SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Frederick Winslow Taylor's Gift to the World?

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Frederick Winslow Taylor's Gift to the World?

Edited by

J.-C. Spender Hugo J. I<ijne

Rutgers University Newark, New Jersey

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" KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS Boston / Dordrecht / London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scientific management: Frederick Winslow Taylor's gift to the world? / edited by J.-C. Spender, Hugo J. Kijne.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4612-8617-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4613-1421-9 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4613-1421-9

1. Industrial engineering. 2. Industrial management. Frederick Winslow, 1856-1915. I. Spender, J.-C. II. Jakob T55.9.S35 1996 670.42--dc20

Copyright © 1996 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1996

3. Taylor, Kijne, Hugo

96-28080 CIP

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, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, Massachusetts 02061.

Printed on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

About the authors VB

Preface ix

Introduction to the essays. Hugo J Kijne & J-c. Spender XI

Chapter 1 Villain, victim or visionary?: The insights and flaws in F. W. Taylor's ideas. J-c. Spender

Chapter 2 Machine-shop engineering roots of Taylorism: The efficiency of machine-tools and machinists, 1865 - 1884. Geoffrey W. Clark 33

Chapter 3 Time and motion study: Beyond the Taylor -Gilbreth controversy. Hugo J Kijne 63

Chapter 4 Standards and the development of an internal labor market. Ton Korver 93

Chapter 5 The movement for scientific management in Europe between the wars. Erik Bloemen 111

Chapter 6 Scientific management in Central Eastern Europe -Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. John Mihalasky. 133

Chapter 7 Scientific management and Japanese management, 1910 - 1945. Seishi Nakagawa 163

Index 181

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Erik Bloemen - Assistant Professor of History at the Free University of Amsterdam. Author of Scientific Management in the Netherlands, 1900 - 1930 (In Dutch), Amsterdam: VEGA, 1988.

Geoffrey Clark - Associate Professor of History in the Humanities Department, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken NJ. Author of several articles about the early engineering curriculum at the Stevens Institute.

Hugo J. Kijne - Associate Director, Rutgers Center for International Business Education and Research, Faculty of Management, Rutgers University, Newark NJ. Author of The Measured Rate System: Taylorism and the Dutch metal industry, 1945 - 1963 (In Dutch), Delft: Delft University Press, 1990.

Ton Korver - Lecturer in Sociology and Economics at the University of Amsterdam. Author of The Fictitious Commodity: A study of the US labor market, 1880 - 1940, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

John Mihilaski - Professor Emeritus at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark NJ, and Exemplary Service Professor in the Department of Management, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.

Seishi Nakagawa - Lecturer in the Department of Commerce, Fukuoka University, Japan.

J.-C. Spender - Professor of Strategy, and Director of the Rutgers Center for International Business Education and Research, Faculty of Management, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. Author of three books including Industry Recipes: The nature and sources of managerial judgement, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

PREFACE

Many of those interested in the effect of industry on contemporary life are also interested in Frederick W. Taylor and his work. He was a true character, the stuff of legends, enormously influential and quintessentially American, an award-winning sportsman and mechanical tinkerer as well as a moralizing rationalist and early scientist. But he was also intensely modem, one of the long line of American social reformers exploiting the freedom to present an idiosyncratic version of American democracy, in this case one that began in the industrial workplace. Such as wide net captures an amazing range of critics and questioners as well as supporters. So much is puzzling, ambiguous, unexplained and even secret about Taylor's life that there will be plenty of scope for re-examination, re-interpretation and disagreement for years to come. But there is a surge of fresh interest and new analyses have appeared in recent years (e.g. Wrege, C. & R. Greenwood, 1991 "F. W. Taylor: The father of scientific management", Business One Irwin, Homewood IL; Nelson, D. (Ed.) 1992 "The mental revolution: Scientific management since Taylor", Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH). We know other books are under way.

As is customary, we offer this additional volume respectfully to our academic and managerial colleagues, from whatever point of view they approach scientific management, in the hope that it will provoke fresh thought and discussion. But we have a more aggressive agenda. The industrial world is in the midst of profound socio-economic changes which have severely shaken our intellectual grasp of its nature and behavior. We feel, in particular, that today's managers, and management educators, cannot move on to the creation of a new post-industrial society without a better appreciation of the influence of scientific management, and of the person who was its principal architect.

