Journal of Management History

Labor at the Taylor Society: scientific management and a proactive approach to increase diversity for
effective problem solving
Hindy Lauer Schachter,
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Hindy Lauer Schachter, "Labor at the Taylor Society: scientific management and a proactive approach to increase diversity
for effective problem solving", Journal of Management History, https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-06-2017-0031
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 Labor at the Taylor Society: Scientific Management and a Proactive
Approach to Increase Diversity for Effective Problem Solving

Purpose: The aim of the article is to add information on which voices contributed to the
scientific management narrative from Frederick Taylor’s 1915 death to the early 1930s
with a focus on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to analyze the
role of labor representatives as participants in Taylor Society meetings and publications.
The research contributes to the management history literature by bolstering the picture
of the Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. The research also shows that
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the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the idea that assembling diverse groups
for dialogue improves organizational problem solving.
Design/methodology/approach: The research analyzes historical sources including all
issues of the Bulletin of the Taylor Society from 1914 to 1933 as well as unpublished
material from the Morris Cooke papers at the Franklin Roosevelt archive and the papers
in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Findings: Taylor Society leaders took a proactive view of encouraging labor voices to
join managers and academics in Society meetings. At the beginning, few labor leaders
spoke at the Society and often at least some of their comments were critical of scientific
management. By 1925 labor participation increased with William Green, American
Federation of Labor president, appearing several times. In addition, labor leaders
became positively inclined to having scientific management experts working in industrial
settings. The labor leaders who participated at Taylor Society meetings in the late
1920s and early 1930s considered scientific management insights useful for labor and
wanted to cooperate in research projects.
Originality/value – The article augments a revisionist view of interwar scientific
management as progressive and pro-labor, a contested point in the management
history literature. The research also shows how the Taylor Society was an early
proponent of the importance of diversity, at least in the areas of gender and
socioeconomic status, to effective problem solving,.
Paper type: Research paper.
Keywords: Taylor Society, Frederick Taylor, scientific management, labor

1
 Introduction
This article is an attempt to add information on which voices constructed the scientific
management narrative from the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s death to the early
1930s with a focus is on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to
analyze the role of labor representatives as participants in the Taylor Society. Formed
as the Society to Promote the Science of Management in 1911 by a group of managers
and engineers who wanted to preserve Frederick Taylor’s approach to solving
management problems (Brown, 1925), the Society was renamed in his honor after
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Taylor’s death in 1915. In exploring the activities of the Taylor Society, the article
contributes to the management history literature by bolstering a revisionist view of the
Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. It also shows that the Society was an
early proponent of the idea that including diverse groups of people in dialogue can give
an organization better problem solving skills due to the different life experiences of its
participants. At least one contemporary diversity management textbook says that this
approach to diversity largely emerged in the 1990s but the Taylor Society had accepted
its basic premise about 75 years before that decade (Canas and Sondak, 2012).
As Clark and Rowlinson (2004) have noted, history is both a set of actions and the
disparate stories various interpreters construct to explain those actions. For that reason
interpretation is at the core of any management history narrative influencing which
historical documents and which facts in those documents scholars consider in
constructing a sense of the past (Stivers, 1999). Interpretation has been particularly
important in constructing the various narratives scholars used to explain the
consequences of Frederick Taylor’s ideas for twentieth and early twenty-first century
management. Few, if any, social theories have been the
subject of greater interpretive divergence than scientific management. During Taylor’s
lifetime his ideas attracted both strong opponents and adherents (Sub-committee on
Administration, 1912). During much of the second half of the twentieth century
opposition to Taylorism dominated the social sciences; scholars portrayed his attempt to
improve efficiency as a plot to rob workers of their skills (Braverman, 1974)—a view that
gained prominence based on its espousal in various management textbooks. In this
view, Taylor’s disciples “became stern taskmasters, stop-watch in hand, pushing

