Scientific Management

Then and Now

Overview
• Understand its inclusion and synthesis of critiques from:
• Its roots in Taylorism
• The Human Relations movement
• Post-Bureaucratic Reforms
• Identify the core definition of scientific management.
• Be able to identify how it can vary and why.
Notes on History of Management!
• Identifying neat “theories of management” is difficult, as they rarely come in an
ideal-typical form. Furthermore, they are rarely even written down… (Bruce 2015)
• Often actual management practices reflect a combination of:
• Individual Management Philosophy’s (Segal and Bruce 2017)
• Training and Education Institutions (Bruce and Nyland 2011)
• Sector and Professional Organisations (Bruce 2015)
• Popular Media (Pagel and Westerfelhaus 2019)
• Experience and Reflection (Greenall 2004)
• The scientific approach has never fundamentally been dislodged as a paradigm.
But it has changed and integrated critiques! Difficult to think of different overall
approaches – more one approach adapting a range of methods (Peaucelle, 2000)!
Start of Scientific Management with
Taylorism (Peaucelle, 2000)
• Developed through world wars in France and America. In particular,
with the move towards increasingly mechanised forms of production.
• Emerged and matured in a period of intensive worker movements.
• Furthermore, occurred at a time of significant unskilled migration from rural
spaces in Europe.
• Associated significantly periods of intensive growth in standardised
products. This remains its speciality!
Taylorism’s Core Features
• Taylorism defined the initial elements of scientific management.
• It took (you guessed it) a scientific approach to the workplace. It outlined a clear
objective and measured tasks and outcomes in relation to this (Peaucelle, 2000).
• Key measurement was productivity the ratio of labour time to value created.
• Drew heavily on management accounting tools to make decisions.
• Specifically sought to deskill the production process (Jones, 2000),
• Made roles more simplistic and interchangeable.
• Increased capacity for both measurement and engineering, create an "average worker" through
the removal of worker discretion and limit role of motivation.
• Did identify that good management required cooperation between labour and
capital and appealed to the potential for mutual gain to do so. Sharing the gains of
growth considered positive!
• This included worker innovation, selection, and training – although these parts were often
ignored... (Crowley et al., 2010).
First Challenge? Human Relations (Bruce
and Nyland, 2011)
• Human Relations approach was the first popular theoretical challenge
to scientific management.
• The emphasis of the approach was two-fold
• Offering a new way to increasing productivity.
• Identifying a new way to develop labor-capital cooperation.
• Highlighted that meeting people's social needs produced identify,
stability, and satisfaction – and therefore - facilitated cooperation and
voluntary additional contributions.
Human Relations
• The approach was first formulated to integrate the "irrational" elements
of human nature, and specifically identified itself against similar
discussions in democratically involving workers which were ongoing in
the Taylor Society (Bruce, 2013).
• It drew significant inspiration on psychological approaches to controlling
workers. Specifically attempting to make workers adjust cognitively and
emotionally to work, not just physically (Bruce and Nyland, 2011).
• Not really the first challenge… Taylorism had already begun to identify
its own issues throughout world wars due to conflict with workers
(Bruce and Nyland, 2011).
Human Resource Management
• Became integrated into scientific management with the rise of the service
economy, decline of trade unions through the institutionalization and
professionalization of Human Resource Management as a key way to manage
labor.
• Primary argument is that it can actively increase both retention of workers and
engagement through specialist approaches too:
• Training for Employee Development
• Performance Management to shape reward management, promotion and manage employee
conduct.
• Specialist methods of Recruitment and Employee Engagement.
• Has begun to identify a specialist contribution to firm productivity in the form of
non-replicable elements of production to be found in highly motivated workers
with capacity to engage in discretion (Harvey and Turnbull, 2020).
Contribution of Human Resource
Management
• Emphasized alternative way to approach management to achieve
aims:
• Psychology rather than Engineering, although it remains broadly scientific it
moves from the measurement of time/energy to a strong focus on
engagement and motivation.
• Developing workers. Though it is not necessarily against deskilling of
processes, it does provide a wider space for workers discretion and sees
autonomy as a space for efficiency gains.
• Cooperation moves from recognizing and solving antagonistic relationships
through sharing to trying to remove antagonism through the development of
shared sense of belonging.
Second Challenge! Post-Bureucracy (Johnson
et al., 2009)
• Least developed challenge. Has become highly pronounced in a few
industries but no singular core and tends to be isolated to specific
teams.
• Did not emerge solely within management, but from a broad reaction
to bureaucracy in multiple environments which had existed for well
over a century. Trends emerged which led to it being taken as a
practical idea though:
• Increasing number of educated workers altering authority of managers.
• Outsourcing supporting intensive flexible specialization.
• The view that the development of organizational cultures had worked.
Workers as Experts (Johnson 2009)
• Workers should have more autonomy. Can develop and manage their
own work with little direction.
• Managers have less of a role than past. Workers are literally expected
to appropriate elements of management responsibility.
• Outcome is can rely more on networks to organize, assumed to have
both an intrinsic worth due to allowing voluntary association
driven decision making and focus on socialized accountability. Rooted
in open communicative trust with peers.
Strong critique!! But is it real…
• Management as an act and function still exists in post-bureaucratic
organizations. Just not always as a clear job role (Josserand, Teo and
Clegg, 2006).
• This has an impact on how power actually changes (Brown et al.,
2010; Torsteinsen, 2012):
• Coordination roles still typically needed, individuals in these roles have a
natural social and logical authority which is difficult to displace.
• Driven by the fact that key concern is not workers day to day self-
management, but instead their adherence to long-term goals.
• Paradoxically often requires increasing surveillance of more complex
autonomous activity to manage coordination.
Reality today?
• Autonomy is getting more common as part of team level management, but "networked
organizations" are very rare in practice (Josserand, Teo and Clegg, 2006).
• Has this just made personality more important… (Brown et al., 2010; Maravelias, 2009;
Townley, Beech and McKinlay, 2009).
• Networks often governed by cliques giving multiple sources of reputation, individuals' aspirations
and power being traded, combines in and out work status.
• These are given from society and within a specific industry and all potential sources for
discrimination and paternalism and recognition of difference and innovation.
• Personality is more invisible and difficult to challenge. New workers need to understand an
uncodified "organizational memory" to be effective.
• Future with unskilled workers?
• Elements of post-bureaucracy common in "managerless" platform-based industries. These tend to
be low-value, highly exploitative, with high levels of surveillance despite trusting worker to
manage their own work (Purcell and Brook, 2020).
Neo-Taylorism
Scientific Management Today
Emergence of neo-Taylorism (Crowley et al.,
2010 and Peaucelle, 2000)
• The initial focus on growth in Taylorism became less valuable as we saw changes in the
structure of competition (are you not glad I taught you specialisation now...)
• Quality
• Diversification
• Flexibility

