The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists 9780199585762, 0199585768

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

M A NAGE M E N T T H EOR ISTS

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the oxford handbook of

MANAGEMENT THEORISTS

Edited by

MORGEN W ITZEL and

M ALCOLM WARNER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2013 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2013 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–958576–2 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Abbreviations

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ix xi xvii

Introduction

1

Morgen Witzel and Malcolm Warner

PA RT I PION E E R S 2

Frederick Winslow Taylor

11

Robert F. Conti

3

Mind, Method, and Motion: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

32

Bernard Mees

4

Henri Fayol

49

Jean-Louis Peaucelle and Cameron Guthrie

5

Mary Parker Follett

74

John Child

6 George Elton Mayo

94

Kyle Bruce

7

Lyndall Urwick

113

Andrew Thomson and John Wilson

8

Chester Barnard and the Systems Approach to Nurturing Organizations Andrea Gabor and Joseph T. Mahoney

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contents

PA RT I I POST-WA R T H E OR IST S 9

The Tavistock Group

155

Frances Abraham

10

Deeply Engaged, Intuitively Analytical and Determinedly Applied: Tom Burns and Joan Woodward in Context but not in Concert

174

Sandra Dawson

11

W. Edwards Deming

196

Milan Zeleny

12

The Life and Diverse Contributions of Dr J. M. Juran

219

Mohamed Zairi

13

Edith Penrose’s Contribution to Economics and Management Scholarship

244

Christos N. Pitelis

14

Peter F. Drucker

271

Peter Starbuck

15

Herbert Alexander Simon: Philosopher of the Organizational Life-World

297

J.-C. Spender

PA RT I I I BUSI N E S S SCHOOL T H E OR IST S 16

Alfred Chandler’s Managerial Revolution: Developing and Utilizing Productive Resources

361

William Lazonick

17

The Aston Studies: A Journey Towards a Science of Administration?

385

Ray Loveridge

18

James March, Richard Cyert, and the Evolving Field of Organizations

407

Mie Augier

19

Geert Hofstede Monir Tayeb

427

contents

20 John Paul Kotter

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448

Karl Moore and Alexandra Klein

21

Henry Mintzberg

462

Morgen Witzel

22

The Competitive Advantage of Michael Porter

480

John Mathews

23

Ikujiro Nonaka

511

Robert Pitkethly

24

Sumantra Ghoshal

527

Susan Segal-Horn

25

C. K. Prahalad

546

Peter J. Williamson and Keeley Wilson

Index

569

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Figures

1.1 A three-dimensional model of management 4.1 Management tools by management element 4.2 Handwritten introduction to the fourth part of Fayol’s book ‘Lessons from the War’ 7.1 The elements of administration 7.2 Management as a basic intellectual discipline 11.1 Basic scheme: product, process, external networks 12.1 Juran’s trilogy diagram 12.2 The quality planning road map 12.3 The feedback loop 22.1 The McKinsey ‘business system’ presentation of the firm from a strategic perspective, circa 1980 22.2 The Porter value chain 24.1 Global strategy: an organizing framework 24.2 New roles and tasks of management 25.1 The Integration-Responsiveness Grid

4 56 64 122 126 209 228 229 230 488 488 530 537 550

Tables 4.1

The six abilities for the eight standard levels in a company

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Notes on Contributors

Frances Abraham is a Principal Consultant and Researcher at The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, undertaking organizational and inter-organizational assignments and consultancy education. Following a first degree in History, specializing in political thought, she first joined the Institute in 1976 as an apprentice action researcher with a team developing shipboard communities in a bulk carrier merchant fleet, followed by consultancy assignments using organizational and work design and systems psychodynamics approaches. Mie Augier is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, and Research Associate at Stanford. She works on research on organizational behaviour, culture, economics and security, strategy, and net assessment. She has published more than fifty articles in journals and books and co-edited several special issues of journals and books. Her most recent book is The Roots, Rituals and Rhetorics of Change (with James March, Stanford University Press, 2011). Her current research interests include the history and future of net assessment and organization theory, strategic management, the links between economics and security, the development of an interdisciplinary framework for strategic thinking, and new security economics. Kyle Bruce is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, Australia. He has published papers on the historiography of Scientific Management and Human Relations, institutional theory in economics, organization studies and international business, US interwar business history, the history of US economic and management thought, and evolutionary economics, strategy, and the theory of the firm. John Child is Emeritus Professor of Commerce at the University of Birmingham. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the Academy of International Business, and the British Academy of Management. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy [FBA]. He has published 20 books and approximately 150 articles and book chapters. He has been editor-in-chief of Organization Studies and senior editor of Management and Organization Review. His current interests are in problems of hierarchy and how smaller firms internationalize. Robert F. Conti is Emeritus Professor at Bryant University, USA. He received BS and MS Degrees in Engineering from Cornell; MBA, MA (Econ), and PhD degrees from Lehigh University; and undertook post-doctoral research at Cambridge. He has been a

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frequent Visiting Professor at the Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing. He was a corecipient of the 2005 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research, for a large-scale study of the effects of lean production on job stress. Dame Sandra Dawson is KPMG Professor of Management at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, a Non-Executive Director of the Financial Services Authority, Oxfam, and DRS plc, and a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology, the UK India Round Table, and an Advisory Group for the Aga Khan University on building a business school to meet the needs of emerging economies. Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College at the City University of New York. She is the author of three books: The Capitalist Philosophers; The Man Who Discovered Quality: How W. Edwards Deming Brought the Quality Revolution to America; and Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women. A former writer and editor at U.S. News & World Report and Business Week, Professor Gabor has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Strategy + Business among other publications. Cameron Guthrie is an Associate Professor in Management at the Université de Toulouse—Toulouse Business School. He holds a PhD in Management Science from Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His research interests are in the areas of management and economic history, creativity and invention, and management education. He has recently published in such journals as the History of Economic Ideas and the Journal of Management History. Alexandra Klein is a juriste of French legal tradition, holds an LL.M. degree from McGill University, a Master’s and a Licence degree in Law and Political Science from Nice, France. Her specialization lies in the field of international commercial arbitration and cross-border jurisdictional competence. She has been a Research Assistant at McGill University’s Faculties of Law and Management. Alexandra practises as a legal adviser in a Montréal law firm. William Lazonick is Professor and Director of the UMass Lowell Center for Industrial Competitiveness and President of the Academic-Industry Research Network. His book, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-tech Employment in the United States (Upjohn Institute 2009), won the 2010 Schumpeter Prize. His most recent book, co-edited with David Teece, is Management Innovation: Essays in the Spirit of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (Oxford University Press, 2012). Ray Loveridge is an Associate Fellow at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, Professor Emeritus at Aston University, and Visiting Professor at Doshisha Business School, Kyoto, Japan, and at the Beijing Institute of Technology. He holds a LittD and MA (Cantab), MSc (LSE), and DipPolEcon (Oxon). He has published widely, most

