TAYLORISM
Taylorism and Degradation of Work
Taylorism continues to be a dominant idea in the management of business as well as in the sociology of work. For over a century now, the theory has been a subject of animated debate on diverse issues such as class control and issues of alienation. While there is no doubt that the theory is still applied in business today, critics contend that this style of management leads to the dehumanisation and degradation of the worker (Hoxie 1916, Mayo, 1923 and Braverman, 1974). However, it is generally accepted that scientific management increases efficiency and output in a workplace. In light of these criticisms, it is important to evaluate how far Taylorism led to the degradation of work.
Taylorism is a philosophy that advocates for the scientific management of work. Fredrick Taylor is credited as the father of this scientific management theory. According to Robbins et al, scientific management can be defined as “an approach that involves using scientific methods to define the one best way for a job to be done” (2014, p.23). In brief, Taylorism’s philosophy is that productivity can only increase if jobs are optimised and simplified. The philosophy promotes the spirit of cooperation between the workers and the managers. The other important element in scientific management is the performance appraisal. According to Taylor, workers are motivated by money, and therefore it is important for managers to link payment with performance – “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” (Taylor, 1911).
But to achieve all this, Taylorism advocates for the scientific management of work as opposed to the “rule of thumb’ commonly practiced in the nineteenth century. In other words, managers should scientifically study and analyse work so that they can obtain optimum productivity and efficiency. To this philosophy, the “golden rule of scientific management” is to “get the situation right, and the appropriate human behaviour and organisation performance will follow” (Burrel and Morgan, 1979:128). From this philosophy, Taylor comes with what he calls the four principles of management: one, the development of a true science, two, the scientific selection of the workman, three, the scientific education and development of the workman, and four, initiate a friendly cooperation between the management and the workers.
Although this kind of management improved productivity, increased employee incentives, and boosted quality control, it is criticized for leading to the degradation of work (Locke, 1982). Perhaps one of the concepts that has attracted passionate debate is the idea of task allocation. In this concept, which is fundamental to the theory of scientific management, Taylor argues that breaking down the task into smaller and smaller tasks allows the determination of the optimum solution to the task. As Taylor explains, “The man in the planning room, whose specialty is planning ahead, invariably finds that the work can be done more economically by subdivision of labour, each act of each mechanic, for example, should be preceded by various preparatory acts done by other men” (Taylor, 1911:38). In this approach to management, Taylor’s intention was to increase efficiency, and, thus productivity.
While scientific management achieved this goal, it generated a rigid working place. The said division and subdivision led to standardization. Standardization is not necessarily bad for business; “it embodies the progressive evolution of improved techniques” (Caldari, 2007). However, it can be injurious when it leads to a dehumanising effect. According to Baverman (1964) and Mayo (1923), the rigid style of management reduces workers to machines who cannot either excel or think. The science of management does not only specify what is to be done but also how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it (p.39). This leaves the worker with limited space for innovation and creativity (Haber, 1964). The endowment of workers is wasted. In their production line, and in their small task, workers become part of the machine. This was the case in Ford Company – one of the early companies to implement scientific management. In this company, Meyer quotes one of the workers describing how they used to perform small fragments of work in the motor assembly department: “One man fits the part together so that the bolt holes come right. The next man fits the bolt holes into place. The next has a pan of nuts before him and all day he scoops them up and with his fingers starts them on the thread of the bolts. The next man has a wrench and gives the final twist that makes them right” (Meyer, 2004). Such a system increased efficiency tremendously, but the workers were detached from the final output. As one of the workers in the Ford company notes, ‘it may be fine to see an automobile come through that door every twenty seconds – but you don’t see them if your job is to start the nuts on the threads. You haven’t time. There are always more bolts to be capped” (Meyer, 2004). As Dewey (1996) observes, the worker becomes increasingly distanced from the worker when planners and managers concentrate on the efficiency of movement.
