Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) consolidated a system of managerial authority, often referred to as scientific management, that encouraged a shift in knowledge of production from the workers to the managers.

His system broke up industrial production into very small and highly regulated steps and required that workers obey the instructions of managers concerning the proper way to perform these very specific steps. Taylor determined these steps through careful scientific observations, his most significant individual contribution to scientific management. He used these observations to compare the pace at which various workers completed tasks. Taylor's system of management atomized, or separated workers from each other. Workers in his system were given highly detailed work instructions that Taylor's scientific studies had determined to be the very best - that is most efficient - way to perform the specific, isolated, task. Workers became parts of a larger machine and they were expected to understand that their interests were in accord with the interests of managers. This "mental revolution" of interests was, Taylor believed, the most significant contribution of scientific management, in that it reduced management-worker strife.

Born into an economically established old Philadelphia Quaker family, he was the youngest of eleven children. He attended Germantown private school. At sixteen, after a three-year trip through Europe with his family, he was sent to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, in preparation for Harvard University. After passing his Harvard entrance examinations with honors, he suffered severe eyestrain that precluded his attendance there. On the advice of eye doctors, he went to work for a small machine shop in Philadelphia, where he learned the trades of pattern maker and machinist, after which he took a position at the Midvale Steel Works in 1878. It was here that Taylor eventually became foreman of the machine shop, with expert knowledge of the ways of the work floor. He promptly set out to destroy those ways, particularly the "soldiering" of labor. That is, Taylor knew that workers tended to do much less work than they could really produce; he wanted to increase their productive capacity. Workers resisted his efforts but, after three years, Taylor seems to have succeeded in raising production through constant managerial pressure. His next decade at Midvale was spent in careful, scientific study of these problems (production and worker resentment). He wanted to increase output without having to drive the workers.

In 1881 Taylor published an essay on metal cutting that generated a great deal of attention by engineers because of its rigorous examination of the individual steps involved in cutting metal. In 1895 he began to publish papers on schemes to increase worker incentive. He successfully combined these interests in a June 1903 presentation to 350 mechanical engineers in Saratoga, New York. This essay would stand as his most complete statement of scientific management. Martha Banta called the Saratoga essay, "one of the key documents shaping modern industrialization." The success of this essay propelled Taylor to the presidency of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1906.

In spite of this honor and his success among engineers, Taylor's work was rarely known outside of the community of industrial engineers until lawyer, reformer, and future U.S. Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis tapped his ideas to help in the Interstate Commerce Commission hearings concerning railroad rates. He used Taylor's scientific management methods as an example of progressive management techniques that could ease the strain on workers even as it raised their pay and increased profits for owners. In 1910, Brandeis argued before the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that wage increases did not necessitate increases in railroad rates. He argued that properly administered railroads, that is, those governed according to the principles of Taylor, did not need to raise rates to increase wages. The Eastern Rate Case, as it came to be known, stimulated a great deal of interest in notions of efficiency. Taylor credited Brandeis with the successful promotion of the system. "I have rarely seen a new movement started with such great momentum as you have given this one," Taylor wrote to Brandeis.

Brandeis, who invented the term 'scientific management,' wrote to fellow lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court justice, Felix Frankfurter, on February 27, 1911, about his work with the ICC and expressing his belief that scientific management exemplified the future of social order. "The Commission did, I think, quite as much as they could, and rather more than I thought they would with the efficiency argument. They accepted the fundamental principles