Among those most supportive of our endeavor, we acknowledge the vital part that Myron F. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of the Stevens Institute of Technology, played in getting the project started. We hope his own biographical study, based on intimate knowledge of Taylor's family and records, and originally intended for this volume, will be published soon. l-C. Spender also acknowledges the inspiration many years ago of Professor Chuck Wrege, of Rutgers and Cornell (also Archivist for the Academy of Management), who sparked a lifelong interest in the importance of knowing what really happened in those early days when today's management ideas were crystallizing and becoming the conventions we now take for granted.

We dedicate this work to our wives and families, who, as every author knows, make the space in which such projects grow from small seeds to full maturity.

INTRODUCTION

Hugo Kijne and J.-c. Spender, Rutgers University.

Corporate managers have long been the targets for books and ideas which promise much and deliver little. But this has not always been true. The history of accounting, for instance, shows us that many ideas have been instrumental in the growth of industry. Today we see ideas like teamwork, total quality management (TQM) and bench marking having a powerful impact on business practice. But no business idea has had more impact than scientific management. Our basic understanding of how to manage a business is still largely shaped by this essentially American system of ideas about modern work and business organization. While the Americans did not invent business, or business organization, scientific management is very American and played a key part in the evolution of business's modern form. However much of scientific management's influence is considered malign. Sometimes it is just misunderstood. Taylorism was, and still is, much demonized and made the subject of much misrepresentation and misinterpretation. For instance, it will surprise many to discover that scientific management was not just about factory work, it was also about the systematic approach to that we experience today at many dentists' and doctors' surgeries.

This book is important because it adds depth to our understanding of scientific management, itself under radical review because of the changes sweeping the world's industrial activities. For many business writers and management teachers the key to increasing US competitiveness is the elimination of scientific management's legacy and the adoption of new flexible forms of organization based on trust rather than science. Japanese firms are often used as illustrative examples. Ironically, it is from the Japanese that US business has lately learned about TQM and the kanban system which, as Nagakawa shows in this book, are actually Japanese developments of Taylor's ideas. Likewise the use of expert systems and robots, the implementation of automation and flexible machining, and today's new systems of shop floor organization such as teaming, concurrent engineering and in-line inspection, revolve around the same ideas which scientific management explored.

Our book shows that the disciplined engineering approach to manufacturing which underpins scientific management was not uniquely American. But from the mid-

Spender & Kijne xii

nineteenth century on, when the American system of manufactures startled the world at the Crystal Palace International Exhibition, it was clear that America led the world in the application of rigorous scientific analysis to the process of large-scale, high volume and heavy manufacturing. Scientific management, as developed by Taylor, his assistants, and a loose group of US engineering consultants, spread from America to the rest of the world. Sometimes it was taken up eagerly, as in Russia, sometimes it converged with local initiatives, as in Poland and Czechoslovakia, sometimes it was resisted fiercely, as in England, sometimes it became the focus for violent national debate, as in France, sometimes it was quietly absorbed and elaborated, as in Japan. But in no industrial nation was it ignored.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 - 1915) developed the basis of his system of scientific management between 1874, when he started work as a pattern maker and machinist after abandoning his Harvard studies because of eye trouble, and 1895 when his third ASME paper, "A Piece Rate System", was published. Initially known as the Taylor system it acquired the name Scientific Management around 1910. Through its introduction, Taylor helped shape the engineering-led management revolution that would create the twentieth century era of mass production, the highly capitalized high-volume manufacture of relatively inexpensive, standardized products that achieved huge economies of scale and characterized the major industrial economies until the very recent past.

When implemented in full, scientific management consisted of five fundamental elements: a central tool room, stopwatch time study, a planning department, a differential piece rate system and functional foremen. The central tool room was crucial to standardizing the physical dimensions, tolerances, and procedures of the production operations and, thereby, to securing managerial control of the shop floor. Before scientific management, craftsmen owned their own tools and thereby some of the most important components of the means of production. This minimized the possibility of management's establishing general measures of productivity and quality. This, it tum, inhibited the flow of capital into production. Taylor's stopwatch time studies were the basis of finding an optimal and standardizable method of production and of designing appropriate tools. Once this one best way was found, it became the performance standard and the basis of the reward and payment system. The planning department translated the physical steps necessary to produce a part into sequences of standardized operations, so providing management with control over the flow of parts around the shop floor. Production could then be planned over longer periods of time and the returns on major capital investments evaluated. The differential piece rate system ensured that a worker was awarded a higher rate if he worked according to the designated method, and a lower rate if he chose to work according to a different method. It articulated Taylor's social reformist conviction that the fruits of increased productivity had to be shared between management and labor.