notes on contributors

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recently ‘The Multinational Firm as a Locus of Learning along Networks’, in S. Collison and G. Morgan (eds.), Images of the Multinational Firm, Wiley, 2009; ‘Developmentalism’, le Libellio d’, Paris, Ecole Polytechnique, 2010; ‘Politics and Power in the Multinational Corporation’, Review, Organization Studies, 33(2), 2012. He has been associated with a number of journals and learned societies, most notably as senior editor of Human Relations between 1989 and 2000. His current research focuses on comparative strategies of industrialization and development within a global context using the concept of national configurational archetype. In his most recent empirical work (op cit) he has focused on sources of contention in the cross-national ‘transportation’ of management practice. John Mathews is Eni Chair of Competitive Dynamics and Global Strategy at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, and concurrently Chair of Strategy at MGSM, Macquarie University, Sydney. He has been active in developing fresh approaches to strategizing through focus on strategic resources, routines, and activities, as elaborated in his 2006 text Strategizing, Disequilibrium and Profit, published by Stanford University Press. Joseph T. Mahoney earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, with a doctorate in Business Economics from the Wharton School of Business. He joined the College of Business of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, and is currently Caterpillar Chair of Business in the Department of Business Administration. He has published sixty research journal articles and a 2005 Sage book, Economic Foundations of Strategy. He is an associate editor of the Strategic Management Journal. For the academic year 2008–2009, he served as Chair of the Business Policy and Strategy (BPS) Division of the Academy of Management. Bernard Mees holds a PhD in the History of Ideas from the University of Melbourne and is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management and at the Centre for Sustainable Organisations and Work at RMIT University. His books include Terror, War, Tradition (edited with Samuel P. Koehne); The Science of the Swastika; and Celtic Curses; and he researches German intellectual history, business and management history, and historical linguistics. Karl Moore is an Associate Professor, Desautels Faculty of Management; Associate Professor, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University; and Associate Fellow, Green Templeton College, Oxford University. He has taught on change and leadership on MBA and executive programmes at Oxford, Cambridge, LBS, INSEAD, Duke, Darden, IIM Bangalore, and Skolkovo in Moscow. He has written twenty-seven referred journal articles in leading journals, including SMJ, Mir, and Business History, and ten books. He has worked as a consultant with leading firms, including IBM, Nokia, HP, Air Canada, IATA, Motorola, and Wipro. Jean-Louis Peaucelle is a Professor in Management at the Universit of Reunion Island. He is a qualified civil engineer and holds PhDs in Sociology and in Computer Science.

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His publications are in the areas of management and economic history, information systems, and work organization. His articles have appeared in such journals as The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, History of Economic Ideas, and the Journal of Management History. He has written numerous textbooks and chapters, including one about Henri Fayol’s management tools and another about Adam Smith’s pin-making example. Christos N. Pitelis is Director of the Centre for International Business and Management (CIBAM) and Reader in International Business and Competitiveness at the Judge Business School, as well as Fellow in Economics at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. Christos has published extensively in scholarly journals such as Organization Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Studies, and Industrial and Corporate Change. He is editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the Collected Papers of Edith Penrose, and on the editorial boards of, among other publications, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and Management International Review. He is also a guest editor for leading journals on the theory of the firm, globalization, international business, regulation, global governance, and global finance. Christos has researched, consulted, and co-ordinated projects for governments, the European Commission, the United Nations, USAID, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the private sector. He has been Visiting Professor in Europe, Russia, China, Latin America, and the United States. Dr. Robert Pitkethly is an Official Fellow and Tutor in Management at St Peter’s College, Oxford University, a committee member of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre and a member of Oxford University’s Faculty of Management. He holds degrees in chemistry, business administration, and Japanese studies and has qualified and worked as a UK and European patent attorney. He has been a Research Fellow at the Judge Institute in Cambridge University, and a Visiting Research Fellow at both the Institute of Intellectual Property and the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy in Tokyo. Susan Segal-Horn is Professor Emeritus of International Strategy at the Open University Business School, UK. Her research focus is the globalization of industries and firms, particularly global strategies in service industries and within multinational service firms. Susan has published five books and over ninety academic papers and articles. Her latest book is an MBA textbook, Understanding Global Strategy, published in 2010. Her next book focuses on the globalization of professional service firms. J.-C. Spender holds a PhD in Corporate Strategy from Manchester Business School. He retired from the Deanship of the School of Business and Technology at SUNY/FIT in New York in 2003 and has since been researching the theory of the firm and the history of business education. He holds Visiting Professorships at ESADE, Lund University, and University Campus, Suffolk. His books include Locke, Robert R., and Spender, J.-C. (2011), Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, London: Zed Books; and Burton-Jones, Alan, and Spender, J.-C. (eds.) (2011), The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Peter Starbuck was born in Birmingham in 1936. He trained and qualified as a construction industry professional, either side of a two-year interruption for National Service (1959–61) in the Royal Engineers in West Germany. His commercial career has also included work with education and training, the Health Service, social housing, and charities. His involvement with Peter F. Drucker began in 1975, when he applied his ideas commercially. For the last twenty years he has studied Drucker and related influences, and is the only person to have deposited a PhD thesis on him with The British Library. He continues to work from his home office on the English/Welsh Borders. Monir Tayeb has been conducting research into the impact of national culture on organizations and their management styles, and the management of multinational companies since 1976. She has a BA in Business Studies from the University of Tehran, an M. Litt in organizational behaviour from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from Aston University in Birmingham. After the completion of her doctoral research in 1984, she worked for two years as a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, where she was involved in an international project on national culture and leadership styles. From 1986 until her early retirement in 2005 she taught at Heriot-Watt University; her last position was Reader. She still participates in the university’s undergraduate distance learning programme as a course author. Since 1989 to date she has been involved in the postgraduate distance learning programme at Edinburgh Business School as faculty-author. She has published several books and articles and contributed to a large number of edited books and international conferences. Andrew Thomson is an Emeritus Professor at the Open University, having been the founding Dean of its Business School. Before that, he had spent twenty years at Glasgow University, latterly as Professor of Business Policy. He is a graduate of Oxford and Cornell Universities, and also spent time working in Unilever as a brand manager. His research interests began in industrial relations, but then migrated to management development, and more recently to management history. In this latter area he has coauthored The Making of Modern Management and a biography of Lyndall Urwick. Malcolm Warner is currently Professor and Fellow Emeritus, Wolfson College, Cambridge, and the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of over fifty books on management, many of which have been translated, as well as of numerous articles, essays, and reviews on the subject. He has been the Editorin-chief of the International Encyclopedia of Business and Management, vols. 1–8, London: Thomson Learning, 2nd edition, 2002. He is also Co-Editor of the Asia Pacific Business Review. He has, in addition, been a frequent Visiting Academic at many campuses and business schools across the world. Peter J. Williamson is Professor of International Management at Judge Business School, and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard and has held professorships at London Business School, Harvard Business School, and INSEAD. Peter is co-author of a number of books,

