MGT510 Southern New Taylor Theory of Scientific Management Paper

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Taylor’s theory of scientific management was the first attempt to theorize and thus systematize the management of workers. Identify and briefly discuss the four basic principles. Which principle is most seen in your place of employment?

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CHAPTER 3 Scientific Management, Bureaucracy, and the Emergence of the Modern Organization In this chapter we will take a historical perspective to make sense of our status as “organizational beings.” In particular, we will explore the “prehistory” of organizational life and examine some of the economic, political, and cultural conditions that led to the emergence of the modern corporation. This is not intended to be a comprehensive history; instead, it will serve to highlight some of the most important societal transformations that, in the past 200 years or so, have profoundly altered our sense of what it means to be human. In addition to this historical perspective, we will examine some of the early theories of management and organizational communication that—in conjunction with huge shifts in the way we live—emerged early in the 20th century to explain and regulate the newly emergent organizational life. It is important to recognize that these theories did not emerge in a vacuum but are closely connected to the kinds of social and political tensions society was experiencing at the time. The two most influential theories of this time were scientific management, developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and bureaucratic theory, developed by one of the founding figures of sociology, Max Weber. In addition to these two theories, we will also be examining related theorizing and research that emerged around the same time. Finally, we will use the critical perspective to assess the strengths and weaknesses of these early theories. figure THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN ORGANIZATION While many economic, political, and cultural factors led to the emergence of what we would recognize today as the modern, corporate organizational form, two factors are particularly worthy of mention— the emergence of industrial conceptions of time and space. Put simply, the modern organization depends for its existence on the willingness of its employees to appear together at a specific place and time. Of course, the recent emergence of the virtual organization complicates this claim, but most of us still have to “go” to work in a real, rather than a virtual, sense. This statement is so obvious that it seems barely worthy of mention. In order to survive, organizations depend on people to come to work and stay for a set period of time. However, this has not always been the case. Indeed, the very idea that people should work for someone else and thus earn a wage is an idea of fairly recent invention. As late as the middle of the 19th century, working for an employer (as opposed to working for oneself) was called “wage slavery.” For the average U.S. citizen, such a notion directly contradicted the principles of freedom and independence on which the United States was established. In fact, in the early 19th century around 80% of U.S. citizens were self-employed; by 1970 this number had decreased to a mere 10% (Braverman, 1974). To be described as an “employee”—a term that came into widespread use only in the late 19th century and was originally used exclusively to describe railroad workers—was definitely not a compliment. As management scholar Roy Jacques (1996) argues, “Before the late nineteenth century in the U.S., there were workers, but the employee did not exist” (p. 68). This shift from a society consisting of “workers” to one consisting of “managers” and “employees” is key to understanding the historical transformations that led to the emergence of an “organizational society.” This shift involves both a change in the kinds of jobs people held and a more fundamental transformation of collective beliefs, values, and cultural practices. Moreover, a change occurred in the forms of discipline and control to which people were willing to consent. In Foucault’s (1979, 1980b) terms, the employee as a particular “subject” (i.e., an object of scrutiny about whom knowledge is produced) was created as a definable and measurable entity. Similarly, managers as an identifiable social group were also created to administer and control the newly emergent employee. To understand our origins as corporate or organizational beings, we will explore the elements of this creation process. Time, Space, and the Mechanization of Travel Most of us are familiar with the fact that the Industrial Revolution produced a major transformation in the structure of Western society. In Europe and the United States, the invention of steam power and the emergence of mechanical, high-volume production profoundly altered people’s relationship to work. Broadly speaking, a major shift occurred in which society was transformed relatively rapidly from an agricultural, mercantile system to an industrial, capitalist system. In Britain—the first nation to experience an industrial revolution—this process began around 1780. In the United States, industrialization did not get fully under way until almost 100 years later. In both cases, however, the changes in how most people lived were profound. The process of mechanization not only enabled the production of vast quantities of goods but also fundamentally altered the economic, political, and cultural landscape. Of course, this process did not happen by accident. Indeed, a whole set of societal changes occurred that made industrialization possible. One of those changes involved the creation of a mass population of workers who could be employed in the new factories. As I indicated earlier, self-employment was the norm; so, what occurred to begin this shift to wage employment? In Britain and other parts of Europe this shift occurred with the passing of a series of “enclosure” laws. For hundreds of years, many people in Britain (mostly the poor) had access to “common lands” on which they could raise livestock and grow food (even today we use the term commons to describe a gathering place open to all, regardless of social status). The enclosure laws took away such common’s rights, awarding these areas to landowners who made vast fortunes through rents and sheep farming. Those who were dispossessed could no longer provide for themselves and thus were forced to sell their labor to others. In the United States, of course, there was no enclosure system; indeed, the government provided ordinary people with incentives to colonize the apparently limitless supply of land. The U.S. Industrial Revolution relied for its labor on the large numbers of immigrants that arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, many of those immigrants left their home countries as a result of the enclosure system in Britain and much of Europe. In addition to these important political developments, the shift to industrial capitalism was rooted in technological change. The creation and emergence of steam power functioned literally as the engine of the Industrial Revolution. It made possible the efficient, cheap, mass production of goods and allowed the development of a national transportation system that could rapidly move people and goods. However, there were other—equally significant—consequences of the emergence of mechanical power. In many respects these consequences were just as important in the emergence of the organizational society in which we all live. Here, I am referring to a profound shift in human consciousness and perception of reality that accompanied the emergence of railway transportation. Historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1986) argues that the invention of the railway was a major factor in the transformation of humans’ experience of time and space. Specifically, he suggests that the mechanical motion of the