Concept
Scientific management
Overview
Scientific management is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes in management. Scientific management is sometimes known as Taylorism after its pioneer, Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Taylor began the theory's development in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s within manufacturing industries, especially steel. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s. Although Taylor died in 1915, by the 1920s scientific management was still influential but had entered into competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas.
Although scientific management as a distinct theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important parts of industrial engineering and management today. These include: analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency through elimination of wasteful activities (as in muda, muri and mura); standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation.
Scientific management has been criticized for having its roots in slavery practices.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Although the scientific arrangements of organic nature afford as yet the only complete example of the true principles of rational classification, whether as to the formation of groups or of series, those principles are applicable to all cases in which mankind are called upon to bring the various parts of any extensive subject into mental co-ordination. They are as much to the point when objects are to be classed for…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Scientific management is.
For by this, he means the traditional science which had come down, in scanty and distorted measure to be sure, from antiquity through scholasticism. It is called contentious both because of the logical method used and the end to which it was put. In a certain sense it aimed at power, but power over other men in the interest of some class or sect or person, not power over natural forces in the common interest of all…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
States what Scientific management is.
If, therefore, Political Economy be a science, it cannot be a collection of practical rules; though, unless it be altogether a useless science, practical rules must be capable of being founded upon it. The science of mechanics, a branch of natural philosophy, lays down the laws of motion, and the properties of what are called the mechanical powers. The art of practical mechanics teaches how we may avail ourselves of…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Scientific management is.
Philosophers who discussed Scientific management
Related ideas
- Empiricism
- Vladimir Lenin
- Analysis
- Joseph Stalin
- Leon Trotsky
- Competition
- Leninism
- Max Weber
- Management
- Cybernetics
- Pseudoscience
- Soviet Union
- Scientific method
- Syncretism
- Applied science
- Operations research
- Logic
- Standard of living
- Rationality
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Fascism.