Scientific Management

"Scientific Management. - This is one of the names adopted for a certain body of principles and methods of management which have been propounded as applicable to industrial undertakings, other names being Efficiency Engineering and Industrial Management. Developed in the United States, mainly since about 1905, and particularly in connexion with engineering work, the methods of Scientific Management have exercised a profound influence on methods of factory management in England and on the continent of Europe, as well as in America. Though applicable to most of the problems of industrial administration, they have in fact been worked out mainly in connexion with the control of workshop processes.

The theory underlying Scientific Management is briefly that there is one best way " of doing every act that has to be performed in a workshop, and that it is the duty of the management to discover that " one best way " and to make such arrangements as will ensure that it is always carried out. The method of procedure may be indicated by propounding the following three questions: I. What are the factors which limit the speed of a particular workshop process or machine?

2. Why is it that the volume of output from a particular process is always less at the end of the week than the product of the speed of the process or of the machine, multiplied by the working hours in the week, would lead one to expect?

3. Why do some workers produce so much more than others working under the same conditions?

An attempt to discover full answers to these questions leads to very far-reaching inquiries, and radical changes in organization and administrative methods may become necessary if the results of such inquiries are to be put to effective use.

Thus, the investigations prompted by the first question may be expected to lead to modifications of the mechanism and construction of a machine to enable it to run faster; to modifications of tools or appliances used; to changes of the material used for machine parts, for tools or for accessory purposes. Changes in the design of the work to be done might also follow, which, while leaving the product just as suitable for its purpose as before, would enable the process to be carried out faster. A different method of handling the work, the machine or the tools might be developed, involving a new series of motions on the part of the workman which would result in a saving of time. Not only would specific improvements be made of the kind suggested above, but the effect of each of the many elements which influenced and limited the speed of a process would be reduced to a law, the knowledge of which would save a great deal of experimentation in applying the process to changed conditions.

Investigation of the second question might lead to equally valuable discoveries. For instance, it might be found that the process was stopped altogether for portions of the working week for such reasons as lack of continuous supply of material to be worked on; changes of the " set-up " of a machine due to change in the nature of the work to be done; breakdowns of the machine; adjusting or sharpening of tools; waiting for instructions and many other possible causes. The attempt to remedy these would lead to the development of methods of work-control and planning. These would aim at ensuring that material was always ready to hand to be worked on; that all work of a like nature was carried through at the one time, to avoid needless resetting of machines; that tools and appliances were ready to hand; that instructions as to the next job were prepared and ready in advance; that the nature of each new piece of work was clearly described and so on. Schemes of periodic inspection or adjustment of machines or tools might be indicated in order to reduce time lost through breakdowns.

The third question would lead to the discovery that different workmen had slightly different ways of doing the same thing, and that the ways of the faster workers could be explained to and adopted by the others; that some workers were temperamentally. more suited to a particular kind of work than others; that some were not trying; that others were trying too hard and were worrying themselves by their failure; that in some cases the relations between the workmen and the foreman were happy and in other cases not.

The remedying of these troubles would lead to careful methods of choosing workmen for particular jobs, to ensure that men of suitable temperament as well as capacity and skill were employed; to schemes of instruction for showing the worker exactly what was required of him, and for teaching him the methods which had been found to be the best for carrying out the work in question. A scheme of payment by result might be developed, to give the workman the necessary incentive to ensure that he would profit by the instruction given him and would follow the methods laid down. The methods of control, the relationship of the various grades of personnel and the demarcation of the spheres of authority of the various officers of the workshop might also require rearranging, to allow of the foregoing changes and to ensure satisfactory relations between the workmen and those directing them. Built up on the result of such investigations as have been indicated, a variety of systems of management have grown up, one emphasizing one factor and another specializing in another direction, and all known by the general description of Scientific Management.