In such a setting, the workers cannot appreciate their roles in the entire production line. This is when Marxists say that the worker is alienated (Baverman 1974). The situation is made worse by the fact that scientific management focuses on the separation of mental work from manual work. In metaphorical language, this has been described as the separation of the hand from the brain. It was the view of Taylorism that workers with limited education backgrounds were not in a position to plan how work should be done (Caldari, 2007). To address this concern, Taylor came up with the solution of separating conception from execution (Gabor, 2000). This in essence separated workers from managers. In today’s working environment, such alienated workers can be described as disengaged. To Baverman (1974), this kind of structural arrangement led to antagonistic social relations where the hand and the brain not only become separated but also divided and hostile. To critics, especially, Baverman and Marxists, this was a deliberate design by the capitalist to exploit workers. Separation of conception from exception is, in essence, dehumanisation of the labour process. This aspect of dehumanisation can be attested to by the labour unrest that followed the wide application of scientific management in Europe and America. Marxists are very much critical of the alienation considering their firm belief that work is the essence of man.
Taylorism is also seen as degrading because of the negative attitude it displays towards the worker. In a description of a worker, named Schmidt, Taylor says that he had just the ox-like mentality needed to do the brutish physical labour (Taylor, 1911). In one instance, Taylor describes what was required of Schmidt, the worker: “When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right through the day. And what’s more, no back talk” (Taylor, 1911:13). Such an attitude towards the worker can only be in modern-day termed as barbaric and cruel. It treats the worker as a machine that only receives instructions. What informs this perception of the worker is Taylor’s conviction that “in the majority of cases this man [Schimidt] deliberately plans to do as little as he safely can” (Taylor, 1911 13). Such a negative attitude could have influenced Taylor’s harsh approach to the worker. But in any case, such an approach could only have applied to the uneducated worker.
More degrading aspects of Taylorism are seen when it comes to payment. The idea of payment in scientific management theory is informed by the assumption that workers are mainly motivated by pay. It is from this background that Taylor comes up with the principle of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”. This was after Taylor discovered that in the crafting system, there was an attempt for workers to do the least amount of work in the longest amount of time. This is why Taylor proposed that managers should scientifically measure workers’ productivity and set high targets for them. However, the formula that Taylor uses to set targets –time-motion studies – has been described as having social Darwinism aspects where only “the strongest, quickest, or most dexterous” could survive (Tompkins, 2005:74). This is because the rate of the most productive man in Taylor’s time-motion studies would be used to set the targets for all the other workers. In addition, relying on workers’ pay as the main motivator has been critically opposed by human relations theorists who argue that money is not the only motivating factor in the industrial relationship. As Mayo (1923) found out, a worker’s motivation involves many other factors such as recognition, social aspects of the workplace as well and a sense of belonging.
In conclusion, the argument that Taylorism led to the degradation of work is only true to some extent. It is true that Taylorism dehumanises and alienates the worker but it is also true that the management approach increased the high daily wage and raised the general standard of living. It could also be argued that the failure of scientific management was because of applying the techniques without understanding the philosophy behind them. In its original sense, scientific management had conceptualized an environment where the interest of the employer and the worker were one and the same thing – “that prosperity for the employer cannot exist a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employee, and vice versa” (Taylor, 1911: 10). In addition, Taylor’s idea of scientific management is where both the employer and worker would realize justice.
List of References
Braverman, H. (1974) Labour and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the Twentieth Century. New York: NYU Press
Burrell, G & Morgan, G. (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate life. London: Heinemann
Caldari, K (2007) Alfred Marshall’s Critical Analysis of Scientific Management. Euro. J. History of Economic Thought Vol 14(1):55-78
Dewey, J (1996) The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Electronic Edition, ed. Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation
Gabor, A. (2000) The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business – Their Lives, Times, and Ideas. New York: Time Business
Haber, S. (1964) Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Hoxie R.F (1916) Why Organized Labour Opposes Scientific Management. The Quarterly Journal of Economic, vol. 31(1), pp62-85
Locke, E. (1982) The Ideas of Frederick W. Taylor: An Evaluation. The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 7(1), pp.14-24
Mayo, E (1923) The Irrational Factor in Society. Journal of Personnel Research, Vol. 1(10):419-426
Meyer, S (2004) The Degradation of Worker Revisited: Workers and Technology in the American Auto Industry, 1900-2000. [Online] Robbins, S.P. et al (2014) Fundamentals of Management. New Jersey: Pearson Education
Taylor, F (1911) Principles of management. New York: Hive Publishing Company
Tompkins, J (2005) Organisational Theory and Public Management. Belmont: Thomson-Wadsworth
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