigue-inducing Victorian-style clothes) and calls for a consumer
boycott of firms that did not permit their workers properly to rest seem to place the
Gilbreths at both ends of the reformist social spectrum. But Fatigue Study remains their
most adventurous and novel work, drawing as it does most clearly on the application of
motion study and psychology to the many problems of early-twentieth-century industrial
engineering.
After Frank’s death in 1924, Lillian Gilbreth would continue their work to promote the
gospel of efficiency in an increasing number of walks of American life. Her contracts as
the roaring twenties waned seemed largely to become restricted to offers from other
women in industry, however, and her role as a mother of twelve as well as an industrial
engineer promoted in the popular press by her many admirers seemed evermore to restrict
her ability to make a difference in the masculine world (Graham 1998). Lillian moved
away increasingly from management proper and stopped producing innovative theory.
Her Quest for the One Best Way from 1925 was originally penned as a gift for her
husband, her works on home economics (e.g. 1927’s The Homemaker and her Job) a
result of her increasing identification in the public mind with traditional women’s roles
(an identification she herself encouraged; see Gilbreth 1928b). The model kitchens she
designed in the 1930s even seemed to represent a repudiation of Frank Gilbreth’s tenet
(which Lillian was still promoting at the time) that managers could only succeed if they
had a thorough grounding in the industry in which they worked as Lillian had always
loathed cooking. Her raising of eleven children (a twelfth died as an infant) is somewhat
 11

more readily comprehended when taken in light of the scale of her household help which
by 1914 even included two secretaries. She did finally receive her doctorate in 1915 from
Brown University after completing a new dissertation (Gilbreth 1915)—on reducing
waste in teaching (e.g. by having students dispense books to other students, rather than
the teacher doing so)—an achievement that (in a long line of such accomplishments)
made her the first American (male or female) to be awarded a doctoral qualification in
industrial psychology. But much of Lillian Gilbreth’s most influential work would come
to lie outside business management after the death of her husband Frank in 1924.
Some of her contracts from after 1924 have proved the cause of some interest among
management historians, however. Her contract performing market research on the use of
sanitary napkins or tampons for Johnson & Johnson and in reforming both clerical and
sales work at Macy’s Department Store in New York in the later 1920s brought new
insights and methods to bear, but not in terms of publications (Bullough 1985; Graham
2000). Lillian Gilbreth’s involvement with women’s betterment groups saw her hired by
Herbert Hoover to head the women’s section of the his ill-fated President’s Emergency
Committee for Employment (1930-31), a new path in her career which would see Lillian
involved in pioneering (although ultimately unproductive) studies of why American
women were lower paid than men and attempts to lessen discrimination against women
and older workers during the Depression (Lancaster 2004: 273–91). Her reputation was
further enhanced after the publication of two of her children’s childhood memoires as
Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and its rather-less successful sequel Belles on their Toes
(1950). Cheaper by the Dozen (which owes its title to a quip of Frank’s about why he and
his wife had decided to have twelve children) made Frank and Lillian seem rather
comical, but the success of the book saw the two American management pioneers
immortalised subsequently in not one, but three films (not to mention a
musical)—although the Steve Martin-starring remakes of the 1958 film version of
Cheaper by the Dozen from the 1990s are only very broadly based on (one might say
only ‘inspired by’) the original book (Lang 1950; Rogers, Bucci and Sergel 1959; Lewy
2003; Shankman 2005). Lillian Gilbreth kept up her consulting work after World War II,
though. She had taken up a full professorship at Purdue University in 1935 (which also
hired, in an attempt to feminise the faculty, renowned aviatrix Amelia Earhart at the time)
until her mandatory retirement at age 70. Gilbreth kept working in various roles—from
involvement with the Girl Scouts of America to further work with handicapped persons
(cf. Yost and Gilbreth 1944)—until her second retirement upon her ninetieth birthday in
1968. Her publications from this time range from continued advocations of more
understanding of psychology by managers (Gilbreth and Cook 1949) to renewed
promotions of the many efficiencies that could still to made in modern housekeeping
(Gilbreth et al. 1959). Regularly attending 30 or more conferences each year and
undertaking world-wide speaking tours well into her 80s, Gilbreth died a legend of
American management in 1972, a grandmother to both modern industrial psychology and
work study.
Lillian Gilbreth was a pioneer whose work in management was largely enabled by her
husband. A life-long Republican, she makes a strange candidate as a feminist, however.
The subject of three doctoral dissertations (a fourth has been written on both the
 12