The origin of the movement is traceable to the work of F. W. Taylor, an American engineer, for many years a manager in the works of the Bethlehem Steel Co., Midvale, Pa. His investigations, leading later to the development of his methods and principles of management, sprang from the attempt on his part to lay down a standard fair day's work and to see that he got it from the men under his control. This led him into a deep analysis of the elements affecting the amount of work that could be done in a given time, and in turn by the kind of steps already indicated to the formulation of his system. One of the largest single pieces of investigation carried through by him was concerned with establishing the laws governing the rate of removal of metal by cutting-tools in a machine. This was carried on at intervals during 26 years. One result of it was the discovery in 1899 of modifications in the composition of tool steel from which the modern high-speed steel was developed. The whole results were published in 1906 in the Transactions of the American Society of MechanicalEngineers under the title" The Art of Cutting Metals." In this Taylor distinguished 12 different factors as influencing the possible speed, and he established formula expressing the effect which each had on the rate at which metal could be removed during a machining operation. He found that the maximum speed of working could only be attained by a correct adjustment of each variable in relation to all the others. To enable this calculation to be made quickly, one of Taylor's assistants, C. G. Barth, devised a type of compound slide rule, by which the best adjustment of the 12 variables referred to could quickly be found, so establishing the combination of conditions under which the work could be done in the shortest time. An account of these slide rules was published in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1904). A special slide rule was needed for every variation of every type of machine, and in order to reduce this complication it was necessary to group together all machines capable of doing similar work and to modify them so as to make their movements identical. One calculation and one slide rule would then serve for all the machines of a group. In other words, machines were, where possible, standardized.

To enable maximum cutting speeds to be attained Taylor established, as a result of the foregoing investigation, a set of standard cutting tools for the commonest kinds of machine operations, such as lathe work. These standard tools were specified as to contour of cutting edge, all angles of cutting edge, size of shank and hardening treatment, etc.

Another piece of standardization work resulting from Taylor's investigations was in connexion with the design and use of belt drives. Obviously, if a machine was to be called on to give its maximum performance the means of driving it must be suitable to ensure adequate power. This necessitated an investigation into the laws of power transmission by belting and the drawing up of rules for the standardization both of the material of the belts themselves and of the conditions under which they should be used. One of the most important of these conditions is the tightness of the belt before starting up the drive. Besides laying down suitable rules for this, apparatus was designed for measuring and checking it. Accounts of this work were published by Taylor in 1894 and elaborated by Barth in 1908, both in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Concurrently with all this investigation another line of thought had been receiving attention, both from Taylor and others, again mostly in connexion with the engineering trade. This was the problem of obtaining from the workman a higher level of effort than he gave under ordinary methods of workshop management. Although " piece work " - payment by the piece as against payment by the hour or day - was in very general use in many industries, the practice of " cutting the rate " had reduced its efficiency as a stimulus to maximum effort. One of the earliest attempts was the development during the 'eighties by. H. R. Towne of the Yale & Towne Mfg. Co., United States, of a scheme called by him " gain sharing," according to which improvements in the efficiency of a works department resulted in the payment to workers in it of a bonus on a prearranged scale. Other plans were the Rowan scheme, which consisted in the fixing of a variable rate per piece, the rate falling according to a fixed scale as the workmen's output rose. By this plan, although the workman benefitted by extra effort, the rate of increase of benefit constantly diminished. The aim was to avoid the temptation to " cut the rate " while still making an attempt to fix a standard of expected output from the workman. This plan was published in 1891.

In 1895 Taylor published his Differential Piece Rate, which may be considered to be the basis on which all the multitudinous systems of payment by result of the Scientific Management movement are founded. Taylor's system contained two revolutionary ideas. The first was the careful specification in great detail of the work to be done, with standard times allowed for each element of the work as against the " overall " time hitherto specified for the complete job. The second was the offering of an increased rate of return to the worker for increases in his efficiency - exactly the opposite to the Rowan plan. This was achieved by offering two alternative piece rates, the lower to apply if the work was done at less than the standard speed and the higher if it were done at the standard speed or faster. The feasibility of this scheme depended entirely on the accuracy with which the " standard time " could be determined. So important did this become that the idea of " time study," with its later development of " motion study," is probably the bestknown feature of Scientific Management, and indeed is often taken to be synonymous with it.

Many modifications of Taylor's scheme of payment by result were developed by other workers in the movement. All retained as their basis the setting of a standard time by careful time study, the time being built up of the times for the elements of the work, and the nature of the work to be done and the methods to be followed being specified in great detail. All provided that the rate of incentive should increase at or about the efficiency needed to accomplish the task. The best known of these other schemes are the " Gantt bonus plan " by H. L. Gantt, published in 1901, and that of Harrington Emerson, published in 1909.

It will be realized that the characteristic features of Scientific Management so far touched on - the standardization of appliances and methods, the detailed specification of the work to be done, time and motion study, setting the workmen's task, regulating his payment by his performance of it - all lead to increased complication of management functions.