steam engine was rooted in regularity, conformity, and potentially unlimited duration and speed. For the first time in human history, transportation was freed from its natural, organic limitations, and its relation to the space it covered was changed drastically. With steam power, “motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on mechanical power that created its own new spatiality” (p. 10). Schivelbusch points out that a frequently used metaphor in the early 19th century to describe locomotive power was that it “shoots through like a bullet.” Railroad tracks crossed rivers, carved through towns, and bored directly through mountains. In the face of such mechanical power, nature lost its awesome majesty, and the arrival of “the infernal machine” heralded a new, “rational” way of looking at the world. From a 19th century perspective, the invention of mechanical forms of transportation was a doubleedged sword. From the point of view of industry, steam-powered transportation represented the breaking of nature’s fetters on economic development. No longer subject to the unpredictability of horses and wind power, transportation became much more efficient and predictable for business purposes. Against this modernist perspective was regret at the loss of a close relationship between humans and nature. The new travel technology alienated people from the natural relationships among the traveler, his or her vehicle, and the landscape through which the journey unfolded. Riding a horse or traveling in a stagecoach had a natural rhythm and sense of exertion, movement, and distance traveled that was lost in train travel. While such a perspective seems quaint from a 21st century point of view, it nevertheless indicates the fundamental change that mechanical travel introduced in people’s experience of the world. As we shall see, the railway traveler who felt alienated from his or her natural surroundings had much in common with the worker who experienced alienation from his or her work in the newly industrialized organization (of course, these were frequently the same people!). In order to better understand this process, however, we must look more closely at how this new industrial consciousness emerged in the workplace. That is, we need to examine how the craftsperson of the 18th century became the industrial employee of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries—the employee about whom so many management and organization theories have been developed. Time, Space, and the Industrial Worker The transformation of society from a primarily agrarian to an industrial system witnessed changes not only in the way goods were manufactured but also in people’s relationship to and experience of work. The mass production of goods by mechanical means required a completely different kind of worker from the craftsperson of preindustrial times. We have already seen how political developments such as the enclosure system created workers as “raw material” for the new factories. However, the new worker had to embody a different set of work habits that were necessary for the new form of industrial work discipline. The development of these new work habits can be traced to the emergence of a new understanding and measurement of time. Historian E. P. Thompson (1967) identifies the shift from task time to clock time as being a defining feature in the emergence of industrial capitalism. Task time refers to an organic sense of time in which work is shaped by the demands of the tasks to be performed. For example, the lives of the people living and working in a seaport are shaped by the ebb and flow of the tides, regardless of the “objective” clock time. Life in a farming community is shaped by the seasons; working long hours in the harvest season contrasts with the more limited amount of labor in the winter months. Similarly, the lives of independent craftspeople and artisans are oriented around the tasks they perform and are not dictated by the hands of the clock. Thompson (1967) shows how, in preindustrial Britain, little of life was subject to routine, with work involving “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness” (p. 73). For the most part, people worked when they needed to and thought nothing of mixing leisure with labor. Thompson argues that this task orientation toward time is more humanly comprehensible than labor dictated by the clock and represents a lack of demarcation between work and life in general. From the perspective of clock time, however, such an orientation toward work appears wasteful. In the struggle between employers and employees in early industrial capitalism, time proved to be the significant point of contention. As more and more people shifted from self-employment to working for others, employers attempted to impose a sense of time—clock time—that was alien to most workers but essential to the development of systematic and synchronized forms of mass production. As such, under the employer–employee industrial relationship, time was transformed from something that was passed to something that was spent—time became a form of currency. In this new relationship, it is not the task that is dominant but the value of the time for which the employer is paying the worker. (See Critical Technologies 3.1 below.) However, the introduction of clock time into the workplace marked a period of considerable struggle between employers and employees, in which the former attempted to erode the old customs and habits of preindustrial life rooted in task time. For example, in the late 1700s Josiah Wedgwood was the first employer to introduce a system of “clocking in” for workers (Thompson, 1967, p. 83), dictating the precise time that employees started and finished work. In addition, early industrialists recognized that schooling could socialize future workers into the discipline of industrial time. Thus, a number of late18th century social commentators viewed education as “training in the habit of industry,” referring not to specific skills but to the discipline required for industrial work (Thompson, 1967, p. 84). The shift from task time to clock time was a key development in industrial capitalism, and political struggles regarding time were (and still are) a widespread feature of capitalist–labor relations (Stevens & Lavin, 2007). E. P. Thompson (1967) documents the words of one early 19th century worker who reports the level of exploitation to which he and his fellow workers were subjected: The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloak for cheatery and oppression. Though this was known amongst the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss any one who presumed to know too much about the science of horology [timekeeping]. (p. 86) Interestingly, it is precisely at the moment when industrialization required a much greater synchronization of labor that an explosion of watches and clocks occurred amongst the general population. This played an important role in socializing the average person into the new industrial “time consciousness.” By the early 1800s watches and clocks were possessed widely and were considered not only convenient but a mark of prestige. Even today watches are given as gifts to mark long service with a company. Along with the introduction of personal timepieces came factory owners’ widespread use of punch clocks. These devices recorded the precise time that workers “clocked in” and “clocked out” of work. Again, a great deal of worker–management conflict developed (and still exists) around this technology. As a college student, I spent my summers working for a company that required hourly workers to clock in every morning. The punch clock required that we clock in by 7:30 a.m.