2
 workers?to do more with less (Dent and Bozeman, 2014, p. 148). However, as early as
the 1950s some labor history scholars argued that on the contrary after World War I a
period of greater cooperation arose between scientific management and organized
labor (McKelvey 1952, Nadworny, 1955). By the 1990s revisionist scholars concluded
that scientific management actually constituted an honest attempt to share mutual gains
(Nyland 1998, Simha and Lemak, 2010).
While historical research depends on using archival sources or texts as a
methodology to reconstruct the past (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker 2014; Decker
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2013), researchers cannot assume that archives tell the story of their times. Scholars
must approach historical documents in a spirit of methodological reflexivity which
acknowledges that archives always contain partial information. They are evidentiary
fragments which reflect the socio-politics of knowledge production in the era of their
composition (Durepos and Mills 2012, Lipartito 2014). At any time only some historical
actors were able to speak up about transactions which concerned them in a forum that
someone preserved; other voices had to remain silent for lack of forums to express their
views. Archives that allow contemporary researchers to fully understand the rules
gatekeepers set for gaining access to forums such as journals and conferences are rare
(Decker 2013). While researchers can only use documents that survive (they cannot
create new ones for people silenced in their own time), scholars want an understanding
of how interested parties constructed forums that support a given historical narrative
(Yates, 2014). Pertinent questions include: How did gatekeepers involved in preparing
documents such as journal articles award access? Who did they invite into the dialogue
and hence allow to leave traces of their views? (Whittle and Wilson, 2015). This
approach to document analysis means exploring content and authorship to ascertain
which perspectives the documents omit as well as which they contain. A broad-based
approach allows us to understand which populations were allowed to participate in
document creation and which voices were absent (Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker,
2014). Scholars need to ascertain the network of actors that contributed to producing
knowledge (Hartt, Mills and Mills 2012) as well as the negotiations that worked to
construct that network and make it seem as if all relevant actors agreed on what
happened at a given time (Durepos and Smith, 2012). If these networks are restricted

3
 by gender or class, the result may be a document that discounts how traditionally
underrepresented voices viewed a given phenomenon.
Contemporary scholars are not the only people to understand that when dialogue
includes participants from diverse backgrounds this heterogeneity yields a more
rounded perspective on social issues. While the Taylor Society’s original members were
all men who held managerial/professional positions, its leaders understood from the
start that they needed to expand demographics to fully understand and solve
management problems. In 1916, the Society’s bulletin noted that participation by
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women would be useful, particularly for discussing management in female dominated

areas such as nursing (Coming Meetings, 1916). Research has shown that the Society
reached out to female professionals especially after 1919 and that women played a role
in Society deliberations and governance in the 1920s and 1930s. The Society’s bulletin
published female authored articles each year both on topics relating to women-
dominated professions and on generic managerial issues. Other bulletin authors cited
female-authored work. Women served on the Society’s board of directors and in key
groups such as the nominating committee although they never constituted a majority of
the membership or of any committee on which they served (Schachter, 2002). Indeed in
1921, when the Society had 654 members not more than 30 were female.
Early in the Society’s history members also raised the need to include the voice of
labor. Louis Brandeis raised the issue as early as October 1915 when he noted with
regret the absence of labor representatives at the Society’s meetings and urged that
Society leaders pay attention to getting greater diversity (October meeting, 1915). Two
years later Harlow Person (1917a), who became the Taylor Society’s managing director
in 1919, articulated a need to include managers, workers and social scientists in the
discussion with workers defined as employees of any firm as well as representatives of
organized labor. He argued that no one of these groups could understand “the whole
truth” and each group’s voice would be “complimentary (sic) to and essential to the
other” (p. 2). At a subsequent discussion, Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard
Law School, agreed that the Society needed the voice of labor. He argued that
managers and executives could not represent workers no matter how conscientious a
given manager might be (Person, 1917b). This proposal received more contentious

4
 debate than the suggestion to include women with some discussants expressing
reservations based on whether workers had enough knowledge and education to
participate.
Several recent research streams have shown that the Taylor Society in the interwar
years supported pro-labor policies. Case studies show that particular business
executives who were active in the Taylor Society fostered pro-labor policies in their
enterprises (Bruce 2015, Goldberg 1992). Other scholars have analyzed similarities
between policies espoused by the Society and union leaders (Nyland and Heenan,
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2005; Nyland, Bruce and Burns, 2014)). Schachter (1989) showed how Taylor acolytes
brought pro-labor perspectives to the public sector. Field (1995) argued that social
democrats within the Taylor Society allied with unionists to institutionalize state-
sanctioned collective bargaining. Nyland (1995) examined Taylor Society members’ role
in justifying an eight-hour work day. These research streams undergird a picture of the
Society’s business executives and management professionals as a progressive force in
interwar industrial relations. However, they do not focus on any role labor
representatives had as participants in Society endeavors. Indeed, some aspects of
Society membership policy—such as the use of blackballs to eliminate prospective
members—could have suggested a desire by the leadership to limit labor participation.
Research on gender has shown that women did play a role in Taylor Society endeavors.
A need exists for similar research to examine what role, if any, labor, played to
complement perspectives of managers and scholars. This need is particularly
compelling because at the core of the controversies over the legacy of scientific
management are its consequences for labor. To ascertain how labor perceived these
consequences it is insufficient to show that professionals affiliated with the Society held
Progressive views of industrial relations in the interwar period. One also wants to learn
whether members of the labor community participated in Taylor Society forums.
This article explores the role of labor representatives at the Taylor Society through
examining their role in activities and ideas that were reported in the Society’s journal.
From 1914 to 1933 the Society published a bulletin, generally with five or six issues
each year. Each issue included articles (many of which authors had already presented
as papers at Society conferences), excerpts from meeting discussions, comments from