The material equipment of a works requires special attention to keep it in conformity with the standard. The quality of raw material must be more carefully regulated to enable it to be worked at the standard speeds and on the standard methods. The elimination of waiting between jobs requires elaborate planning of work; the making of time studies is the work of experts; the studies themselves require constant revision to suit changes in design, working methods or material; the incentive to output necessitates systematic inspection of work to ensure the standards of accuracy or finish being maintained. In these and numberless other directions work of a much higher order than hitherto is demanded from the management staff if the system is to function at all.

In order to enable the works management to cope with the new demands made upon it, Taylor devised a new method of administrative organization known as functional control, and applied it particularly to the sphere of the shop foreman.

Under the usual methods of organization a foreman has complete charge of the men under him. All instructions from the higher management pass through him and reach the workman as though they were the foreman's own orders. Taylor's idea was that the instructions which had to be given to the workmen under his system were so much more detailed and elaborate, and dealt with so many more aspects of his work than hitherto, that it became impossible to pass them through a single foreman. It was impossible, he claimed, to find a foreman sufficiently expert in all the sides of the control work or having a sufficiently rich endowment of qualities to carry out the multiplicity of functions now embodied in management. Thus, he would have to be sufficiently skilled at the particular process to teach the men under him how to carry it out; he should have the impartial judgment of an inspector; he must have the assertiveness and force of character needed to get a good day's work out of his men; knowledge of character, sympathy and sense of justice to deal with matters of discipline; he must be methodical and sufficiently versed in clerical and statistical methods to plan out his work and avoid loss of time between one job and another. He must understand costing, methods of handling material, time study and the setting and adjusting of piece or bonus rates, and so on. Because of the obvious impossibility of creating a staff of foremen who should be experts in all these lines, Taylor replaced the single foreman having complete charge of a group of men by a number of " functional foremen," each specializing on one aspect of management control. Each individual workman 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 looking after a particular aspect of management, of which he was the mouthpiece, as far as the workman was concerned.

This rigid and literal working-out of Taylor's idea of " management by experts " had usually to be modified in practice on account 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," was maintained, by which a group of men was wholly answerable to a single foreman, a group of foremen to a departmental 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 psychology. 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 beforehand, 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 1lianagement systems as actually applied to an industrial undertaking.

Standardization of all machines doing similar work; of all factory 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 dissemination 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 development 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 considerable 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 successful performance of the task as laid down in the instruction based on the time study.

Functional Management

This may vary from complete functional foremanship to functional study of methods, technique and procedure, the results being conveyed to the workman via a departmental foreman.

Planning

A special functional department is charged with laying down the order of preference of all work, the sequence of operations 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 available, 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 Management 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 investigation into the working of Scientific Management should be made, and appointed for this purpose Prof. R. F. Hoxie, of the university 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 constant 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 specialized 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 and 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 fundamental ideas of their system. Their conception of industry was entirely mechanical. Their organizations were ingenious structures 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 materials, 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 garded as mistaken even by many of his closest followers, who were inclining to believe that in forfeiting the vital factor of personal leadership the loss was greater than could be compensated for by any amount of intensification of expert knowledge. There was a growing tendency too to concentrate study and standardization on the inanimate side of industry, on machines, tools and equipment, on materials and their treatment, on handling methods and appliances, on labour-saving devices, rather than on speeding up and regulating the motions of the worker. The same distinction was seen in the attitude of British labour leaders to Scientific Management. Among the more intellectual leaders the accumulation of more and more of the technical knowledge of an industry in the hands of the management and the more detailed regulation and instruction of the manual worker which results were recognized as inevitable. They were seen to be merely a continuation of the process of replacing hand labour and hand skill by machinery. Such men accepted the need for the application of science to industry as far as the inanimate factors were concerned, and concentrated their antagonism against the treatment of the worker as mere impersonal mechanism.

By the end of the World War some 100-200 American undertakings, largely engineering concerns, had adopted Scientific Management in one or another of its forms, as a complete system. In Great Britain the number of such firms was perhaps one-tenth of those in America, and the positions in France and Germany were perhaps less advanced still. The influence of the movement, however, cannot be estimated by any such figures. For every concern that had adopted the system in its entirety there were io or 20 that had adopted portions of it, or had modified their previous methods of management under the influence of ideas first given prominence by the Scientific Management school. The conception of " the one best way," the belief that every act, every relation and every implement of industry is worthy of close and systematic study, has provided an inspiration and a stimulus to management methods in all industries and in every country, the effect of which can hardly be less than that of the introduction into industry of machinery a hundred years ago.

(C. G. R.)