—if we clocked in at, say, 7:32 a.m., we would not be officially “on the clock” until 7:45 a.m. On the other hand, if we were stupid enough to clock out at 4:59 p.m., we would get paid only until 4:45 p.m. Theoretically, then, the company could get 28 minutes of free labor from a worker. Employees would try to “game” the system by, for example, clocking in for someone else if it looked as though that person might be a couple of minutes late; or they might drive slowly back to the depot after making a delivery to make sure they didn’t have to clock out too early. In Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, there’s a scene in which Chaplin runs out of the factory where he works after “losing it.” On the street outside, Chaplin accosts a woman, who calls for help from a passing police officer. As Chaplin runs back into the factory to escape the pursuing officer, he takes time to stop and punch his time card. It’s a great example of how the technology of the punch clock helped instill in workers a sense of industrial time and functioned as an important technology of control in shaping people’s work lives. The introduction of clock time, then, was not only crucial for the development of mass-production techniques but also as a means of controlling a workforce for whom independent work was the norm. As Thompson (1967, p. 80) points out, the shift to clock time was not simply a technological advancement but, more significantly, made possible the systematic exploitation of labor. Once time became a form of currency—something that was paid for—then employers used all possible means to extract as much labor as possible from their workers. In fact, much of the workplace conflict in the 19th and early 20th centuries revolved around the length of the working day, with workers’ unions playing a significant role in reducing the amount of hours employees were required to work. Nevertheless, the basic principle that workers could be required by employers to work a certain number of hours was accepted relatively early in the Industrial Revolution. Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Thinkstock The creation of “clock time” was closely linked with industrialization and efforts to control factory workers. In case this discussion appears rather detached from our early 21st century work experience, let me illustrate the extent to which time is still intimately connected to issues of power and control in the workplace. Management scholar Joanne Ciulla (2000) points out that the level of power and prestige a person holds in his or her job is connected quite closely to the amount of discretionary work time they possess. Generally speaking, the more one is considered a professional, the less one is tied to clock time and the more one is invested in the nature of the tasks one performs. For example, as a university professor, I have a considerable amount of discretion over how I organize my time. As long as I fulfill my professional obligations (teaching, advising, committee work, research, etc.), how and where I spend that time is entirely up to me (in fact, as I write this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop!). I don’t have to clock in when I come to work or clock out when I leave. So, even though I may work 60 hours in a given week, the clock dictates relatively little of that time. On the other hand, for an assembly-line worker, the clock and speed of the assembly line dictate the entire working day. Such a worker has little or no control over how his or her time is spent and, as in the case of the Jim Beam company (see Chapter 1), he or she may not even have discretion over when bathroom breaks are taken (Linder & Nygaard, 1998). Each of these examples demonstrates the close connection between organizational power and one’s control over clock time. As we will see later in this chapter, the 20th century witnessed a more and more discriminating measurement of clock time in the workplace. While 19th century owners and managers considered it a major accomplishment to gather workers together in the same place at the same time, 20th century managers developed much more precise forms of control. In the first part of this chapter, we have been examining the historical, political, and communication contexts for the emergence of the modern organizational form. As we can see, the issue of control figures prominently. In order for organizations to function as collective, coordinated, goal-oriented social structures, fundamental shifts had to occur in the experience and meaning of work. While it took a number of decades, the average worker had to be trained to internalize, accept, and maybe even celebrate the idea of working for someone else in a synchronized, coordinated manner for a specified time period. As the 20th century progressed, however, the simple coordination of employee activity was no longer the ultimate goal of organizations. As numerous management researchers were soon to show, there were many sources of untapped potential for increasing the productivity of organizational employees. In the rest of this chapter, we will explore in detail two of the earliest theories that attempted to further systematize life in the modern organization. First, we turn to scientific management. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s (1911/1934) theory of scientific management was the first systematic attempt to develop a set of principles regarding the management of workers. While the organization and control of workers had been a major preoccupation of employers since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Taylor’s ideas transformed how control was exerted. However, to appreciate fully the impact of scientific management on control in the workplace, we need to understand the nature of work as it had developed under industrial capitalism. With this context, we will be able to see more clearly the ways in which Taylor’s theory revolutionized management–worker relations. Sociologist Harry Braverman (1974, p. 52) argues that work within industrial capitalism has three general features: As we saw in our discussion of Marx in Chapter 2, workers are separated from the means by which to engage in the production of goods. As such, they can produce goods only by selling their labor power to others. Marx calls this process expropriation. Workers are freed from any legal constraints (such as slavery or serfdom) that prevent them from freely selling their labor power to capitalists (although the development of company towns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries tended to put severe limits on a worker’s freedom to sell his or her labor power). From the capitalist’s point of view, the purpose of employing workers is the expansion of a unit of capital that belongs to that capitalist. This is how the capitalist is able to make a profit. An important principle in operation here is that the worker does not sell an agreed-on amount of labor but, rather, the power to labor for an agreed-on amount of time. In theory, human labor is infinitely expandable, and, thus, the capitalist seeks various ways to increase the productivity of the worker during a given time period (e.g., speeding up the production line). It has long been established that one of the best ways to increase productivity is through the division of labor. Adam Smith (1723–1790) provides the most famous analysis of how the division of labor operates to increase productivity in his famous economic treatise, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776/1937). Using the example of the production of pins, Smith shows that, by dividing pin manufacture into 18 different operations, productivity is increased immensely. The division of labor, first presented by Adam Smith well over 200 years ago, is an essential feature of all societies. As Braverman points out, however, the division of labor takes two different forms. First, the social division of labor divides society into different occupations and has been a feature of all societies for thousands of years. Second, the manufacturing division of labor is a specific feature of capitalist society and divides humans. That is, not only are the operations in making a particular product (e.g., pins) separated from one another; they are also assigned to different workers. Thus, the skill needed to make pins is not embodied in