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including Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation is Disrupting Global Competition. He serves as non-executive director of several companies spanning financial services through to green energy. John Wilson is Professor of Strategy at the University of Liverpool Management School. He has published widely in business and management history, including a biography of Lyndall Urwick, and a textbook on British management (both with Andrew Thomson). As well as playing a leading role in the Association of Business Historians and the European Business Historians Association, he has also run the Management History Research Group workshops for ten years. Keeley Wilson is a Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, specializing in innovation and strategy. Prior to this, her background was in consulting and banking. She has worked closely with companies around the world on various aspects of global innovation, including innovation footprints, integrating innovation activities in India and China, and managing global projects. She is co-author of Managing Global Innovation, HBRP, 2012. Morgen Witzel is a Fellow of the Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter Business School. He is a writer, lecturer, and consultant on management, and is particularly well known as a writer on the history of management theory and practice. He is the author of twenty books, including Management History: Text and Cases and A History of Management Thought. He also edited the Biographical Dictionary of Management, and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Management History. Mohamed Zairi is the JURAN Chair in TQM and Executive Chairman for European Centre for Best Practice Management, and previously the SABIC Chair in Best Practice Management. Professor Zairi is also Assistant Chancellor for Strategy and Growth at Hamdan Bin Mohammed eUniversity in Dubai. He has been involved in guiding, mentoring, and advising on the implementation of excellence in both the government and private sectors. Professor Zairi has been awarded the Ishikawa/Harrington Medal (2005) by the Asian Pacific Quality Organisation (APQO), and also the Certified Six Sigma Grand Master (2005) by Harrington Institute Inc. In 2006 he was awarded the E. Jack Lancaster Medal by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). In 2009, he was presented with the ASQ Grant Medal. The Yoshio Kondo Academic Prize (2010) was bestowed upon him by the International Academy of Quality. Milan Zeleny is Professor of Management Systems, Fordham University, New York City. He was previously at Columbia University. Currently he is also at Tomas Bata University. He has been editor-in-chief of Human Systems Management for thirty years. His books include Human Systems Management, Multiple Criteria Decision Making, and Autopoiesis. He is preparing The Biocycle of Business and The Emerging Economy. He has over 500 publications, and is ranked first among Czech economists, according to the Hirsch citation index. His current interests are transformation, re-localization, glocalization, and community restoration.

Abbreviations

AI AMA APSA ASQ ASQ BOP BPA BPR BR CC CEMA CFI CIOS CIP CNOF CoP CosPUP CQE CSR DC DCP DMNC DRAM DSIR EGOS EOQ ESRC FDI FME FTC GE GLOBE GM GPS GS GSIA HBR HBS

Artificial intelligence American Management Association American Political Science Association American Society for Quality Administrative Science Quarterly Bottom-of-the pyramid Bureau of Personnel Administration Business process re-engineering Bounded rationality Core competencies Chinese Enterprise Management Association Colorado Fuel and Iron Company Comité International De l’Organisation Scientifique Customer intervention point Comité National de l’Organisation Française Communities of practice Committee on Science and Public Policy Certified Quality Engineer Corporate social responsibility Dynamic capabilities Dynamic Competitiveness Paradigm’ Diversified multinational corporation Dynamic random access memory Department of Scientific and Industrial Research European Group on Organization Studies European Organization for Quality Economic and Social Research Council Foreign direct investment The Foundation for Management Education Federal Trade Commission General Electric Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project General Motors General Problem Solver Global sourcing Graduate School of Industrial Administration Harvard Business Review Harvard Business School

xviii HEP HRM HRS IAE IB ICC ICS IFG IIT ILO IMD IMI IO IOC IP IPM IR IRC IRIC ISB ISO ITC JAIST JFI JIT JUSE LBS LT M&A MbO MESS MIT MNC MNE MoI MPT MRG NIST NGO NJBT OR OT PAF PDCA PERT PIMS POCCC

abbreviations Human error probability Human resource management Human relations school (of management) Instituts d’Administration des Entreprises International business Interstate Commerce Commission International corporate strategy Institut Français de Gestion Illinois Institute of Technology International Labour Organization International Institute for Management Development International Management Institute Industrial organization Indian Oil Corporation Intellectual property Integrate process management Integration responsiveness Industrial relations counselors Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation Indian School of Business International Organization for Standardization Information technology and communications Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Juran Foundation Inc. Just-In-Time systems Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers London Business School Logic Theorist Mergers and acquisitions Management by Objectives and Self- Control Micro-Electronics in the Service Sector Massachusetts Institute of Technology Multinational companies/corporations Multinational enterprise Model of the individual Modern portfolio theory Management Research Group National Institute of Standards and Technology Non-governmental organization New Jersey Bell Telephone Operational research Organization theory Prevention, appraisal, and failure costs Plan-do-check-act Project evaluation and review technique Profit impact of marketing strategy Prévoir, Organiser, Commander, Coordonner et Contrôler

abbreviations POSDCORB PSAC QPR RBV RLM RM SARFT SBU SCP SOGI SM SQC SHRM SSRC STS TCE TIHR TNC TPS TQM UNCTAD USO WEF WORC