Functional foremanship is the most misunderstood element of Taylor's system. It certainly strikes us as complicated when operatives have to interact both with four or

xiii Sc ientific Management

more foremen, each with different functional competencies, and with a number of people in the planning department. But this arrangement reflected Taylor's belief that management would never achieve adequate control of the work process unless the arbitrary power of the foremen was fettered. Nepotistic and despotic foremen were common in most workshops at that time.

Taylor began to implement his ideas between 1878 and 1884 while he was with the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia where he rose quickly from machinist to manager of the heavy machine shops. Midvale was then owned and managed by William Sellers, one of the most innovative and aggressive US. manufacturers of the time. Sellers was highly supportive of Taylor's attempts to increase productivity and efficiency. Later Taylor refined his system while working for Joseph Wharton at the Bethlehem Steel Company. Here he also laid the basis for his considerable wealth by developing the Taylor-White process of high-speed metal cutting, a development which contributed significantly to the dominance of the US armaments industry in the First World War. This discovery, of course, was an outcome of the same systematic method of analyzing the production process that he was later to apply to the industrial process generally.

A variety of lucrative periods of improving others' factory operations, and the success of his patented machining process, helped him decide to retire from working for others in 1893 while still a young man of 37. He then devoted himself to the promotion of his system of scientific management by publishing and being an active, though often unpaid, management consultant. He also invested with considerable success, especially in the firms he was advising. While he was not the first or the only management consultant, this activity grew into a profession during this crucial period. Taylor's 1895 paper was followed by his first book "Shop Management" in 1903 and then the hugely successful and much-translated "Principles of Scientific Management" in 1911. By then Taylor's ideas were widely known in the US and had begun to spread around the world.

Taylor was the driving force behind the scientific management movement, and is still often referred to as the Father of Scientific Management. But he was not alone in his efforts. Among his associates were Henry Gantt, the creator of the Gantt-chart, an important planning tool which is in universal use around the world today, Sanford Thompson, an MIT graduate, Carl Barth, the mathematician who perfected Taylor's time study methods and designed the calculators necessary for the application of the metal-cutting system, and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, whose motion studies became the analytical stepping stone between Taylor's system and Henry Ford's assembly line. Other prominent important contributors were Morris Cooke, King Hathaway, Wilfred Lewis and Henry Towne. Admiral Caspar Goodrich, an old friend of Taylor's, also promoted the use of scientific management in the Watertown Arsenal. Taylor and these associates founded the Society to Promote the Science of Management, which, after Taylor's death, was renamed the Taylor Society. In the

Spender & Kijne xiv

nineteen thirties it was renamed again, acquiring its present name, the Society for the Advancement of Management.

Although widely known by 1910, the impact of Taylor's system in the US was probably limited by its founder's dogmatic insistence on close adherence to the ideal model. As a result, the installation process became lengthy, often up to five years, and contentious. Taylor also insisted (though not always successfully) that one of his associates be put in charge of the installation process. In practice many factory owners and managers wanted to take advantage of the new system and increase productivity without setting the system's underpinnings in place, without, for instance, establishing the time standards or the conditions necessary for the workers to meet these standards. In particular they were anxious to raise productivity without the countervailing increases in worker's wages. In due time, these exploitive implementations of scientific management would become known world-wide as Taylorism, the target of critical films such as Chaplin's "Modem Times" and books such as Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".

The new system, especially its exploitive adaptations, triggered vigorous resistance from the labor unions in spite of Taylor's constant exhortations that scientific management was pro-labor, enabling management and labor to banish arbitrariness and power struggles and, instead, cooperate on a rational basis. He berated managers for mis-applying his system and insisted that he had the best interests of the workers in mind. Labor's main objections were that scientific management was founded on a purely instrumental view of the worker and that it was no more than a speed-up system in analytic clothing, where standards were set by the fastest workers, thereby depriving others of all possible joy in their work. Taylor's defense of the system was weakened by the fact that the basic principles he had laid down were typically violated, and that his name was linked as much to these violations as it was to the less frequent correct applications of scientific management. But his oft-stated belief that trade unions would become redundant once scientific management was applied correctly showed that he either misunderstood the role of the unions or was fundamentally opposed to them for reasons that have still not been clarified.