5
 the editor, and book reviews. This Bulletin of the Taylor Society is a key document
management historians can use to understand which voices contributed to the scientific
management narrative from Taylor’s death to the early 1930s. By examining all of the
bulletins researchers can answer similar questions to those asked in earlier analysis on
the role of women at the Society. Such questions include: Did Taylor Society bulletins
include articles written by labor representatives? Did labor representatives participate in
meeting discussions? If they did participate as authors and discussants, what did they
say? Did their point of view agree with that espoused by managers and scholars or did
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they have a particular viewpoint on key industrial issues? Did labor representatives
attain positions on committees and the Society’s board of directors? The study ends
examination of the bulletins in the early 1930s because at that time their format
changed with, for example, elimination of reports on meeting discussions an important
part of earlier bulletins. In 1936, the Taylor Society merged with the Society of Industrial
Engineers to form the Society for the Advancement of Management which published its
own journal.
Ideally researchers should be able to supplement the bulletin analysis by access to
Taylor Society archives to learn how the group’s leaders granted access to the
meetings and journal publication. Such analysis might help to validate the
representativeness of any labor officials claiming to speak for workers at the Society.
Unfortunately, the president of the Society for the Advancement of Management (SAM),
the Taylor Society’s successor organization, informed me that his group has no such
archive. As a substitute, the author analyzed unpublished documents from the archive
holding the papers of Morris Cooke, a Taylor Society founder and president and, letters
from Taylor society members in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of
Technology. These archives include a number of letters that deal with interactions
between society officials and labor representatives. Authors include a wide range of
people including Harlow Person, the society’s managing director, and William Green,
the American Federation of Labor (AFL) president. As Simha and Lemak (2010) have
noted, it is important to consult original source documents in trying to reconstruct the
tenor of early twentieth century management history; research based on reading

6
 textbook accounts or modern synopses is not likely to provide a balanced in-depth
picture.
The article is divided into three sections. The first uses the Taylor Society’s bulletin
to examine labor participation in Society endeavors; it reports growing participation after
1925 along with greater cordiality of labor participants to scientific management. The
second section analyzes these findings in relation to the representativeness of labor
participation at the Society and other issues raised by contemporary diversity
management theory. The final section offers conclusions.
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Labor Representatives at Taylor Society Forums

The earliest appearance of a labor representative in the Taylor Society’s bulletin
occurred in 1917 when Abraham J. Portenar spoke in a discussion on instructions and
individualism in industry (Control and Consent, 1917). Portenar had an active union
background; he had chaired a strike committee for New York Typographical Union No. 6
and served on its pension committee although at the time he spoke to the Taylor
Society he was no longer a printer but rather superintendent of New York State’s
Bureau of Employment. He had a longstanding interest and relation to the use of
scientific management in industry. Two years previously in preparing for federal
Industrial Relations Commission hearings, Frederick Taylor had asked Portenar to visit
plants rationalized under shop management (Nyland, 1998). In his remarks at the Taylor
Society, Portenar acknowledged that labor and the supporters of scientific management
saw some issues from the same angle but, he argued against the use of scientific
management, saying “I am an enemy of the Taylor system?You have too much system
and too little humanizing” (p. 14).
At a 1919 meeting, a worker spoke during a discussion on industrial relations
although the bulletin editors did not record his statements (Felix Frankfurter et al 1919).
In the same year, Rolland Cornick, an arsenal employee, became the first bylined co-
author from labor ranks (Cornick and Otterson 1919). In a short article, he noted that the
most significant aspect of his publishing in the bulletin was that he gave labor’s point of
view. He then argued against company unions and for more democracy at work even
going so far as to say that America might go the way of Russia if labor’s prospects did