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Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating, Reporting and Budgeting President’s Science Advisory Committee Quality–price ratio Resource-based view Reverse logistics management Rational man Structural adaptation to regain fit Strategic business units Structure-conduct-performance Society–organization–group–individual approach Scientific management Statistical quality control Human resource management Social Science Research Council Socio-technical systems Transaction cost economics Tavistock Institute of Human Relations Transnational corporations Toyota Production System Total quality management United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Services Organization World Economic Forum Work Organization Research Centre

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chapter 1

i n troduction morgen w itzel and m alcolm warner

The purpose of The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists is to produce an up-to-date evaluation—or in some cases, re-evaluation—of the contributions of the most significant management theorists to the field of management. It builds on a great deal of existing, previous work done by those interested in the history of the subject and we will adumbrate how far earlier work has shed light on the underlying narrative (see Barley and Kunda 1992; Warner 1998a; Witzel 2012). We have attempted to cover a considerable number of management writers who have made, in our opinion, major contributions to the field. This new work is probably the largest one-volume work on management thought available in the English language and we are indebted to Oxford University Press for recruiting us as editors and commissioning this work. We hope it will be of significant use to both students and teachers of management, as well as interested practitioners. Bringing together this collection serves several ends. First, of course, there is the need to recognize the contributions that certain seminal figures, past and present, have made to the theory of management. These contributions have taken many forms and range from what we might call ‘progressive orthodox’ such as Chester Barnard and Sumantra Ghoshal, to the ‘revolutionaries’ such as Frederick Taylor and Herbert Simon, to the openly heterodox such as Henry Mintzberg. Nor were their views developed in isolation from each other (Sibbet 1997). Surveys of management ideas such as Mol and Birkinshaw’s (2008) and Hope and Player’s (2012) demonstrate how management ideas evolve and cross-fertilize over time. In part, at least, this happens through the actions, interactions, and re-actions of key management theorists to events around them, and sometimes to each other. The contributions in this volume help to contextualize the theorists and make clear what ideas influenced them and, in turn, what influence they have had on others. Second, there is the need to keep ideas alive. This is especially true in the case of some of the older management thinkers. As Witzel (2012) shows, it is not uncommon for good, valid theories of management to become ‘lost’, no longer studied save by a few. Even for familiar figures such as Taylor, time has a way of shrouding them in myths. The study of

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the modern-day reception of Taylor’s work by Payne et al. (2006) shows how even the academic perception of Taylor is often at odds with reality. It is important, in our view, to understand what these seminal figures believed and why, what they offered to the world then, and what they offer now. Diversity in management thought is essential, if we are not to become too narrow in our worldview and fall into the trap described by Ghoshal (2005) of becoming too narrow and too focused, and thus at risk of the kind of disconnection from the real world described so cogently by Mintzberg. And finally, there is the need to avoid the re-invention of the wheel, or as Mol and Birkinshaw (2008) put it, the putting of old wine into new bottles. With the world of management seemingly growing ever more complex, there is a real need to look back and remember the pioneering work that has been done in this field, and then to advance from those foundations, rather than to keep reinventing management for each new generation. Having established the need for this book, we then proceeded to its design and structure. Putting together a project like this one requires answering a number of questions from the outset. First, what is management theory? Second, who are the management theorists? Third, what criteria do we use for including some people in a work such as this, while excluding others? The selection process for any biographical compendium is bound to engender warm debate, and this project was no exception. Some theorists, such as Frederick Winslow Taylor or W. Edwards Deming, claimed an immediate place, thanks to the durability and impact of their ideas. Other seemingly marginal figures assumed greater importance the more we looked at them. We would certainly include C. K. Prahalad in this category, as the importance of his work has grown, and will continue to grow with the passage of time. As to the question of what management theory is, we have deliberately taken what some might see as a narrow view. Certainly other views are possible. Lyndall Urwick (1933) believed that many of the management ideas of his day could be traced back to the seventeenth century, and modern management historians such as Daniel Wren (1994) and Morgen Witzel (2012) have shown that some management concepts have their origins in the Middle Ages or even the classical world. But while the ideas of some of these thinkers (Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, for example) became enormously influential, as Witzel (2012) points out, they do not constitute coherent bodies of theory. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a large but largely inchoate body of ideas about management which needed to be brought together in systematic form. The ‘paradigm shift’, from thinking about management to management theory and management systems, began with Taylor, and fittingly he is the first subject to be considered in this volume. As Robert Conti’s chapter shows, Taylor was not single-handedly responsible for scientific management: others, notably the Gilbreths, played highly important roles. But he was the figure around which the first true management theory coalesced (Merkle 1980). And as shown too, the impact of scientific management spread across the world and persists to this day. Some later management theorists worked in Taylor’s shadow, others like Mary Parker Follett reacted against him. But we would argue that all were influenced by Taylor to some extent, even if sub-consciously, or even if only to reject his ideas in favour of other, more progressive views of management.