Gilbreths) and even several rambling attempts at post-modern and post-colonial inquiry,
Gilbreth was adamant that if she deserved praise, it was largely because of the pioneering
work and support of her husband (Price 1987; Graham 1992, 1994; Lancaster 1998;
Englander 2000). The biography of her written by her friend Edna Yost in 1949 and her
own autobiography (written, ever-so properly, in the third person) which did not appear
in print until as late as 1990 suggest that her reinterpretation by many subsequent authors
as the greater of the two intellectually confuses her level of education with the nature of
her contribution. Although the author is literally (as well as literarily) dead (cf. Barthes
1967), it seems a strange kind of wisdom to suggest that she should not be taken at her
word. Lillian was certainly a remarkable woman who trail-blazed possibilities which long
remained closed to her many successors (often even well after her death) and was widely
hailed later during her lifetime for her pioneering work as a humanitarian as well as an
industrial engineer. But her contributions to management theory were mostly achieved as
a demure, wifely, if considerable foil to her husband’s intellectual and commercial
audacity. Inundated by accolades later in her lifetime—from honorary doctorates to
industry awards and medals—her status as a feminist is unorthodox and marginal. It is
quite clear that she saw herself largely as a promoter and continuer of her husband
Frank’s work, no matter what later admirers may have made of her.
The Gilbreths’ influence in the further development of work study continued on well
into the 1930s and after the war, works such as Ralph Barnes’s Motion and Time Study (a
reworking of his 1933 Cornell dissertation on micro-motion study) going through seven
editions between 1937 and 1980, and Benjamin Niebel’s similar Motion and Time Study
passing through as many as eight from 1955–88. At a centennial celebration of the life of
Frank Gilbreth organised by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1968,
motion study was even credited as essential to the US space program, while oddities such
as Gilbrethian Therbligs still appear in works on industrial engineering (even as “thought
therbligs”) today (cf. Ryker 1969; Aft 2000: 109–17; Lehto and Buck 2008: 248–49).
Indeed one recent study of the legacy of the Gilbreths on contemporary process
management has even suggested that their seminal work in the field—and particularly the
emphasis on psychology stressed by Lillian—still holds lessons for quality systems
which obtain today (Mousa and Lemak 2009). A collection of their films made in 1944
under the sponsorship for the Chicago branch of the Society for the Advancement of
Management (as the Taylor Society had been renamed in 1931) is now available on the
internet (Perkins, Gilbreth and Barnes 1944) and (time and) motion study software can be
purchased today, advertisers proclaiming its suitability for use both in industrial
management and in sport science.
Many of the psychological aspects of the work of Gilbreths were to be developed
further (and often in more or less ignorance of Lillian’s seminal contribution) in the wake
of the emergence of the human relations school of Kurt Lewin and Elton Mayo. Indeed
according to some schools of thought, personnel management in its psychologically
influenced form represents a fundamental, indeed paradigmatic (in the sense of Kuhn
1962) break with scientific management. From this perspective the Gilbreths can be seen
(like Mary Follett) to represent a bridge between (orthodox) Taylorism and the human
relations movement that was to dominate much American academic management
 13

discourse after the Second World War (cf. Price 1987: 5–6; Wren and Bedeian 2009:
331).
Above all, though, the work of the Gilbreths represents a very modernist form of
rationalisation, of the measuring, categorisation, recording and governing of work, work
methods, employees and processes. If Michel Foucault (cf. esp. Foucault 1991) was right
to claim that the essential feature of modernity is an increasing rise in social governance
through the relentless expansion of knowledge then the motion studies and uses of
psychology stressed by the Gilbreths would seem to represent one of the most
pronounced forms of the governance of production in the history of management thought
(cf. Price 1987: 12). Taylor’s mental revolution entailed recourse to a ‘science’ of
management as the ultimate arbiter of work processes, of deciding who would direct
production and how it would be done. The committing of processes (and indeed the
governance of bodies) to writing and film would be Taylorised more completely under
Frank Gilbreth’s motion study while workers would be enrolled more fully into the new
labour process by the equally coercive and ideologised Taylorisation of their minds
through the encouragement of Lillian’s much more obviously teacherly psychology of
management.
The most colourful contributors to scientific management (albeit stemming from the
black and white era), Frank and Lillian Gilbreth remain the best known American
management pioneers after Taylor. In recent years Lillian has come to overshadow her
inspirational husband, however, and not just because of the longevity of her educational
and consulting career. As productive as they were unconventional, the Gilbreths represent
the most complete rationalisers of the scientific management movement. Yet they also
worked just as vigorously (and moreover inventively) to extend Taylorism beyond its
primary focus on improving productivity to industrial betterment and social inclusivity,
promoting safer, happier and above all more humane (even if still rather paternalistic)
work places as advocates of the ‘good exception’ to what they saw as part of the less
admirable side of orthodox Taylorism.

Bibliographical note

Spriegel and Myers (1953) collects their key works. A somewhat odd attempt at a
bibliography of writings by and on the Gilbreths is available in Cowan (2003); Price
(1987) provides a fuller survey to 1987, supplemented by Lancaster (2004). Their
unpublished papers are held in the Frank and Lillian Gilbreth Library of Management in
the Archives and Special Collections of Purdue University.

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 14

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 16

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