You can start an overview of the history of the organisation of work any time in history you like; it would not surprise me if the Neanderthals had some kind of division of tasks between members of a community. But let us not go back that far (I would like to have some readers left for my next blog posts); in general, the start of people management is placed in the late-nineteenth century when there was a first reaction on the industrialisation and the exploitation of workers.
Of course you have the political works of Marx and Engels around that period, but I refer now to the social reformers in mainly the UK and the US who wanted to address the problem of exploitation, long working hours and horrendous working conditions the lion’s share of the workers was subjected to. These initiatives to provide the work force with housing, better working conditions and education, reflected a paternalistic approach of the industrialists towards ‘their’ workers; efforts to educate the workforce and their families in line with the principles of religious morality. Strict moral control of the workers on the work site, but also in their private lives, was the consequence. For example workers were not allowed to drink alcohol or had to go to church on Sundays.
Although their initiatives were an important signal that something had to change, the ‘paternalistic’ attitude of the social reformers towards the workforce was economically not advantageous and lead to less competitiveness for the company. So scientists were looking for new ways how to increase production and increase control and motivation of the workers (exploitation and bad working conditions were, like you can imagine, devastating for motivation – it led to drinking, illnesses, injuries etcetera).
In the meantime the factories grew and grew, employing often several tens of thousands of workers, and the distance between superior management and the level of the individual worker was enormous. Superior management was no longer the director who knew all workers and their family situation; it became a body which took rational and “objective” decisions.
All these developments lead to the development of the so-called scientific management by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915); a new scientific approach which is based on several principles:
- application of principles of ratio on how to organize work;
- strict separation of tasks between management and workers;
- detailed scientific analysis on how to perform the tasks;
- training of the worker on how he/she can do their tasks most efficient;
- recruitment & selection of workers on a scientific basis;
Scientific management was mainly introduced to let management control how the work is done and the individual workers each has a very specific task in the process. Due to the specificity and the simplicity of the task every meaning was taken out of it. Money was seen as the only motivator: so if you increase the wages, the harder they work. The workers were controlled directly by supervisors and indirectly by controlling their output.
Fritz Lang – Metropolis (1927) – a groundbreaking and very impressive movie by the German expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang
The ideas of Taylor were received with enthusiasm by the industry, because it increased productivity and efficiency, but with hostility by the unions and the workers, because workers had less influence and freedom on how they perform and a lot of work was monotonous and mind-killing.
On the basis of the description above you might think that we have left these practices far behind us, but that is not entirely true. Just imagine the fast food industry, in which one cuts the roll, another butters it, the third puts the meat on it, the fourth puts some lettuce on it (and so on, and so on). Usually it is associated with low-pay, down-to-earth processing. Not very popular.
So, what has scientific management taught us ? First, that monotonous labour is mind-killing and in the end leads to stress, illness, alcoholism and what have you. Second, that people demand some say in how they perform their tasks. Third, that workers need some kind of social interaction with others to make work worthwhile. Fourth, that people can not be controlled totally – that makes them different from machines.
To end this post on a happy note, an infamous scene from the Lucy show and an anticipation on The Basics 4 on Fordism;
M
psycho at work 