7
 not change. He argued that workers wanted greater efficiency but they needed to
benefit from the enhanced production.
Labor representatives continued to make rare appearances in the next few years as
discussants at meetings. In 1920, Margaret Bonfield of Great Britain’s National
Federation of Women Workers said she had come to the meeting to learn if the Taylor
Society’s research could do anything to lighten the worker’s load. She acknowledged
that workers were critical of scientific management - sometimes even finding its
introduction into factories dangerous - although they favored greater efficiency. She
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argued that labor wanted a scientific management that would provide a partnership for
workers and thought good for labor might come out of Taylor Society research on job
insecurity and unemployment (Distinguished guests speak, 1920). Aldo Cursi, a union
organizer, spoke out against company unions (Discussion of the preceding papers,
1920). Portenar contributed to a discussion on waste in 1922 where he disputed the
contention that workers deliberately restricted output and argued that the way for
companies to get worker enthusiasm was to give them a share in management
(Discussion, 1922).
By the mid-1920s, however, a change in emphasis at the Taylor Society coincided
with increased labor participation. Although the original members had formed the
organization to promote better management techniques, Society leaders now realized
that “promoting technique requires looking at industrial conditions and social values”
(Comment ,1926). To advance the field the technical engineer had to give attention to
human relations including problems created by low wages and unemployment (Brown
1925). Focus on such social problems turned the Society into “an imaginative forum” for
macroeconomic coordination and stimulated labor participation (Alchon 1992, p. 120). In
1924, a member of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union led a discussion on scientific
management and workers at the annual Society meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(Spring meeting, 1924). In 1925, two of five discussants for a paper on factory
reorganization came from union ranks, the first time the union movement produced
multiple cited participants in a single discussion. Even more noteworthy William Green,
American Federation of Labor (AFL) president spoke at the December 1925 meeting.
This was a historic occasion noted by major newspapers such as the Wall Street

8
 Journal and New York World. Green (1925) began his remarks by accentuating that
both labor and management consultants had to erase years of prejudice against the
other. He then argued that management had to learn to deal with independent rather
than company created unions, a contested issue at the time.
In 1926 the Society published three papers on union-management cooperation in
railroads. One article came from the head of the AFL’s railway employees department
who had cooperated with consulting engineer, Otto Beyer - a Taylor Society member -
to negotiate an agreement at the Baltimore & Ohio railroad where the company
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recognized collective bargaining and the union collaborated in developing and

implementing shop floor efficiency measures (Jewell 1926, Field 1995). The bulletin
noted that Hugh Frayne, an Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers’ member and AFL
organizer who had chaired the labor division of the War Industries Board during the first
world war was in the audience (Comment, 1926).
In 1927, the journal published a four-paper symposium on eliminating waste in
industry. Two pieces were by union leaders - one of whom was AFL president, William
Green who stressed a need for management-labor cooperation (Green 1927, Geiges
1927). Green also served as a discussant for a 1928 paper on raising wages (Williams
1928). A 1929 letter from him appeared in the bulletin urging those people planning the
Fourth International Management Conference in Paris to invite workers to give
managers the benefit of their advice - exactly what the Taylor Society was allowing him
to do. In 1930 the bulletin published three articles on experiments to reduce unit costs at
the Naumkeag textile mill in Massachusetts; one paper expressed the view of the
secretary of the United Textile Workers of America (O’Connell 1930). In 1933, Fannia
Cohen from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union contributed one of three
papers for a symposium on economic security.
At least as interesting as the increase in participation is a shift in labor tone. While
many of the earliest labor participants were critical of aspects of scientific management,
the speakers in the mid- 1920s and early 1930s are much more positive and in favor of
cooperating with the Society. AFL organizer Frayne thought the Taylor Society papers
offered a genuine solution to labor problems and used the word “safe” to characterize
social thought among contemporary engineers (Comment, 1925). Gustave Geiges