introduction

3

Indeed, the cycle of acceptance and rejection is one of the features of the development of management theory over the course of the twentieth century. Paul Adler (2003) has shown the existence of a kind of ‘wave theory’ of thinking about management, in particular about organizations, moving from the scientific and mechanistic approach pioneered by Taylor and the Gilbreths to the more humanistic model of the human relations school of Follett and Mayo, then back to the more rigorous approach of management science. Herbert Simon was a key figure here, and Deming and Juran’s work on quality management also fits into this model. We then move again to a more humanistic approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Peter Drucker, with his insistence that management was the last of the liberal arts, is emblematic of this trend, and Deming’s later work also fits into this trend. The 1990s saw a swing back towards more mechanistic approaches, but the first decade of the twenty-first century, says Adler, saw a resumption of the trend towards humanistic theories. Following on from Adler we can see this trend manifest in the works of theorists such as Sumantra Ghoshal and C. K. Prahalad. The tricky process of determining who should be included in this work became our next priority. The first principle was that our theorists should have produced major bodies of work on management, and made management one of their main priorities, even their sole priority. All must have believed in the importance of management and emphasized its positive role in organizations, in business, in society. Even so, the list of people who fit this category is quite long, as Warner (1998a) and Witzel and his colleagues (2002) clearly demonstrate. Given that in this present work we intended to treat each subject in depth and analyse them thoroughly—in some cases, more thoroughly than has been attempted in print so far—we could only include a limited number of subjects. It became important to identify the most significant figures, and for this we needed a set of criteria. Our response was to develop a three-dimensional model, the three dimensions being length, breadth, and depth. Figure 1.1 presents these three dimensions diagrammatically in the form of a cube. With respect to length, we may conceptualize an axis which takes in the history of the field, particularly in terms of thinking about theory. At one end, we find the earliest origins of the subject, and at the other end those ideas and theories that are the most recent. It was clear that it was important to include the earliest theorists as well as some of the more recent, so as to illustrate how management theory has changed and evolved over time. The issue of where to begin then preoccupied us. Notwithstanding the important influence and ideas of earlier thinkers such as Machiavelli, Adam Smith, and Charles Babbage (see Warner 1998a), we decided to start with the paradigm shift mentioned earlier, the emergence in the 1890s and 1900s of complete and coherent ideas about management. This in no way downplays the importance of these earlier thinkers, but although they are key figures in terms of the dimension of length, it was difficult—in the end, impossible—to find any who matched our other criteria for breadth and depth. Along the timeline, we chose to group our theorists into three clusters. The first of these consists of the early pioneers spanning the period from the 1890s to the 1930s. This was a critical phase in the development of management theory and we will try to unravel the complex inter-relationship and interactions between the theories—as well as

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LENGTH BREADTH

DEPTH figure 1.1 A three-dimensional model of management

theorists. Some were involved with scientific management and others with the human relations school, but others like Henri Fayol developed their ideas independently and still others, such as Lyndall Urwick, tried to synthesize the ideas of other schools. The final figure in this group is Chester Barnard, who represents a kind of transition from the pioneers to the next evolutionary phase of management thinking. The pioneers were usually industrialists or consultants, and few had any academic background. This began to change after the Second World War. Some post-war theorists were associated with research institutes or foundations. Herbert Simon came from this background before becoming a founding faculty member at the Carnegie Institute. What is interesting about some of this group, such as Simon and Edith Penrose, is that they came from disciplines not associated with management. Rather like the pioneers, they saw the problems of management and felt that their own disciplines could be brought to bear on solving those problems; hence the uniqueness of their contributions. On the other hand, Peter Drucker’s institutional associations were fairly tenuous and only gained an academic home late in the day when he went to a chair at Claremont College in California. Deming and Juran, too, were best known as consultants. As a further note, much pioneering work in this period was done by collectivities such as the Tavistock Institute, and we decided to include ‘group’ entries to encompass the whole work of these bodies, rather than just individuals within them. The Carnegie Institute, as Augier and March (2011) have shown, became the standard bearer—or in their term, ‘poster boy’—for a revolution in business schools. Among other things, business schools increasingly became the key incubators of new research and new theory in business. Our third cluster of thinkers included nearly all stem from business school teaching and research backgrounds. Their theory and contribution is for the most part much more rigorous than that which went before, and sometimes, as in

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the case of Alfred Chandler or John Kotter or Henry Mintzberg, it launches a direct challenge at previously held certainties. Other modern figures, such as Ghoshal and Prahalad, looked at the changing face of the world as globalization began to emerge as an ever more powerful force, and speculated on ways that management theory could go forward. This is not to imply that such a notion was entirely absent from earlier work, but their contribution did highlight its importance. Unlike with our first and second clusters, there is no clean break between the second and third, and no transitional figure of the stature of Barnard (although we have assigned Herbert Simon that role, perhaps tendentiously). There is considerable overlap in terms of both time and ideas. Alfred Chandler was not much younger than Herbert Simon. Yet Simon was a product of the postwar revolution, while Chandler was very definitely grounded in the ‘modern’ notion of a business school. This may seem a trivial point, but it is our observation after reading the chapters in this book that institutional roots and environment often played a very great role in the forming and shaping of ideas. Whilst we have looked at many theorists as individuals, it is clear that their contribution took place in both an institutional and societal context. Breadth refers here to the measure of how specialist or how generalist a contribution is, the degree to which the work of a particular author is relatively narrow or wide in scope. This also may coincide with how far it is less or more technical, even complex, in its nature. A good number of contributions have clearly made their mark on the history of ‘general management’, some more and some less. It would be true to say that many of the management thinkers we have selected have been able to generalize to a degree. Similarly, some specialists who have made a very large mark on their own discipline but whose general impact on management as a whole was more limited were eliminated. Philip Kotler, despite his great impact on marketing theory and practice was omitted for this reason. This judgement may seem perverse, but again, we are concerned with theories of management, not just particular aspects of management. A further aim of this book was to treat each subject discussed as broadly as possible as well. There is more, much more, to Deming than just quality theory, or to Mintzberg than emergent strategy, or to Ghoshal than international strategy. Our purpose was to capture the thought of each of these individuals in the round. With respect to depth, here we were concerned with the degree to which each theorist helped to alter the paradigm in the field, a much rarer quality, with minimal contribution at one end and maximal at the other. The notion of the ‘paradigm’ is taken from the field of the history and philosophy of science and associated with the work of T. S. Kuhn (1962). While it is fairly straightforward in science to identify those who have changed the paradigm, such as Newton, it is more difficult in social science and perhaps even more problematic in management (see Clarke and Clegg 2000). Some even talk in the plural, of paradigms, many of these sharing an anti-management quality (see Donaldson 1995). A strong candidate here would be Taylor (see Merkle 1980; Warner 1998b; Link 2011). We can further argue that Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie helped change the paradigm by introducing more rigorous social scientific methods, and John Kotter helped to reconceptualize leadership. To some extent, each of the figures or schools described here

