Taylorism

Taylorism is a form of organizational practice developed by and named after Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) who promoted his ideas in his publication The Principles of Scientific Management.

His main objective was the improvement of working processes in industrial production. Therefore, Taylor replaced universal organizational principles with concrete methods to improve the workers’ efficiency. These methods were derived from several experiments arranged by Taylor. This was part of the innovative character of his ideas.

Besides his concrete methods valid under certain circumstances derived from experiments, he developed several general principles for successful working processes. These are:

(1) Separation of intellectual and manual labour:

First of all, working processes should be as divided as possible. This is true for the manual labour itself: for example the production of needles is – according to Taylor – to be divided into approximately 18 steps such as cutting the filament, sharpening the filament, putting the head on it or packaging the completed needle. On the other hand, so called working offices are to be established in which working processes can be planned, organized and structured by masters who are not involved in manual labour.

(2) Workload and bonus

As Taylor considers all human beings lazy and only aspiring towards profit, he introduces the principle of workload and bonus. By his experiments, he identified the most efficient workloads for all workers which were then made standard for them. If they overachieve their workload, they will receive a bonus but if they underachieve their workload, they will have to pay a fee for not reaching their standard.

(3) Selection and adaptation of workers

According to Taylor’s ideas, every worker should optimally fit to his position. Therefore, workers are to be selected according to their abilities and afterwards distributed to different positions in the working process.

(4) Reconciliation of workers and management

To reconcile workers and representatives of a factory’s management, Taylor proposed the introduction of experts, mostly engineers and mathematicians, to plan and organize working processes. According to Taylor’s opinion, rational science made the tyranny of the management as well as the strong resistance of the workers unnecessary.

The ideas of taylorism experienced broad reception on the one hand but also strong criticism on the other hand. First of all, there is no explicit theory behind Taylor’s experiments. Furthermore, the collected data is said to be manipulated or calculated in a wrong way. In Taylor’s model, employers have a strong control over their employees and this stands in contrast to his idea of a reconciliation of workers and management. Moreover, workers are forced to work very hard to gain enough money to survive, they are seen as lazy machines and they are systematically de-qualified due to the strong division of labour.

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For further reading: http://www.matkuch1.de/tayt3.htm

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Soruce: Kieser, Alfred/Mark Ebers (ed.): Organisationstheorien. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006.