Critiques of Scientific Management and Practices in Organisations

Critiques of Scientific Management and Practices in Organisations

Scientific management, also being referred as Taylorism for this term earliest being coined by Frederick Taylor, could be considered as a theory of managing the employees within the organisation through analysing and synthesizing the workflows of the employees. The main objective of the scientific management, however, was to make improvements of the economic efficiencies of the organisation mostly through the raise of the productivities of the work forces (Bruere 2004). Scientific management could be considered as one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the management within the human history, and the theory was developed by Taylor mostly based on his own experiences in working in a large manufacturing facility within the 1880s and 1890s (Appleby 2011). Just as stated as Kunda (2012), starting from Taylor, management had no longer been an empirical issue, but more an area of scientific researches that the managerial scientists develop systematic ways to improve the overall work efficiencies of the manufacturing facility. However, although the scientific management had been a breakthrough within the science of management in the history and remained influential even for the most current researches of management and organisational studies, there are deficits and inapplicability of the theories for the current businesses, which were under higher level of pressures on the scarcity of resources and complexity of the markets. Based on the above concerns, this essay would try to discuss and evaluate critically about the potential elements of the scientific management, and also critically assess the applicability of the theory on the practical organisations at the present time.

In the book of “The Principles of Scientific Management” of Taylor (1911), concepts of scientific management had been introduced by Taylor in details. Management, in the book, had been considered as a science that contains principles, laws as well as rules, but not the rules of the thumb, and by following those rules, laws, and principles, the employees’ productivities could be improved with the general organisation’s economic efficiencies being increased. Referring reaching the highest economic efficiencies, or maximising prosperities, for both employers and employees as the ultimate objective for the scientific management, Taylor had actually undertaken a unitarist view of the organisation, through which he saw the employers and the employees have the same interest in the manufacturing process, and it is the commonly shared interests that lead to the unstoppable efforts by employers and employees for maximising the prosperities of them through increasing productivities (Eylon 2008). The scientific management also brings a new mode of theory for both the employers and the employees, through which the employers were considered not pursuing for the