a single worker but, rather, is fragmented among many. While the social division of labor maintains the organic connection between the worker and his or her craft, the manufacturing division of labor ruptures that connection and turns the craftsperson into an unskilled detail worker. In examining scientific management, we will be particularly interested in the manufacturing division of labor because Taylor concentrates his efforts here in his attempt to transform the nature of work. Let us now examine his theory more closely. Taylor’s Principles: The “One Best Way” As an engineer at the Midvale Steel Company in Pennsylvania, Taylor spent his entire professional career attempting to develop more efficient ways to work. From shoveling piles of pig iron to the science of cutting metals in machine shops, Taylor was single-minded in his efforts to develop the “one best way” to perform various tasks. Starting in 1880, and continuing for 26 years, Taylor performed between 30,000 and 50,000 experiments on steel cutting alone (Taylor, 1911/1934, p. 106). The development and implementation of the principles of scientific management, however, were by no means simply a technological issue. More than anything else, Taylor’s system addressed the relations between employers and employees. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Taylor was confronted with a work environment characterized by high levels of antagonism between workers and managers. Much of this conflict revolved around efforts by employers to intensify the work process (i.e., get workers to work harder) and corresponding attempts by workers to restrict their output. Taylor referred to this deliberate restriction of output by workers as systematic soldiering—a problem he saw as the central problem in the workplace. While what he referred to as “natural soldiering” involved “the natural instinct and inherent tendency of men to take it easy” (Taylor, 1911/1934, p. 19), systematic soldiering resulted “from a careful study on the part of the workmen of what will promote their best interests … with the deliberate object of keeping the employers ignorant of how fast work can be done” (p. 21). At first glance, systematic soldiering appears to defy logic. Why would workers wish to restrict their output and at the same time hide from their employers how fast a particular job could actually be done? This seems especially odd given that most workers in Taylor’s time were paid according to a piece rate (i.e., a given amount for each “piece” produced) and thus, theoretically, would receive higher wages the more they produced. As Taylor shows, however, systematic soldiering is a rational response by workers to the logic of the workplace. For the most part, systematic soldiering occurred because employers tended to reduce the piece rate as the workers’ output increased. As such, workers had to work harder to earn the same amount of money. Thus, they would attempt to find the minimally acceptable output level that would both maintain wages and insulate themselves from employer attempts to reduce labor costs. The process of systematic soldiering was not an act by individual workers but, rather, was based on collective decision making by groups of workers. Workers policed one another to make sure no one was engaging in “rate busting”—a practice that could jeopardize the piece rate (and, potentially, coworkers’ jobs). Indeed, such collective decision making was possible in part because many workers in the late 19th century were still organized into work groups within factories that reflected the old guild system. For example, Ciulla (2000) documents the case of “iron rollers” in the Columbus Iron Works who worked in 12-man teams, with each team negotiating with the employer how much iron they would roll and their fee. They then made a collective decision regarding what portion of the fee each member would receive. These groups worked according to a strong moral code, the most important element of which was an agreement to produce only as much as their union had agreed on. A constant struggle was waged between these workers and the owners, who wanted increased output. According to Ciulla, “worker restriction of output symbolized unselfish brotherhood, personal dignity, and cultivation of the mind” (p. 92). In developing his principles of scientific management, Taylor’s objective was to replace this old system of ordinary management—a system he perceived as arbitrary and based on “rules of thumb”—with a rational system rooted in sound scientific principles. Such a system, he argued, demonstrated conclusively that the workplace did not have to be rooted in conflict and antagonism between mutually exclusive interests but, instead, could be based on cooperation and mutual benefit. From his perspective, scientific management turned a zero-sum game into a win-win situation. Taylor outlines four basic principles of scientific management: Scientific job design. Each element of the work task is designed according to scientific principles, thus replacing the old “rule-of-thumb” method of “ordinary management.” Scientific selection and training of individual workers. Each worker is matched to the job for which he or she is best suited and then trained in the necessary skills. This differs from the system of ordinary management, where workers chose their own work and trained themselves. Cooperation between management and workers. In order to ensure that all the work being done corresponds to scientific management principles, managers supply a supportive supervisory environment that provides workers with a sense of achievement. Equal division of work between management and workers. Under this principle, management assumes the responsibility for scientifically designing tasks and planning ahead. Under the old system, workers were responsible for both the planning and labor of work. Under the new system, managers develop the laws and formulas necessary to design and plan tasks scientifically. Taylor argues that the only way in which these principles can be enacted is through what he calls a “complete mental revolution” in society in which both workers and managers fully recognize the benefits of working under the new system. In an argument consistent with Adam Smith’s idea of “enlightened self-interest,” Taylor claims that scientific management simultaneously increases productivity, cheapens the cost of consumer goods, and raises the income of workers. As a result, the population’s real income is greatly increased and the entire country’s general standard of living improves. In The Principles of Scientific Management Taylor provides the reader with a series of vivid illustrations to make his case for “the one best way” to perform work tasks. The most famous example is his discussion of the “science of shoveling.” In his research at the Bethlehem Steel Company, he shows how a worker named “Schmidt” increased his daily productivity from 12 ½ tons of pig iron shoveled to 47 tons. Taylor achieved this large increase in productivity by carefully observing the work process for several days, redesigning the task (e.g., by experimenting with the size of the shovel and varying rest periods), and choosing an appropriate worker who was physically capable of working at this higher rate. In this example, Taylor promised to pay Schmidt $1.85 per day instead of his usual $1.15. Thus, under Taylor’s system, a 60% increase in wages is more than offset by an almost 300% increase in productivity. From its inception, scientific management was an extremely controversial system. Indeed, in January 1912 Taylor was called to appear before a congressional committee set up to investigate the effects of his system on workers. While much of the opposition to scientific management came, not surprisingly, from labor unions, the system also encountered opposition from factory owners and captains of industry. From the latter’s point of view, the idea that management skills were rooted in scientific principles rather than being inherent in a superior