Scientific Management

Scientific Management is the "management thought concerned primarily with the physical efficiency of an individual worker" (Business Directory). Frederick Taylor developed this theory of management in the late 19th century that aimed to improve productivity by analysing and evaluating every step in a manufacturing process and breaking in into smaller repetitive and specialised task (Merriam Webster). The application of such a study is known as the ‘scientific management' and holds distinctive features in its pursuit of maximising productivity.

Taylor identifies the conflict between both workers and managers. Workers practiced "soldiering" where there is the instinctive tendency of men to work leisurely. More concerning to productivity is the conspiring of workers to work at a leisurely pace. This creates the first inefficiency in the market. Secondly, Taylor identifies managers as being incompetent where they lack information on workers abilities and time needed to accomplish tasks. Managers thus resorted to "guesswork" in their attempts to estimate output availability. These conflicts increased tension in the workplace and reduced productivity, thus the "scientific management" approach was developed to narrow this conflict by creating a "scientific, impartial, universal and law-like" approach to work (Rose 1978: 34) to create an authentic industrial partnership.

The first main feature of "scientific management" focused on was the organisational structure and routine. To deal with soldiering and incompetence, Taylor created the "functional foremanship" (Rose 1978: 34) that assigns workers to managers they are responsible to. This lessens the blurred lined between workers and managers so that everybody has a clear role in the organisation. It represents the idea of "division of management" (Littler: 1978, 190). "Thinking departments" (Rose 1978: 35) are set up to oversee the overall production lines and settle administrative issues such as pay calculation and discipline. Critics to this approach claim that creating this functional relationship has degraded and devalued workers. Effectively, there is a transfer of control over production from workers to managers. Applying this technique has also been largely unsuccessful as gains from "supervisory specialisation is offset by role-conflicts and ambiguities of jurisdiction" (Rose 1978: 35). In this sense, there is a "bureaucratisation of the structure of control" (Littler: 1978, 185). In contemporary society, more sophisticated methods are developed such as the "contingency theory" by Max Weber which highlights that there is no "one best way" to approach the workplace but instead, it is a conflict between different interest groups and the firm's objectives. However, we must note that "scientific management" is essentially an early concept