After Taylor's death in 1915, the unions effectively shut scientific management as a job design methodology out of US industry. But it rebounded strongly as industry geared up for the war effort and management sought more efficient methods. In this sense, it was the war, rather than Taylor, that institutionalized and ensured the propagation of the scientific management that we know today. Even the labor leaders, most of whom had been vigorously opposed to the new system, began to yield. Samuel Gompers of the AFL, who ten years before had corresponded with Taylor, commented in 1921 that there were signs that engineers and scientists had recovered from and progressed beyond the pseudo-science that had brought Taylorism into such ill-repute among the work force, when speed up was the watchword and when labor was classed with iron and coal as an inanimate factor of production. But Gompers was already referring to implementations that gave the

xv Scientific Management

unions much more influence in establishing working conditions and time standards than Taylor would have allowed.

In the 1930s, scientific management began to decline for a second time. The Hawthorne studies precipitated the Human Relations movement and challenged many of the principles on which scientific management was built. Until the 1950s the movement sought merely to ameliorate the impact of the division of labor and bureaucratic job design that characterized scientific management. Only later did the movement towards new forms of organization begin which would suggest the coming demise of both bureaucracy and scientific management.

In those industries that could develop large enough markets for standardized products, scientific management was also rapidly overtaken by the Fordist system. While having much in common with scientific management, Fordism was based on the continuous production of identical parts on an assembly line where simple work tasks were performed repetitively by unskilled labor. In contrast, in most custom and small batch production facilities, scientific management continued to provide the basic logic of the work. In the 1970s, with US productivity growth falling behind that of its principal competitors for the first time since the early nineteenth century there was a crisis of Fordism and Peter Drucker could announce the coming rediscovery of scientific management. But a world wide reassessment of Taylor's ideas was already under way in academic circles, as well as among managers and consultants. New varieties of scientific management, such as statistical quality control, were being proposed by a new generation of production engineers such as Deming and Juran.

Scientific management around the world

Scientific management crossed the oceans soon after its initial development in the US. Henri Ie Chatelier, who had corresponded early with Taylor, published the French translation of "Shop Management" in 1907, four years after its appearance in the US. Industrialists like the Michelin brothers and Renault were immediately interested in Taylor's ideas. German and Dutch translations of Taylor's publications followed. In contrast, England was among the last to consider scientific management principles, partly because its trade unions were then among the strongest in the world and partly because it was vigorously criticized by number of humanist managers such as Cadbury.

In the 1920s two new organizations became instrumental in the further promotion of scientific management. Le Comite International de l'Organisation Scientifique (CIOS) and the International Management Institute (IMI) both founded in 1927, the first with European, the second with American financial support. In the same period scientific management reached the newly reshaped middle European states of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Czechoslovakia was the most industrialized country of the three, while the war had left the Hungarians with little industry. The

Spender & Kijne xvi

first international management conference, held in Prague in 1924, provided an enormous boost to scientific management in Middle Europe. Czechoslovaks and Poles held key positions in the CIOS and became prominent in the subsequent conferences. American management experts became frequent travelers to Middle Europe to advise their local counterparts.

Some of these showed considerable inventiveness when it came to improving efficiency and productivity. In Europe and away from Russia during his years of exile, Vladimir Iljits Ouljanow, better known as Lenin, had become a diligent student of Taylor's writings. In scientific management he saw part of the solution to one of the most fundamental problems he had to solve: how to build a workers' state and a socialist society in the absence of a well developed capital market system and a industrialized workforce. He clearly saw scientific management as an instrument for industrialization, a tool to transform peasants and serfs into factory workers. At the same time, he was aware of the system's capitalist origins, and therefore created his own standards for its application. It would only be applied on a temporary basis, and only if the workers were sufficiently informed about and understanding of its necessity. After the revolution, members of the industrialization committee of the Supreme Soviet corresponded with the Taylor Society, and in the 1930s a local variety of scientific management, called "Stachanovism", was developed.

In Japan, the first publications on scientific management appeared in 1911, followed, in 1913, by Ueno's translation of Taylor's "Principles of Scientific Management", two years after its US publication. Between 1917 and 1927, a number of organizations for the promotion of scientific management were founded. The most important of these was the Institute for Industrial Efficiency, founded in 1922, which in 1925 became the first overseas branch of the Taylor Society. Most of these organizations merged into the Japanese Federation of Efficiency Organizations in 1927, the same year the CIOS and the IMI were founded. As in the US, one of the first applications of scientific management in Japan was in a military installation, the Kure Naval Yard, and as in the Soviet Union, there was early application to railway engineering and the repair works of the Japanese National Railroad.

