Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/398

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
380
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT


would now receive his orders from perhaps half a dozen experts. One told him which job to do next, or in what order to do a series of jobs. Another supplied him with the instructions as to the nature of the work to be done or the article to be worked on. Another told him at what speed to run his machine. Another saw to the upkeep of the machine; another set the piece rate; another judged the quality of the product, and so on. Behind each of these functional foremen was a special department look- ing after a particular aspect of management, of which he was the mouthpiece, as far as the workman was concerned.

This rigid and h'teral working-out of Taylor's idea of " manage- ment by experts" had usually to be modified in practice on ac- count of the friction and confusion it almost inevitably led to, due to the difficulty of defining sufficiently clearly the sphere of each functional foreman, or to the clash of personalities.

Harrington Emerson embodied the necessary modification of Taylor's scheme in his plan of "Staff and Line" organization, published in 1909. In this the usual chain of executive authority, the " line," wa* maintained, by which a group of men was wholly answerable to a single foreman, a group of foremen to a depart- mental manager, several of these to a works manager, and so on. The experts, on the other hand, were collected into special " staff " departments, and their functions were to advise or instruct the "line" officials as to what instructions should be given, or how their work could best be done. This plan gives scope in the line organization for that personal leadership which was fatally destroyed by Taylor's functional foremanship, but still enables the methods of work and the technical policy to be laid down by experts in the various functions.

The last of the three questions propounded at the beginning of this article did not receive the same amount of attention as the other two at the hands of any of the leaders of the Scientific Management school of thought. Taylor in his paper on Shop Management (1903) does, it is true, make a feature of selection of the worker to suit the job, but his ideas in this direction were very different from those of the later school of applied psychol- ogy. Taylor's aim was the discovery, by records of individual performance, which men were as a matter of fact most successful in carrying out the task set them. The less successful were to be shown the correct methods of working, but if they still failed to reach the predetermined level of achievement, which was that of a good man, not an average worker, they were to be discharged to make room for others. A follower of Taylor, Dr. Katherine Blackford, made an attempt at selection of the workers before- hand, in distinction to Taylor's selection by trial and error on the job. In her book, The Job, the Man and the Boss (1914), she attempted to devise tests which should indicate the capacity of men for various kinds of work, i.e. their chance of making good if taken on and given trial. In view of the recent progress of applied psychology in this field, her work is not, however, worthy of serious consideration.

It may be useful to summarize the features embodied in Scientific Management systems as actually applied to an in- dustrial undertaking.

Standardization of all machines doing similar work; of all fac- tory equipment, e.g. driving and power transmission gear, factory furniture, etc. ; of all tools and appliances ; of materials to be worked on; of routines; of quality of work, etc. The maintenance of the standards usually necessitates several special departments, e.g. for inspection of quality, for upkeep of machines and tools, for dissemina- tion of information, etc.

Time and Motion Study. Time studies are made of the elements of all jobs, as distinct from overall times. Motion study is a develop- ment of time study, being an analysis by special methods (including photographic and even cinematographic) of the motions involved in an element of work. From this study motions or parts of motions which are useless are eliminated and the new method taught to the worker. The results of time and motion studies are embodied in written instructions for the use of the worker. These are in con- siderable detail, covering not only a full description of the work to be done but also of the exact methods of doing it, the tools to be used, the "setting" of the machine, etc., with times for each element both of the machine's work and the work of handling.

Payment by Result. Some schemes of extra payment for the suc- cessful performance of the task as laid down in the instruction based on the time study.

Functional Management. This may vary from complete func- tional foremanship to functional study of methods, technique and procedure, the results being conveyed to the workman via a depart- mental foreman.

Planning. A special functional department is charged with lay- ing down the order of preference of all work, the sequence of opera- tions or moves through which each job has to pass, the arranging beforehand that all material, tools, appliances, etc., shall be on hand for each job when needed, the conveying of all instructions either to the foreman or to the workman according to the degree of functional management in operation. The planning department is also the central statistical bureau of the factory where all records of the state of advancement of all jobs, of costs, of machines avail- able, often of stores, of men available, etc., are kept.

These features do not exhaust all the functions of management, but may be taken as those which distinguish Scientific Manage- ment schemes of organization from earlier types. Of course, certain of these features have been selected and applied in many instances where the full and complete scheme has not been adopted. A scheme which could claim to be ranked among the instances of Scientific Management would, however, include all the above features.

This account would not be complete without some mention of the attitude of labour to Scientific Management. Taylor himself, and later some of his followers, made extravagant claims to the effect that the new methods, by enabling standards of work to be laid down and the worker's achievement to be measured and his exertion rewarded on a prearranged scale, solved the labour problem. Not only has this happy result failed to materialize, but the attitude of labour, suspicious at the outset, has tended to harden into declared antagonism. The extension of the system in America was opposed more and more vigorously as time went on, leading to a serious strike against it in the Watertown Arsenal in 1911.

As a result of growing antagonism the United States Commis- sion on Industrial Relations in 1914 directed that an investiga- tion into the working of Scientific Management should be made, and appointed for this purpose Prof. R. F. Hoxie, of the univer- sity of Chicago, with the assistance of a Scientific Management expert and a labour leader. This Commission visited many of the chief establishments in the United States at which Scientific Management was in operation, and its findings are given in Prof. Hoxie's book Scientific Management and Labor. Everywhere the investigators found labour antagonistic; the objections which, with minor ones, appear to be fundamental were as follows:

The system leads to " driving " the worker and to sweating, due to its attempt to speed up all to the speed of the fastest.

The minute splitting up of jobs leads to very much increased specialization of the worker, to the narrowing of his range of skill, and consequently to the destruction of craftsmanship. The work became more monotonous and less satisfying to the worker.

It was claimed that the individual task and reward, and the con- stant selecting of the fastest workers, destroyed the solidarity of the workers in a factory. The knowledge of a "trade" was no longer necessary to the workmen; all the speciajized knowledge having been acquired by the management, the workman had less to sell than previously.

For these and other reasons it was claimed by the workers that the system was anti-social; that it was undemocratic; that it treated the worker as a tool, denied him scope for his personality, and condemned him to endless routine meticulously laid down ana arbitrarily enforced.

There can be no doubt that much of the resentment of labour has been aroused by the personality and mental attitude of the Scientific Management experts and the staffs they created in the works which they reorganized, rather than by the fundamen- tal ideas of their system. Their conception of industry was en- tirely mechanical. Their organizations were ingenious struc- tures of men, machines and routines. Each of these had its place in their buildings, but like steel, brick and cement, though differing in their qualities, all alike were simply building mate- rials, inanimate and obedient to the hand of the builder.

This cast of mind inevitably bred bitter antagonism in labour, and by the year 1921 there was already distinct evidence of a change on the part of the most advanced organizers, both in America and in England. It was significant of this change that Taylor's scheme of functional foremanship had come to be re-