class of men (“captains of industry”) was difficult to accept. However, for Taylor, scientific management was more than just an efficiency system designed to improve productivity—it was something akin to a moral crusade. Historian Martha Banta (1993) has pointed out that The Principles of Scientific Management is written not so much like a typical scientific treatise but rather in a strong moral tone. As such, the principles of scientific management reflected Taylor’s need “to eliminate immoral waste motion in the workplace and to replace dissonance with harmony in society at large” (p. 113). Indeed, Taylor’s system was consistent with the progressive ideology of the time, in which science and efficiency were connected to social harmony (Fry, 1976, p. 125). This connection between efficiency and societal harmony is a good indication of the extent to which many of the leading thinkers of the day saw “the question of organization” as the central issue facing society as a whole. At the turn of the century, mass immigration, African Americans moving north into industrial areas, women entering the workforce, and labor unrest were all seen as disrupting the smooth functioning of society. As such, the emergence of the scientific, machine model of organization appeared to provide a way to assimilate the new worker into the fabric of society. A formula to describe this historical period might be written as follows: From a communication perspective, Taylor’s principles encapsulate the idea that a progressive society rests on the clear and convincing communication of ideas. As becomes clear from reading Taylor’s work, he is fully convinced that the only thing preventing full adoption of his principles is a lack of clear understanding of how his system operates. Thus, the provision of information in a clear manner and the use of vivid practical examples will ensure the wide acceptance of his system. Moreover, the way his system is practically implemented requires a model of communication consistent with the discourse of representation discussed in Chapter 1. That is, success of the system depends on the clear transmission of information about how a specific task should be performed. Taylor even recommended that managers prepare job cards that gave workers precise instructions for their tasks; in this way, there could be no misunderstandings or ambiguities about the nature of the work. Next, we turn to a discussion of two of Taylor’s contemporaries and collaborators—Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. The Contributions of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth While Taylor was the principal exponent of scientific management, he was certainly not alone in that endeavor. Almost as famous in their application of scientific principles to work were the husband and wife team of Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868–1924) and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878–1972). Immortalized in the book Cheaper by the Dozen (Gilbreth & Carey, 1948)—so called because Frank and Lillian had 12 children—the Gilbreths became famous for their development of time and motion studies. Although they were initially advocates of Taylor’s system, they became rather disillusioned with Taylor’s focus on time as an indicator of how efficiently a job was being performed (Graham, 1997, p. 547). Instead, they argued that managers should focus on motion rather than time (Graham, 1999, p. 639). Smithsonian Institute Archives Along with her husband, Frank, Lillian Gilbreth refined scientific management and helped introduce its principles into the home. Using the new technology of motion pictures, the Gilbreths studied workers’ movements by analyzing tasks according to Therbligs—the basic units of motion that make up all work tasks (can you spot where the word Therbligs comes from?). Using this unit of analysis, the goal was to redesign work tasks, making them more efficient by eliminating any unnecessary movements. The objective was not only to increase the efficiency of work (the Gilbreths promised a 33% reduction in unnecessary movements in any task) but to reduce the amount of fatigue experienced by workers. Given that one of the complaints about Taylor’s system was that it pushed workers beyond limits of physical endurance, this goal caught the attention of managers, and the Gilbreths were widely sought after as organizational consultants. A second important difference between the Gilbreths’ system and Taylor’s is that the former paid close attention to the psychological dimensions of work. While Taylor based his system on the belief that workers were motivated primarily by economic incentives, the Gilbreths believed that worker satisfaction in performing tasks was key to achieving optimum performance (Graham, 1997, 1999). Indeed, the Gilbreths developed the term happiness minutes, referring “both to the reduced fatigue that efficient workers would experience … and to the greater enthusiasm workers displayed once they began thinking about their own efficiency challenges” (Graham, 1999, p. 641). Thus, the Gilbreths argued for the need to increase workers’ job satisfaction by correctly matching individuals to jobs, minimizing the fatigue experienced in the work process, and giving workers personal reasons to work efficiently. In addition, they advocated tapping into employee expertise and involving them in decision making by, among other things, placing suggestion boxes in the workplace. As sociologist Laurel Graham (1999) points out, “Roughly a decade before Elton Mayo’s famous ‘Hawthorne Experiments’ at Western Electric [see Chapter 4], Lillian Gilbreth made both the psychological attributes of the worker and the social characteristics of the work situation central to modern management” (p. 640). While it would be easy to dismiss the Gilbreths’ system as manipulative and aimed at further exploiting workers, evidence suggests they had a genuine concern for workers. Their break with Taylor’s system was due in part to their perception that it treated workers simply as bodies, neglecting the psychological dimension of work that is necessary for job satisfaction. Indeed, in his consulting work, Frank Gilbreth had a policy of signing contracts with both managers and unions before taking on a particular job, suggesting a genuine concern for labor issues (Graham, 1999, p. 640). However, the story of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth has an interesting twist. In 1924, Frank Gilbreth died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving Lillian as the sole breadwinner for her surviving 11 children. Despite the fact that they had been equal partners in their consulting business, Lillian found herself suddenly unable to earn a living this way. Given the climate of the times and the prejudice against educated women, she had to find alternative ways of supporting her family. Thus, in the years between 1924 and 1930 she remade herself as a nationally renowned expert in the application of scientific management principles to the home. As she herself explained in a 1925 magazine interview, “The search for the One Best Way of every activity, which is the keynote today in industrial engineering, applies equally well to home-keeping and raising a family” (quoted in Graham, 1999, p. 633). For example, in discussing ways for women to increase their efficiency in the kitchen, Gilbreth recommended that they plot their movements by carrying a ball of string and pinning the string every time they changed direction. In this way, a woman’s movements around the kitchen could be “graphed out” (Gilbreth, 1927). Such information could be used to rearrange the kitchen appliances in order to minimize unnecessary motion and hence reduce fatigue. From the perspective of the scientific and progressive philosophy of the time, Lillian Gilbreth was fighting against a traditional, romantic view of the home that saw it as a haven from the harsh realities of modern, industrial life. Any changes in traditional household methods were viewed