Scientific management's impact on management education

One of the first of the modem schools of business was Wharton, founded by Joseph Wharton, the head of Bethlehem Steel, in 1881. Joseph Wharton understood better than most the value of a methodical approach to manufacture, especially to the determination and control of production costs. As an educatea man and a qualified metallurgist he spoke and read German and had visited the German vocational universities where the scientific approach to industrial affairs had been taught for over a century. He studied their educational innovations and became enthusiastic about their real-world vocational approach.

While Taylor visited both the Wharton and Tuck schools and gave talks there, as Nelson (1992) reveals, his impact was far more profound at the Harvard Business

xvii Scientific Management

School. This was founded in 1908 with Edwin Gay in charge and responsible for shaping its curriculum. With the recommendation of the Dean of the Engineering School, Gay visited Taylor in 1908 and was immediately impressed with the possibility of applying the scientific methods he too had learned in Germany to the internal operations of manufacturing companies. He believed that business was an economic phenomenon that rested on discoverable scientific principles and that practical scientific knowledge could be brought to bear on the subject. Gay pressed Taylor to come to Harvard to lecture.

Initially Taylor refused, maintaining his characteristically practical position arguing that scientific management could only be learned on the shop floor under his tutelage of his own associates. In fact he criticized university learning roundly, considering it largely irrelevant to anything but leisure. Gay persisted, but to no avail until he told Taylor that he would set up courses in scientific management anyway, with or without the master's help. This goaded Taylor into visiting Harvard and giving exhortatory talks about the changes that scientific management would bring about. In due course he became a popular and familiar figure on campus, visiting regularly, refusing compensation or even expenses.

Gay saw the power of the convergence between the engineering approach being taken by Taylor and the increasing number of management consultants, and his own German training in the application of scientific analysis to business. He articulated this approach into the business school curriculum as best as he was able. This same message influenced the curricula at Tuck and Chicago where Person and Marshall (who later collaborated with Gay to found the AACSB, the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business) introduced scientific management to their colleges. While Wharton's program was early dominated by economists and eventually adopted a more theoretical and research-oriented approach, maybe under pressure from their accounting colleagues, Harvard's development of a pragmatic scientific approach set a pattern of business education that was eventually emulated all over the world. While Taylor's particular contribution is no longer clearly visible, he was a powerful influence at the time today's notions of management education were being shaped.

The rediscovery of scientific management

The rediscovery of scientific management as an area of research for historians, management scholars, industrial sociologists and psychologists was brought about by the economic events of the 1970's, as US productivity began to slide, as overseas countries began to be serious industrial competitors, and by a number of influential books. Societies were changing too. During the late sixties, industrial unrest, increasing labor turnover, absenteeism, and an increasing number of wildcat strikes challenged management's control the industrial shop floor. What was first labeled withdrawal behavior by American social scientists was later characterized as the "crisis of TayloristiFordist production systems" by the French and Italian Marxists

Spender & Kijne xviii

who were among the first to recognize that serious long-term changes were underway in capitalist industrial societies.

Those European industrial sociologists who focused on social integration and worker affluence, were forced to reconsider their basic concepts. In the US, Braverman's "Labor and Monopoly Capital" argued that the managerialist separation of the conception and execution of industrial labor had changed little since Taylor's days, in spite of widespread attempts towards reform from different schools of human relations, industrial psychology, sociology and management (Braverman 1974). Braverman also leaned heavily on Kakar's psycho-analytic biography which argued that Taylor was driven to control of the workplace as a reaction to his own upbringing. In the UK, Rose extended the analysis in his book "Industrial Behavior" arguing that Braverman's analysis over-romanticized the idea of the pre-Taylor industrial craftsman (Rose 1976). Nelson's (1980) "F. W. Taylor and the rise of scientific management" and Coriat's (1979) analysis of the relationship between scientific management and the patterns of unskilled labor immigration into the US in the late nineteenth century, diminished the impact of Braverman's explicitly political approach, especially in France, where his Marxist analysis had been preceded by those of Proudhon and Georges Friedmann.