these objectives [are] unattainable without adversely affecting efficiency. Increasing stock
would be the only way to shorten delivery periods, which is costly in the case of a limited
product range and becomes more prohibitive as the product range is diversified. Diversity
would also appear to be very expensive as it reduces the size of the manufactured series.
Quality would seem attainable only by means of increased inspection points, which are also
costly, and only possible with the help of qualified, rare and thus more expensive personnel.
Flexibility would also appear to be contradictory to heavy and rigid investments in heavy
industrial equipment itself purchased to lower prices. (Peaucelle 2000, p.7)
New Methods (Peaucelle, 2000)
The new approaches to
match objectives
increasingly draw on the
critiques of Taylorism to
function.

In this way scientific

management has integrated
the logic of alternatives into
itself to support specific
approaches to
management.
Scientific Management is
Diverse (Peaucelle, 2000)
• There is a consistent thread in its development, scientifically engineering
production towards clear objectives.
• The methods change continuously to match the structure of competition.
• This has created contradictions in methods of management. Often hard to
combine overall aims and the usage of individual methods.
• For example. Deskilling is increasingly complex due to an increasing need to use
skilled (and professional) workers whose roles are difficult to engineer or measure.
• In this situation drawing on different approaches is essential to maintaining
the management relationship depending on methods required!
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