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helped to change the way we think about management and added significantly to the further development of management theory. Of course none of these figures worked singlehandedly or in isolation; each had their colleagues, their forerunners, and their followers, and they need be considered as both revolutionary and evolutionary figures. Some writers may be categorized as making a more theoretical contribution, whilst others a practical one. There might be a case for perceiving the former as having more depth than the latter. It is quite clear that a number of the seminal authors chosen contributed more to theory than others. The weight of the balance between these two considerations is brought out in the specific chapters concerned. It is said that there is more often than not an implicit theoretical dimension to practice, if there is no visible explicit one. Theory and practice are closely linked in a good number of the theorists in this volume. Much depends on the epistemology employed, as to whether the deductive or inductive approach characterizes the theorists’ work. When we chose the seminal authors to be written about in this collection, we made a somewhat implicit intuitive choice rather than a wholly rational one, and made a judgement on the basis of ‘reputation’. Given that we are making ex post facto decisions about our inclusion, there is clearly a bias in that respect to established authors. We were able to consult with a wide range of advisors in order to make our final choice, notwithstanding our in-house academic editor. There is a rough consensus as to the centrality of many management theorists in the history of the subject, but there will be varying opinions as to the emphasis placed on the work of this one or another. There was also an explicit criterion relating to whether they have already made their marks and whether they were ‘dead or alive’, and as will be seen, we chose a preponderance of the former. Such a view was inevitable given that we were presenting a historical narrative of the contribution of management theorists. But we also tried to balance our choice as between established Western authors and those who lived/live in other parts of the world. As well as North American and European management thinkers, we also included several from Asia; it was our intent to include still more. There was also an attempt to overcome different kinds of bias, not only relating to geographical origins, academic disciplines and so on, but also with respect to gender. In theory, this is the methodology we used for selecting the management theorists we discuss in this volume. In practice, there have been some omissions of notable figures who could have been included under the criteria for length, breadth, and depth, for example Chris Argyris and Kenichi Ohmae. Unfortunately, authors could not be commissioned to write these chapters at the time, which we, the editors, deeply regret. It is clear from the work of the editors of this volume that they are well aware that there have been contributions to management theory from a wide range of national and societal backgrounds and origins (see Warner, 1998b; Witzel 2012). In sum, we did our best to present a selection of management thinkers that would do credit to current reputations in the present decade, as well as in the longue duree. Not everyone, however, may necessarily agree with our selection, but we hope they will be patient in reading the chapters and coming to a more considered conclusion.

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References Adler, P. S. (2003) ‘Toward Collaborative Interdependence: A Century of Change in the Organization of Work’, in Bruce E. Kaufman, Richard A. Beaumont, and Roy B. Helfgott (eds), Industrial Relations to Human Resources and Beyond: The Evolving Process of Employee Relations Management, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Augier, M. and March, J. G. (2011) The Roots, Rituals and Rhetorics of Change: North American Business Schools after the Second World War, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Barley, S. R. and Kunda, G. (1992) ‘Design and Devotion: The Ebb and Flow of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 37: 1–30. Clarke, T. and Clegg, S. (2000) ‘Management Paradigms for the New Millennium’, International Journal of Management Reviews, 2(1): 45–64. Donaldson, L. (1995) American Anti-Management Theories of. Organization: A Critique of Paradigm Proliferation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghoshal, S. (2005) ‘Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices’, Academy of Management Learning and Education 4(1): 75–81. Hope, J. and Player, S. (2012) Beyond Performance Management, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Link, S. J. (2011) ‘From Taylorism to Human Relations: American, German, and Soviet Trajectories’. Paper Presented to the Business History Conference 2011, in St. Louis. Merkle, J. (1980) Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement, Berkeley: University of California Press. Mol, M. J. and Birkinshaw, J. (2008) Giant Steps in Management: Creating Innovations That Change the Way We Work, London: FT-Prentice Hall. Payne, S. C., Youngcourt, S. S., and Watrous, K. M. (2006) ‘Portrayals of F.W. Taylor Across Textbooks’, Journal of Management History 12(4): 385–407. Sibbet, D. (1997) ‘75 Years of Management Theory and Practice’, Harvard Business Review, Supplement, September–October. Urwick, L. (1933) Management of Tomorrow, London: Nisbet. Warner, M. (1998a) ‘Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1856–1915)’, in Warner, M. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Business and Management, London: International Thomson Business Press. —— (1998b) The IEBM Handbook of Management Thinking, London: International Thomson Business Press. Witzel, M. (ed.) (2002) Biographical Dictionary of Management, Bristol: Thoemmes Press. —— (2012) A History of Management Thought, London: Routledge. Wren, D. (1994) The Evolution of Management Thought (4th edn.), New York: John Wiley.

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chapter 2

fr eder ick w i nsl ow tay l or robert f. c onti

Introduction Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, evokes the most emotional and polarized responses of any management theorist. He is both revered and reviled. Peter Drucker described scientific management as ‘all but a systematic philosophy of worker and work. Altogether it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution that America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers’ (Drucker 1954: 280). In contrast, Jeremy Rifkin laments that ‘in the new scientifically managed factory, the worker’s mind was severed from his body and handed over to management. The worker became an automaton. . . . his humanity left outside the factory gate’ (Rifkin 1987: 109). There may be disagreement about Taylor’s effect on work and workers, but there is little doubt about his enduring influence. A 2000 survey of the American Academy of Management ranked Taylor first among the twenty-five most influential management thinkers of the twentieth century. This chapter will examine his career, contributions, and influence on management practice.

The early years Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 to Franklin and Emily Winslow Taylor, wealthy Philadelphia Quakers. His father was a lawyer who did not practise law, and his brother Edward was a non-practising physician. Verblen observed that ‘Abstention from labour was the convenient evidence of wealth, and therefore the conventional mark of

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social standing’ (2005: 31). However, this ‘career path’ was incompatible with Taylor’s fierce drive for achievement. He had a privileged upbringing. When he was 12, his family travelled in Europe for three years, and his father’s behaviour toward service providers made a lasting impression on Taylor. Services in the 1870s seldom met the family’s expectations, and his father compensated by tipping generously to improve service. Taylor became convinced that money was effective for changing working-class behaviour. In 1872 Taylor enrolled in Exeter Academy. It was a feeder school for Harvard University, where he was expected to attend and pursue the law. Taylor’s intelligence and competitiveness led him to excel in his studies at Exeter, but at a price. He developed frequent headaches and impaired vision, and his parents feared for his health. This concern may have tempered their disappointment over Taylor’s decision to pass up Harvard and pursue his love of mathematics and efficiency by becoming an engineer. Rather than attend engineering school he chose the more traditional training of a factory apprenticeship. Taylor later regretted his lack of formal education and managed to earn an engineering degree at Stevens Institute, without interrupting his career.