The renewed academic interest in Taylor and scientific management should also be understood against the background of its practical meaning. The productivity issues were primarily signs of crisis in the Fordist method of manufacturing, which finally started showing its limitations and deficiencies as a comprehensive approach to manufacturing. Different industries in different countries adopted different solutions to these very severe and economically important challenges. Sometimes whole industries moved out of their homeland and into underdeveloped countries where the population was still unskilled and willing to work under classical Fordist conditions. Where such movement was impossible for capital investment or logistical reasons, importing new cadres of unskilled labor, often as dis-enfranchised guest workers, into the domestic factories became an option widely explored in Western European countries. Automation and robotization were similar attempts to salvage the Fordist ideas, to organize production along familiar lines, albeit with new technology. But eventually, with the introduction of new technologies which destroyed existing competencies and demanded entirely new ones (Tushman & Anderson, 1986), radical job redesign or re-engineering became a necessity.

The renewed study of scientific management, focusing on the codification of craft knowledge as, for instance, expert systems, rather than on its destruction, serves several purposes. One is purely academic, to achieve a better understanding the past and therefore of how we got to the present. The second is more practical, with consequences for managers, workers and policy-makers alike. This is the search for new concepts for setting up new kinds of production systems and for doing job design in the emerging knowledge- and technology-based world.

xix Scientific Management

About this book

The book comprises three parts. In the opening chapter, Spender focuses on the insights and flaws in Taylor's theory of industrial organization. Taylor probably made more theoretical contribution to cost-accounting and to the application of accounting to manufacturing, than he made to organization theory. This might seems contrary to one's intuitions, given the managerial, union and organizational theory furor surrounding scientific management. But, Spender argues, there were fundamental flaws in Taylor's thinking which prevented him from making a real contribution.

The nature of Taylor's contributions to engineering and to factory management and some of their effects are explored in the next three chapters. Clark's contribution shows how the rules of scientific research, as established by the Franklyn Institute, and the personal influence of one of its Presidents, William Sellers (Taylor's mentor at Midvale), contributed to the minuteness of Taylor's analysis of his metal cutting experiments. Clark analyzes the parallelisms between the engineering research into machine efficiency in Taylor's days and Taylor's time study of shop floor operations, challenging the image of Taylor as a non-conformist genius and showing how he simply adopted procedures already widely understood by the engineering community. In an analysis of the controversy between Taylor, his followers, and Frank B. Gilbreth, about the usefulness and accuracy of stopwatch time study and motion study, Kijne argues that Gilbreth's contribution was an essential stage in the historical evolution of modem manufacturing from Taylorism to Fordism. Korver's contribution likewise focuses on the relations between scientific management and mass production, and on the changes in the US labor market.

The third part of the book deals with the spread of scientific management over the world. Bloemen describes the history of the CIOS and the IMI, the two European organizations for the promotion of scientific management in the 1920's and 30's, from a pioneering study of the archives of both organizations. Mihilaski's contribution deals with scientific management in pre-WW II Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. He shows how local promoters of a modem approach of industrial management, such as Adamiecki and Bata, developed their own methods and instruments, largely independent of Taylor's but quite similar in their purposes and functioning. Seishi Nakagawa's contribution, deals with the evolution of scientific management in Japan from its initial impact during Taylor's lifetime up to the present. The important finding is that an almost full scale application of scientific management was achieved. This suggests that the social harmony Taylor sought to establish through the application of scientific management existed already in Japan. This adds considerably to our understanding of Japan's later manufacturing successes.

Spender & Kijne xx

An additional chapter on the application of scientific management in the Soviet Union would seem obligatory, were it not for the prior publication of Beissinger's 1988 study.

References

Beissinger, Mark (1988), Scientific management, socialist discipline and Soviet power, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Braverman, Harry (1974), Labor and monopoly capital, Monthly Review Press, New York.

Coriat, Benjamin (1979), l'Atelier et Ie chronometre, Christian Bourgeois, Paris.

Linhart, Robert (1976), Lenine, les paysans, Taylor, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

Nelson, Daniel (1980), Frederick Winslow Taylor and the rise of scientific management, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI.

Nelson, Daniel (1992) "The transformation of university business education". In Nelson, Daniel (Ed) A mental revolution: Scientific management since Taylor, Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH, pp. 77 - 101.

Rose, Michael (1976), Industrial behaviour, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.

Tushman, Michael and Philip Anderson (1986), "Technological discontinuities and organizational environments", Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, pp. 439 - 465.