by many as undermining the sanctity and morality of the family unit. Thus, Gilbreth’s task was not only to introduce science and efficiency into the home but also to connect this efficiency with morality. She had to disassociate morality from household drudgery and show that modernization “would increase job satisfaction without threatening the ideal of a nuclear family in a private home with a full-time homemaker” (Graham, 1999, p. 657). Thus, Gilbreth was able to show that a healthy—and, therefore, moral—home life was made possible only through the scientific achievement of an efficient home. Thus, once again, we see the connections among efficiency, morality, and social (in this case, family) harmony that were so prevalent in this era. How, then, can we assess scientific management? In the next section we examine, from a critical perspective, some of its problems and limitations. A Critical Assessment of Scientific Management Sociologist Harry Braverman provides perhaps the most systematic critique of Taylor’s system. Writing from a critical perspective, Braverman (1974) argues that scientific management is an “attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in a rapidly growing capitalist enterprise” (p. 86). According to Braverman, Taylor assumes a capitalist perspective, recognizing the antagonistic relations between capital (represented by the employers) and alienated labor. His basic goal is to adapt the workers to the needs of capital. However, workers are not adequately controlled, because they maintain their hold over the labor process, generally knowing more about how the work is done than do managers. For Taylor, then, control over the labor process must be placed in the hands of management in order to realize the full potential of labor power. Braverman claims that Taylor succeeds in his task by making a fundamental division between the conception of work and its execution. While in the old craft system, conception and execution were united in a single worker (for example, a shoemaker both designs a shoe and makes it), under Taylor’s system, the unity of labor is broken in order to control it. By placing all knowledge about work in the hands of managers, workers lose control over how work gets done. This division between mental labor and physical labor serves to alienate workers from their jobs, insofar as they become mere appendages to the work process. Their autonomy and decision-making ability are minimized. Furthermore, as managers gain a monopoly over work knowledge and work is further divided into different tasks, workers become increasingly deskilled. Braverman (1974) summarizes the effects of scientific management in the following, rather poignant, manner: “In the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human” (p. 125). We can argue, then, that for Taylor the focal point of organizational control was the human body. In his effort to take control of the labor process from workers and place it in the hands of management, he advocated the development of a vast body of knowledge about work processes, the object of which was to discipline the worker’s body so it performed work in precise and calculated ways (Foucault, 1979). This legacy is still with us, as we will see in the next section. A second, related, criticism of Taylor is that he viewed the individual worker as his basic unit of analysis and neglected the social dimension of work (a management focus that would emerge in the wake of the Hawthorne Studies, which produced the human relations movement—see Chapter 4). Indeed, Taylor saw any kind of communication and cooperation amongst workers as problematic precisely because it led to such problems as systematic soldiering. For Taylor, then, group communication in the workplace was dysfunctional because it interfered with the “one best way” of performing tasks. In this sense, Taylor’s conception of communication is rooted in one-on-one information transmission between manager and worker. Third, Taylor had a rather limited view of workers, seeing them as motivated exclusively by economic incentives. Any notion that workers might fulfill higher-order, psychological needs through satisfying work was completely absent from Taylor’s model. Furthermore, his descriptions of the workers he studied suggested a rather paternalistic view of their abilities. He describes “Schmidt,” for example, as being “so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more clearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type” (Taylor, 1911/1934), even though, by Taylor’s own account, Schmidt was building his own house. Certainly, in comparison with Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s psychological model of the worker, his perspective captures little of the complexity of the worker’s relation to his or her work and the larger organization. Fourth, Taylor can be criticized for elevating scientific management to a moral system that had the ability to cure society’s ills. Certainly, such conceit is consistent with the larger social movement of his time that equated rationality and efficiency with moral good. However, the idea that society as a whole should function according to his machine-like “one best way” is somewhat problematic. However, much of the enthusiasm for scientific management can be explained by the sense that society was disordered and full of social and political unrest. If everyone followed Taylor’s principles (including in their daily lives), then order would be restored. Finally, as I have already suggested, Taylor operated with a very limited conception of communication, though it was consistent with prevailing views of his time. For him, communication was a largely mechanical process compatible with the conduit model (Axley, 1984) discussed in Chapter 1. While Taylor talks about cooperation between management and workers, his conception of organizational communication seems limited to managers accurately transmitting information about work tasks to employees. The Legacy of Scientific Management The conventional wisdom of management thought suggests that scientific management quickly fell into disfavor and, with the emergence of human relations theory, largely disappeared as a viable way to manage employees. The reality, however, is very different. As Braverman (1974) points out, scientific management disappeared from general visibility not because it was rejected but because it became a widely accepted, taken-for-granted way of organizing work. Once Taylor’s principles became a defining feature of the workplace, it was necessary to create various theories and models (such as human relations theory) to adjust the worker to the alienating nature of the work experience. Indeed, one need not look far to see the effects of Taylorism in today’s workplace. The fast-food industry is probably the most visible and successful practitioner of scientific management principles. There is no better example of this success than McDonald’s, which has elevated the principle of the “one best way” to new heights (Leidner, 1993; Ritzer, 2000, 2004). Each McDonald’s is run by closely following a 700-page operations manual, and no aspect of the business of selling hamburgers escapes careful control and routinization. It would certainly make no sense to walk into a McDonald’s and ask, “What’s good today?” Neither employees nor customers have much autonomy in the decisions they make (“value meal” items, for example, cut down on the amount of time it takes for people to place orders). Ritzer (2000) has argued that the basic features of “McDonaldization” are efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control—four elements that are highly consistent with Taylor’s vision of scientific management. The customer-service industry in general applies scientific management principles in a systematic way. For example, sales representatives in department stores often receive electronic messages on their cash registers instructing them to “call the customer by his or her first name.” Many retail stores enforce