Shop Management/Preface
PREFACE
"SHOP MANAGEMENT" is a handbook for those interested in the management of industrial enterprises and in the production of goods. It was first published in 1903, under the auspices of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, having been read at a meeting of that society held at Saratoga, N. Y., in June of that year.
The growing interest in scientific management on the part of the lay public has seemed to call for a new edition of this book. The demands upon the author's time have been such as to preclude his personally giving much attention to seeing the book through the press. No material changes in the text have been found necessary. At several points words have been added to make the author's meaning clear to those with no technical knowledge of the subject. A number of inconsistencies as between the text and the tables and figures have been removed; some minor additions to the time-study data have been made; the illustrations have been redrawn or reset, and a comprehensive index appended. That part of the discussion of the monograph which took place at the meeting at which it was presented, and which seemed pertinent, has been worked in with the text. "The Principles of Scientific Management," published uniform with this book, is simply an argument for Mr. Taylor's Philosophy of Human Labor,—an outline of the fundamental principles on which it rests. In "Shop Management," however, the effort is made to describe the organization and some of the mechanisms by means of which this philosophy and these principles can be made effective in the workshop, or on the market place.
Mr. Taylor has written "Shop Management" in such a way that everything in it should be intelligible to any one with a high school education. It is the general testimony, however, of those who have used the book in actual practice that, with each re-reading, a larger significance attaches to its industrial program.
We are indebted to Mr. Calvin W. Rice, the distinguished Secretary of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for his encouragement in bringing out this new edition of "Shop Management."
May, 1911.