The journeyman journey Apprenticeships were scarce after the panic of 1873 but a family friend was co-founder of Ferrell & Jones, a Philadelphia pump manufacturer, and in 1874 Taylor began a patternmaker apprenticeship at the firm. He developed considerable design and woodworking skills and was eager to further expand his knowledge. After two years, he requested and was granted permission to begin a second apprenticeship as a machinist. In the process he developed a lifelong love affair with machine shops, but the affair had a rocky start. Taylor had been trained by veteran patternmakers but the machinists offered no such training. Apprentices gained skills slowly, by observing machinists and by trial and error experiments, and Taylor responded by deducing general principles from his observations and experiments. He completed his apprenticeships with increased confidence and a feeling that he understood both his trade and his new working-men friends. For Taylor, ‘his apprenticeship was the ultimate credential, one he would invoke all his life’ (Kanigel 1997: 142). Armed with his journeyman papers, Taylor set out on his career.

Midvale: from obsession to insight Jobs were hard to find during the continuing depression, but once again a friend intervened—a major investor in the Midvale Steel Company, a large Philadelphia manufacturer of steel train car wheels. Taylor began as a labourer but was soon assigned to a clerical job he despised. His request for a transfer to the machine shop was granted and

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he was assigned as a lathe operator. Taylor’s aptitude and energy led to his promotion as gang boss of the lathe operators. His cordial relationships with his co-workers dramatically changed when he chose to attack the widespread problem of ‘soldiering’— the intentional restriction of output by workers, enforced by peer pressure. Taylor was obsessed with soldiering. He called it ‘the greatest evil with which the working-people of both England and America are now afflicted’ (1947: 14). Taylor loathed the practice but understood its reasons. Workers feared increased output would lead to job losses. This could be overcome by incentive pay schemes, but managers were notorious for ‘rate cutting’—reducing the pay per piece whenever higher output increased worker wages. As a result, workers restricted their output, and their deep mistrust thwarted Taylor’s efforts to overcome soldiering through incentive pay. He changed tactics and trained promising labourers to operate machines at faster speeds. When assigned to work, however, peer pressure forced them to reduce their output. Taylor took a harder line, imposing fines. The men responded by sabotaging their machines and blaming Taylor for overworking them and their machines. Taylor viewed his fellow machinists as ‘friends’, and was deeply disturbed by their resistance. He was also frustrated, firmly believing that workers and managers shared a common interest, one that could be satisfied by the mutual gains of higher wages and lower unit labour costs. Taylor came to recognize that there were two obstacles to instituting a mutual gains system: ‘The ignorance of management as to what constitutes a proper day’s work for the workmen’ (Taylor 1947: 53), and the reality that ‘Men will not work at their best unless assured a good liberal increase (in pay), which must be permanent’ (Taylor 1947: 26). Taylor attacked both obstacles. William Sellers, President of Midvale, approved his request to conduct a ‘series of careful scientific experiments to find out how quickly various types of work ought to be done’ (Taylor 1947: 86). For monetary incentives, Taylor assigned his assistant, William Fannon, to devise a differential piece rate plan, with much higher piece rates for machinists who met a daily target—an incentive to work hard all day. The success of the plan depended on setting challenging, yet attainable targets, requiring that a fair day’s output be defined. To do so, Taylor instituted stopwatch time studies of machining, to measure how long it should take for an operation, such as machining an axle, and how many operations should be completed each day. This was the ‘scientifically’ based information Taylor needed for his incentive plan, and he organized a ‘rate-fixing’ department to time study operations and set daily targets. He was realistic about the remaining hurdle: ‘It is one thing to know how much can be done in a day, and an entirely different matter to get even the best men to work at their fastest speed’ (Taylor 1919: 62). Taylor attacked this final hurdle by using the machining of axles for a trial. Lathe operators were machining three to five axles a day, but based on time studies Taylor set a target of ten per day, with a 40 per cent attainment bonus. He began a two-week trial, but the selected machinist called Taylor’s target ‘impossible’, and refused to machine more than six axles a day. Taylor fired the machinist and found one willing to cooperate. The machinist followed Taylor’s instruction card and finished ten axles each day. The Gordian knot of soldiering was untangled and the number of cooperating workers steadily grew. A pleased President Sellers cooperated by maintaining rates, even when worker pay doubled.

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By the time Taylor left Midvale in 1890, Scientific Management had been successfully installed—achieved by his steely determination and William Sellers’ cooperation.

Scientific management principles Taylor’s instinct was to generalize by organizing experiences and events into coherent principles. Most notably, he distilled his efforts to increase efficiency into four Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor 1947: 36): 1. Each element of a man’s work should be scientifically developed. 2. The workman for each type of work should be scientifically selected and trained. 3. Management should heartily cooperate with the men, to ensure that the scientific methods are being followed. 4. Management should take over all the work for which they are better suited than the workmen, leading to an almost equal division of work and responsibility between the management and the workmen. Taylor developed his practices before his principles, emphasizing that ‘Scientific Management at every step has been an evolution not a theory’ (1947: 88). Therefore his principles can serve as a framework for evaluating the major practices linked to each.