9
 (Discussion 1929, p. 21), branch president of the American Federation of Full
Fashioned Hosiery Workers, exemplified the new trend when he said that the hosiery
workers’ union wanted Taylor Society experts to solve problems in the industry. In his
opinion, their knowledge would help capital and labor reach a better path of co-
existence. Fannia Cohen (1933) acknowledged that the Taylor Society had contributed
to increasing productivity and hoped that it could now devise a way to distribute the
wealth more equitably.
This new found harmony does not mean that labor participants did not have their
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own point of view on certain issues that set them apart from other discussants. All labor
participants who spoke at Taylor Society meetings opposed the use of company unions
in strong terms. They insisted that labor had to choose its own representatives and
organizations. Other participants varied in their viewpoint with few as strongly opposed
as the labor leaders. Sometimes this divergence led to strong back and forth argument
among discussants. At one point, a personnel manager at one of the meetings
reminded a labor speaker that company sponsored organizations were not the only
labor groups that could become corrupt and dictatorial (Gilson 1920) . But, in general,
the labor leaders saw cooperation with Taylor Society managers and academics as a
good path for workers. Gone are any of the earlier comments bemoaning that a lack of
humanization characterizes scientific management. In 1927, an International Labor
Organization study acknowledged that “workers have become warm adherents of the
doctrine of rationalization” (Thomas, 1927, p. xi).
Taylor Society executives seem to have recognized the shift to greater harmony
when they appointed Geiges, a labor representative, to a 19 member committee
charged with developing a code for employer-employee relations. When the code
appeared, it gained union plaudits for endorsing an eight-hour day and employment
continuity, two outcomes which workers then saw as important progressive benefits. In
discussion at Taylor Society meetings, John O’Connell from the United Textile Workers
called it a good beginning for a human-relations code. John Edelman of the American
Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers declared that the code exceeded actual
practice - to an extent that might make it difficult to implement. In her review, Rose
Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League concluded, “It is a pleasant

10
 experience, therefore, to read this code.” Her summation was that “The Taylor Society
is doing an admirable job” (Industrial Employment Code 1931, p. 30). AFL president
Green (1931) considered the code to be “a real contribution to standards of personnel
relations.”

Discussion
resent-day diversity management textbooks and courses generally consider that
aspects of difference relevant to human resource planning include gender, race,
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ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age and socioeconomic status. From its
earliest days the Taylor Society espoused the benefit for disseminating scientific
management in increasing the diversity of those who participated in its meetings by
gender and socioeconomic status. In the mid-1920s the Society also attempted to
increase age diversity by consciously placing both younger and older members on
committees and on the Society’s board of directors (Comment, 1924). In these areas,
Society executives understood the need to gain multiple perspectives to make the best
decisions. No evidence exists, however, that the Society tried in any way to increase
other types of diversity including race although integrating immigrant ethnic and
religious groups was a major issue for the Progressive reform movement with which
many Taylor Society leaders had ties. Thus, a contemporary reader would most likely
find the Taylor Society’s diversity awareness partial.
Contemporary research suggests that including people with diverse backgrounds
can improve an organization’s problem solving abilities (Bell, 2012). Because people
use information from their identity-group experiences and affiliations to understand
problems, having different perspectives at the table increases the information that
problem solvers can include (Canas and Sondak, 2014). The Taylor Society stands out
as an early example of an organization that understood that any given person’s
background limited his or her perspective to a certain path. To obtain a reasonably
complete understanding of social issues an organization needed to encourage dialogue
among diverse constituencies. Thus, when a union member rose at a Taylor Society
meeting to give his view of a company project, a manager in the audience noted that in
this case who was speaking was even more interesting than what was being said

11
 (Bruere 1926). Harlow Person (1930) explicitly noted that he put Geiges on the
industrial code committee to give organized labor’s point-of-view. Person (1929) was so
confident that this move yielded better solutions that he urged other professional
organizations studying industrial changes also to put an AFL official on their
committees.
At the same time, contemporary diversity research suggests that at least in the short
run diversity can lead some participants to find communication more difficult as in a
diverse organization communicating occurs across group boundaries (Bell 2014). The
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prior section of this article delineated some instances of sharp discourse between
managers and labor officials over the issue of company unions. There is evidence in
letters that were never meant for public perusal that at least some Society leaders who
were Christian were uncomfortable interacting with some of the Jewish participants
(Cooke, 1926). The Society sought gender and socioeconomic diversity despite these
upsets because it valued getting multiple perspectives on industrial issues.
A question can be asked about the representativeness of the labor officials who
participated in Taylor Society endeavors. Did they represent widespread labor
sentiment or did they constitute a small non-representative sample specifically chosen
for window dressing by Taylor Society leaders? Taylor Society leaders had extensive
interaction with labor officials even before America’s entry into World War I. In 1911,
Morris Cooke guided John Tobin, the Boot and Shoe Makers Union president through
Philadelphia plants using scientific management to show the researchers actual
relationships with workers. During the war, Cooke participated in government councils
with AFL president, Samuel Gompers and Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW)
president, Sidney Hillman (McKelvery, 1952; Fraser, 1991). In 1920, Morris Cooke co-
edited a volume on productivity with Gompers, and American Society of Mechanical
Engineers president, Fred Miller, who had started his career as a toolmaker (Cooke,
Gompers and Miller, 1920). The editors designed the contributor list to represent
viewpoints both of organized labor and scientific management researchers; contributors
included union officials such as Rolland Cornick and Hugh Frayne who would later
appear at Taylor Society meetings. Hillman’s biographer says that Cooke and Hillman
viewed each other as “kindred spirits” (Fraser 1991, p. 173); Hillman welcomed Cooke’s