strict guidelines about how quickly a customer should be greeted upon entering the store. A student once told me that the store she worked for required its sales representatives to greet customers within 19 seconds of their entering the store! And we have all experienced annoying telephone sales techniques in which the caller follows a script carefully designed to limit the kinds of responses the unlucky recipient of the call can make. In recent years the power of computer software has taken scientific management of work to new heights. The grocery chain Meijer, for example, uses a computer system to measure the efficiency and speed of checkout clerks, with timing beginning automatically when each customer’s first item is scanned. Each clerk is given a weekly efficiency score, and too many weeks below a baseline 95% score can result in termination. One of the effects of this efficiency effort (in addition to reducing labor costs) is that daily pleasantries between customers and checkout clerks have been significantly reduced (O’Connell, 2008). figure Ryan McVay/Digital Vision/Thinkstock Grocery stores use computer technology to monitor checkout employees’ efficiency in bagging purchases. What all these examples share is the effort to create an efficient, routinized system that maximizes control over both employee and customer. Each is consistent with Taylor’s basic goal of separating the conception of work from its execution and disciplining the worker’s body to perform tasks in a way that will secure profitability for the company. This is particularly true in the service industry, where the point of contact between customer and company employee is the primary source of revenue generation. Finally, perhaps the most troubling legacy of scientific management is the degree to which Taylor’s principles have entered our personal lives. Society is practically besieged by experts telling us how to lead “efficient” everyday lives. Every bookstore displays several rows of books written by “experts” who have a plan for making us more fulfilled people. These “self-help” books are based on the idea that there is “one best way” for us to conduct our lives. No one seems to notice the paradox of there being literally dozens of “one best ways.” Books such as Steven Covey’s (1989) Seven Habits of Highly Effective People preach a gospel that roots happiness in our ability to routinize our lives and locates personal empowerment in predictability. Ironically, many companies now use the principles of self-help gurus to train their workers as they search for new ways to incorporate private aspects of the self into work (Carlone, 2006; Carlone & Larson, 2006). figure BUREAUCRATIC THEORY: MAX WEBER AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Max Weber (1864–1920)—pronounced “Vayber”—is an important figure in the social sciences whose work is wide-ranging, complex, and difficult to classify (Clegg, 1994). Strangely, though, if you examine the way his writings have been presented in the fields of organizational communication and management, the diversity and complexity of Weber’s works disappear. For the most part, he is presented almost exclusively as the theorist responsible for developing the bureaucratic model of organizational behavior. Most textbooks give Weber a page or two, restricting themselves to describing the features of bureaucracy as outlined by Weber (1978). We will take a somewhat different approach to Weber and paint a broader picture of his work. Indeed, the first thing you should know about Weber is that he was not really an organizational theorist or researcher at all but, rather, a sociologist and philosopher. Weber was interested in studying organizations but only to the extent that they were examples of the broader social, political, and economic processes he was interested in explaining. What, then, was Weber’s main focus? In brief, most of his work sought to explain the historical development of various civilizations through the examination of political, legal, religious, and economic systems (Morrison, 1995). He asked questions such as, “What is the connection between religious systems and the development of particular economic structures and organizational forms?” For example, his famous study titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1958) analyzes the influence of protestant religious doctrine on the development of capitalism in the United States and Europe. In this study, he shows how work and the “gain spirit” were elevated in the 19th century to a moral duty in everyday life—accumulating wealth was seen as a means to acquire grace and salvation. Weber’s writings can be compared to those of his countryman Karl Marx, in that both were interested in tracking the historical development of different societal forms. However, Weber differs from Marx in important ways. First, Weber disagreed with Marx that the job of philosophers was to change the world by linking theory to political action. Rather, Weber saw the primary goal of scholarship as developing a descriptive body of historically valid truths (although we will see later that Weber was not averse to engaging in social critique). Second, Weber rejected Marx’s theory of historical materialism that sought to explain society through a primarily economic model. Weber argued instead that no single causal model could explain societal development and change. He saw economics as only one element in a broader model that included examination of political, legal, and religious elements (Kalberg, 1980; Morrison, 1995). As such, his writings attempt to show the interconnections amongst these various features of society. One of the issues that most interested Weber was the forms of power he identified as having emerged historically in various societies. Specifically, he was interested in how a particular form of authority emerged with the modern, capitalist state, replacing earlier forms of authority associated with monarchies and feudal systems. Below, we will discuss Weber’s forms of authority and address their importance for understanding contemporary organizations. Weber’s Types of Authority In discussing the development of social order in different societies, Weber makes a distinction between power and authority. Power is a general term used to describe the ability of those in power to exercise their will, despite resistance by others (Weber, 1978, p. 53). In this sense, it describes the most crude, overt forms of domination. For example, a professor has the power to give a student a failing grade, regardless of that student’s protests. This is the form of power in which Weber is least interested. On the other hand, authority refers to a society’s development of a system of rules, norms, and administrative apparatus to which people adhere. In such a system, leaders are legitimately able to exercise authority over others, who are expected to obey. Weber identified three forms of legitimate authority, which he identified as characteristic of three different forms of social order. Charismatic Authority Literally speaking, charisma means “gift of grace,” and Weber argued that one important source of authority derived from the identification of a particular individual as having exceptional—perhaps even supernatural—abilities and qualities. Certainly, religious figures such as the Pope and Billy Graham partly derive their authority from their charismatic abilities. People follow them precisely because they are seen as having the gift of grace and as transcending the routines of everyday life through their possession of special powers. Such figures do not have to engage in brute force or coercion; rather, their authority is rooted in their followers’ belief in the validity and truth of their powers (Morrison, 1995, p. 285). However, charismatic authority is not limited to religious leaders. History is full of charismatic figures— both good and evil—such as Hitler, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Nelson Mandela. Each of these figures had a charismatic presence that secured the allegiance of millions of people. Charismatic authority is also a significant feature of organizational life. In the late 19th and early 20th century “captains of industry” such as John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan were heroic figures of their day. In the 21st century, industry leaders such as the late Steve Jobs and Donald Trump are identified as charismatic figures with magical abilities when it comes to making money. Weber argues that one of the features of charismatic authority is that it tends to emerge in times of crisis and social unrest. For example, Hitler came to power as a result of the economic and political instability experienced in Germany in the 20 years after World War I. Martin Luther King Jr.