Principle One: the scientific development of work Work measurement The First Principle encompasses Taylor’s most influential and controversial practices— his pioneering studies of the nature and measurement of work, and his breakthrough fragmentation of shop tasks into elements. The latter was more effective in identifying unnecessary elements, a form of motion study. Taylor did not use the techniques developed by Gilbreath, but he established the principle that motion studies must precede time studies, to make times apply to improved methods (Gilbreath, 1911). The times also had to apply to all machinists, so tasks were standardized, and the motion study results codified on instruction cards. To conduct a time study, a skilled machinist was stopwatch timed while following instructions for several cycles. The average element times were totalled to determine the task time. Taylor recognized that a machinist could not maintain a time study work pace for a full day, so he developed an allowance to compensate for operator fatigue. The allowance increased the measured time by 20 to 27 per cent, for a more realistic ‘fair day’s work’. Taylor once testified that allowance values were

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based on ‘long experience’ (Taylor 1947: 106). However, he gave no scientific justification because there was none. There still isn’t. Lehto and Buck describe contemporary time study practices, and conclude that ‘allowance values tend to be traditional rather than arrived at through scientific means’ (2008: 307). In 1914, Taylor’s elemental times proved vital for Henry Ford’s revolutionary manufacturing process. Newly available electric motors freed machines from the constraints of overhead power shafts, and Ford arranged the machines in the sequence of required processes. Parts moved from machine to machine, and when complete were transferred to the assembly line. The mass production era had begun (Hounshell 1984: 218). The efficiency of an assembly line depends on how well the task times at the sequential work stations are equalized, or balanced. Shorter elemental times can be more evenly allocated to the stations, increasing the line efficiency.

Metal-cutting research Taylor’s systematic research on cutting metals was his most validly scientific contribution. In 1880 he began experiments to answer the machinists’ questions: At what speed should a machine be run, and how fast should the cutting tool be fed? Machinists based these decisions on experience and ‘rules of thumb’, leading to wide variations in costs and quality, and Taylor believed that metal cutting laws would yield major improvements. He identified twelve independent variables influencing speeds and feeds, and over twenty-six years conducted thousands of experiments. Mathematically proficient assistants transformed the data into feed and speed formulas. However, the formulas were too complex for machinists, and a Taylor assistant, Carl Barth, converted them to a set of ingenious slide rules. Taylor claimed a slide rule allowed a machinist to determine his settings ‘in less than a half-minute’. His success was consistent with his First Principle, since ‘useful results hinged mainly upon the substitution of science for the individual judgement of the workman’ (Taylor, 1947: 114).

The ‘Schmidt’ case In 1899 Taylor studied the loading of pig iron bars into rail cars at Bethlehem Steel—the celebrated ‘Schmidt’ case. Labourers were loading twelve tons per day per man, and earning $1.15 a day. Taylor improved methods, issued detailed instructions, and instituted a piece work plan. Using the new methods, Schmidt (né Noll) and two fellow workers loaded a daily average of fifty tons per man, exceeding Taylor’s target of forty-seven tons. Taylor claimed that a key to their impressive performance was having the men regularly ‘sit down and rest’, to conserve energy. But the loaders never actually sat down to rest. Wrege and Grenwood point out: ‘Instead, their return walk, empty-handed, was considered a rest’ (1991: 116). Taylor’s zeal led him to enhance his already significant job design success.

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Principle Four: new management roles Planning vs. doing The premise of Principle Four is that ‘Management should take over all the work for which they are better suited than the workmen.’ Taylor favoured separating the planning and execution of tasks, with planning done by management. He wrote that ‘All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centred in the planning or laying-out department’ where thinking was done by management (1947: 98). Taylor’s new roles for management included the planning and coordination formerly done by workers. This supported his view that ‘Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea’, with the work of every man planned in detail as to what to do, how to do it, and how long to take (1947: 39).

Functional Foremen The new management responsibilities required more ‘non-productive’ support from staff specialists. Taylor, however, rejected a line and staff organization, preferring ‘functional management’. The latter featured an extreme division of duties, with eight Functional Foremen directly supervising workers in eight functions—ranging from machine set-ups to maintaining discipline (Taylor 1947: 104). With few exceptions, even Taylorist managers rejected the complexity and confusion of functional foremanship, preferring the simpler line and staff organization.

Management decision support Taylor believed that managers needed more timely, accurate, and relevant information to fulfil their new responsibilities. Characteristically he successfully addressed this need. Accounting reports only provided managers with a ‘scorecard’ for past decisions. Managerial accounting was needed, to provide managers with information for making better current decisions, and Taylor studied cost accounting at the Investment Company in New York, in order to develop such systems. He also instituted ‘exception principle’ reporting, so managers could focus on major deviations (1947: 129). Taylor realized that all relevant costs should influence decisions. He applied this insight at Midvale, where buyers were purchasing the lowest priced power transmission belts. However, the relevant costs included the expense of replacing failed belts and the value of production lost by idled machines. A switch to more expensive, but more durable belts reduced total costs (Kanigel 1997: 201). Several successful practices are linked to the First and Fourth Principles. In contrast, Taylor had mixed results with Second and Third Principle practices.

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Principle Two: scientific selection of workers The Second Principle calls for matching workers’ capabilities to job requirements, but Taylor’s ‘scientific’ methods at times deviated from his Principle. He lauded scientific selection’s potential for worker advancement, citing the promotion of former dirt diggers to higher paying jobs at Bethlehem Steel. Selection of the replacement diggers, however, was by ethnic stereotyping. Taylor’s rule was to assign ‘Italians or Hungarians’ as diggers. (Taylor 1947: 47) At a bearings company, Taylor studied women inspecting ball bearings for surface defects. He decided that a fast reaction time was essential for inspectors and tested their reactions to visual stimuli as a ‘scientific’ means of identifying inspectors to be retained. Taylor made no attempt to correlate test scores with performance, and expressed regret over the lay-offs: ‘unfortunately this involved laying off many of the most intelligent, hardest working, and most trustworthy girls merely because they did not possess the quality of quick perception followed by quick action’ (1947: 90). Taylor did increase productivity by moving inspectors far enough apart to eliminate their incessant talking, and instituting hourly output checks and incentive pay. Inspectors were reduced from 120 women to 35, and wages doubled.

Principle Three: managerial cooperation Taylor’s Third Principle calls for management to heartily cooperate with the workers, to support mutual gains. Taylor appears to put the burden on management for fostering cooperation, writing that ‘managers assume new burdens and responsibilities never dreamed of in the past’ (1947: 36). However, he states that the objective of this cooperation is ‘to ensure that all of the work is being done in accordance with the principles of scie