12
 invitation to start a relationship between ACW and the Taylor Society’s production
experts.
Given these early interactions Taylor Society leaders had a roster of potential labor
officials who could be asked to give talks at Society meetings or partake in discussions.
Records show that Taylor Society presidents and the managing director discussed
which labor personnel to invite to speak at Society conferences and who would be
unsuitable usually concentrating on how well a particular union leader knew the topic
under discussion (Cooke, 1927a and b). To this extent it is accurate to say that the labor
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officials appearing at Taylor Society meetings were a group handpicked by people with
managerial or professional backgrounds. But the participants’ claim to represent a
distinctive labor view still stands because of their position in the labor movement. Many
held high elected positions in their unions. William Green was the AFL president in the
mid-1920s, a position hardly allotted by managerial fiat. That he held such an important
position showed that he had the trust of a significant labor segment.
It should be noted that some union people who spoke at Society conferences had
left their union positions and were actually working in government or industry when they
appeared. Abraham Portenar was a New York State administrator when he spoke at the
Taylor Society although he had previously had a vigorous career organizing workers
and overseeing strikes for the printer’s union. Gustave Geiges resigned his presidency
of the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers in spring 1929 and
became the welfare manager at the unionized Gotham plant in Pennsylvania so he did
not hold a union position for his last Taylor Society appearances (Scranton 1989).
These protean career shifts, however, did not negate the long experience as labor
organizers that Portenar and Geiges brought to the Society’s meetings. When union
leader, Gustave Geiges, reminded his audience that he had started working as a textile
mill knitter at 14, he brought a new set of experiences into the meeting room even if he
was no longer a knitter at the time he spoke.
Finally, we need to understand that no one person or small group of individuals could
have represented all of labor on some issues since labor was divided on the best
strategies to achieve its aims. The same multiplicity of opinions arose for women at the
Taylor Society where some speakers such as Rose Schneiderman applauded the

13
 industrial code’s endorsement of no night work for women while a National Woman’s
Party participant, Jane Norman Smith, assailed the endorsement as enshrining
inequality and hurting women’s chances to gain employment (Industrial Employment
Code 1931).
In a critique of scientific management, public administration scholar, Dwight Waldo
(1948, p. 173) argued that with its doctrine of one-best way and its constant search for
facts, Taylorism’s proponents came to think that “people are fundamentally the same”
and facts exist apart from the perspectives of fact-finding people. If this interpretation of
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scientific management described the Taylor Society, its leaders would not have cared to
enlarge their perspective by recruiting female or labor leader participants as they would
have assumed that all people attending their meetings would have viewed industrial
reality from the same lens. This view of interwar scientific management cannot stand
once researchers take into account the Taylorists multi-year campaign to enlarge labor
participation at their meetings and as writers for their publications. Scientific
management leaders understood that life experiences affect which facts individuals
consider salient.

Conclusions
The record shows that the Taylor Society welcomed the participation of a group of
highly placed labor leaders at its meetings as speakers, discussants and as contributors
of articles to its journal. The Society appointed one union leader, Gustave Geiges, to a
key committee writing an industrial employment code. While these actions ensured
labor a voice at the Society, they hardly gave labor a numerically equal position with
managers or academics as presenters, discussants or committee members. Although
the Society never set official labor quotas, in practice limits existed to labor influence at
the group’s forums. As with women participants, labor voices at the Taylor Society
always constituted a minority. Most speakers and discussants came from academic and
managerial ranks. Geiges was one voice among 19 on his committee. Although some
women served as Society officers and board members, the Society’s leaders never
offered such honors to union representatives. Readers can get some idea of labor’s
participation rate simply by seeing the number of the six yearly bulletin issues in which

14
 labor articles, discussion comments or reviews appeared each year from 1925-1931
(the period of highest labor participation). In both 1925 and 1926 labor representatives
appeared in only two out of six issues. In 1927 and 1928 they appeared in one issue
each while 1929 constitutes the only year in which they are listed in half the issues,
three out of six. In 1930 labor voices appeared again only in one out of six issues, and
in 1931 two out of six issues. The record, therefore, is not one of equality of participation
- either by gender or socioeconomic status. But it is one that shows an organization of
professionals and managers, explicitly reaching out to labor to get underrepresented
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perspectives and augment problem solving. This was a new approach in the 1920s.
Contemporary diversity researchers have been concerned whether adding small
numbers of traditionally underrepresented people to a forum can influence
organizational decision making or whether a critical mass of minority voices is
necessary to spark change. Kanter’s (1977) relatively early corporate case study on
this issue suggested that having token female participation in traditionally male positions
did not lead to changed outcomes since the female officeholders accepted the dominant
group’s positions. However, more recent work on women participating in traditionally
male political positions has made at least some researchers skeptical of the need for a
critical mass to bring about change (Childs and Krook, 2008). While tokenism may
silence minority voices in some cases, several researchers on gender have argued that
size of the admitted cohort is not the only variable affecting influence. Small group
experiments done by Karpowitz, Mendelberg and Shaker (2012) concluded that an
organization’s decision rules as well as the size of the female cohort influenced
women’s role in decision making; when groups required unanimity, even small groups of
women had an important role . More germane to the issue of labor influence at the
Taylor Society a United Nations report concluded that numbers alone do not tell the
whole story because influence also comes from the type of women who participate in
the organization. A small group of traditionally underrepresented people can have
influence if they have experience in decision making and legitimacy within the group
(United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, 2005). While labor never
reached anything close to equality of participation at the Taylor Society its
representatives were eminent in their fields. They had significant experience leading

15
 workers and negotiating on their behalf. Such successful backgrounds could lead to
influence even when the number of labor participants was small. The achievements of
traditionally underrepresented people who enter a new forum matter as well as their
numbers.
The record shows that the Taylor Society was an early practitioner of a proactive
approach to recruiting participants from diverse groups because its leaders assumed
diversity would help the Society make better decisions. The Society’s invitations to
union leaders to participate at meetings provide important evidence refuting a picture of
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advocates of scientific management as anti-union in the interwar years. Anti-union

leaders—or individuals who assumed workers lacked the intelligence to participate in a
meaningful way—would not have envisioned union leader insight as key to solving
industrial problems. In a similar manner, society leaders who believed that facts speak
for themselves would not have sought diligently to enlarge the socioeconomic
background of participants to improve problem solving as was the Taylor Society
practice. Lack of attention to key primary sources such as the Taylor Society’s own
bulletin led some middle to late twentieth century management theorists to posit an anti-
union stance for the group in the interwar period. This article, therefore, concludes by
emphasizing the necessity to analyze primary sources in interpreting the role of
scientific management in American organizational life. Additional information on the
relationship between labor leaders and the Taylor Society could come from examining
labor bulletins to see what role the Society’s leaders played at union conferences.
McKelvey (1952) has noted that the Philadelphia Central Labor Union asked Taylor
Society leaders to speak at its 1927 conference. The invitation itself shows the labor
organization’s desire to continue dialogue with scientific management supporters. A
more intensive examination of such invitations and any resulting articles in labor
journals would be a useful supplement to what management historians can learn from
analyzing the Taylor Society’s bulletin. The extant record shows the importance of
positive interactions between labor leaders and the Taylor Society in the interwar era.

16
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Biographical note

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 Dr. Hindy Lauer Schachter (PhD Columbia University) is a professor in the school of
management at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the author of Reinventing
Government or Reinventing Ourselves: The Role of Citizen Owners in Making a Better
Government (SUNY Press, 1997), Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration
Community: A Reevaluation (SUNY Press, l989), and Public Agency Communication:
Theory and Practice (Nelson Hall, l983. She co-edited with Kaifeng Yang, The State of
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Citizen Participation in America (Information Age Publishing, 2012). Her articles have
appeared in Journal of Management History, Public Administration Review,
Administration and Society, and other journals.

21