—by virtue of his rhetorical powers—was able to unite diverse groups to pursue the goal of civil rights for all. Nelson Mandela (1995) was a charismatic figure even while in jail under the apartheid system, and in postapartheid South Africa he has been a unifying force, appealing to both white and black South Africans. figure © iStockphoto.com/EdStock Steve Jobs met Weber’s conception of a charismatic leader. Another feature of charismatic authority is its tendency toward instability and social chaos. Because such authority is rooted in a single individual, its potential for disruption is quite high. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is in the case of religious cults, where the actions of mentally unstable charismatic leaders have led to the deaths of many followers. Jim Jones and David Koresh in the United States are two examples of such leaders. Similarly, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 contributed to a period of great civil unrest and political instability in the United States. Many organizations also experience instability or failure when a charismatic leader is no longer in charge. For example, many people are wondering how Steve Jobs’ death will affect Apple and its ability to create iconic, must-have electronic products. Traditional Authority In Weber’s second form of authority, legitimacy is derived from tradition and custom. Traditional authority is rooted largely in the inherited right of an individual to expect obedience and loyalty from others. The legitimate exercise of authority, then, comes not from any kind of special powers of the person but from adherence to a tradition that may go back hundreds of years. Probably the best example of traditional authority is a monarchy. Kings and queens derive their authority not from any specific skills or individual characteristics but by an accident of birth. While Weber associates traditional authority with a bygone age (mainly feudal systems), such authority still exists even in corporate life. For example, in family-owned businesses, sons and daughters frequently inherit the reins of power from parents. Such appointments may have little to do with expertise; indeed, even when children are groomed for many years to inherit businesses, developing considerable skill, the organization is still operating within a traditional system of authority. For example, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch employs two of his children in prominent positions in his company. Another good example of traditional authority is the operation of an “old-boy” or “old-school-tie” network in an organization. Employees gain power based not on their abilities but because they have gender and racial characteristics that fit the prevailing value system of the organization. Employees not exhibiting such characteristics tend to be marginalized. For years, women managers have fought against informal organizational structures where important decisions are made on the golf course or at private clubs—places from which women have traditionally been excluded. College fraternities and sororities might also be seen as structured along traditional systems of authority. Organizational structures and belief systems are rooted in age-old customs and values handed down from generation to generation, and potential members are closely vetted to make sure they fit the typical member profile (Bird, 1996; DeSantis, 2007). Rational–Legal Authority Weber’s final system of authority is the most important and the one he argues is at the foundation of the modern form of Western democracy. Rational–legal authority is the form underlying the bureaucratic model. The term bureaucracy means “rule of the bureau,” or office, and refers to a system based on a set of rational and impersonal rules that guide people’s behavior and decision making. People owe allegiance not to a particular individual or set of customs and beliefs but to a set of legally sanctioned rules and regulations. Amongst the features of bureaucracy identified by Weber (1978, pp. 956–958), the following are the most important for our purposes: A hierarchically organized chain of command with appropriately assigned responsibilities. A clearly defined system of impersonal rules that govern the rights and responsibilities of office holders. The development of written regulations that describe the rights and duties of organization members. A clearly defined division of labor with specialization of tasks. Norms of impersonality that govern relations between people in the bureaucracy. Employees behave and make decisions according to the rules of their positions rather than personal ties to others. Written documentation and use of a file system that stores information on which decision making is based. Weber argued that the bureaucratic system, with its foundation in rational–legal authority, was technically superior to the other forms of authority in a couple of ways. First, bureaucracy was democratic insofar as it treated everybody equally and impersonally. While at first glance an “impersonal” organizational decision-making system might seem lacking in human qualities, it remains an important feature of most organizations in the Western world and ensures that people are treated according to their merits and abilities. Second, Weber argued that the rational–legal authority system and its bureaucratic structure promoted the development of capitalism (Morrison, 1995). This is because bureaucracy enhances the speed of business operations by maximizing efficiency and functioning according to a set of calculable rules. In addition, because of its impersonal structure, business people are increasingly encouraged to make decisions for economic rather than emotional reasons. As Morrison states, “When fully developed, bureaucracy adheres to the principle of sine ira et studio—without hatred or passion” (p. 299). Weber’s three authority systems do not represent three mutually exclusive forms of organization. Indeed, it is not unusual for all three kinds of authority to be found in a single organization. There are certainly plenty of examples of organizations that are highly bureaucratic but also employ charismatic figures and have strong traditions to which members adhere. My own university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is recognized as both a top-notch research university and a powerhouse in the world of men’s college basketball. As such, it simultaneously embodies rational–legal, traditional, and charismatic forms of authority. For students, the process of “getting an education” partly involves figuring out a highly complex system of bureaucratic rules that regulates everything involved in obtaining a degree. At the same time, the university’s prestige is derived not only from its educational excellence but also from its history and tradition, not a small part of which is the success of the university’s men’s basketball team. As such, the team’s former and much-revered coach, Dean Smith, holds significant charismatic authority, despite having retired many years ago. The current coach, Roy Williams, is similarly revered (and, not accidentally, a former assistant of Dean Smith), having won two national championships at UNC—it’s not unusual to see bumper stickers around Chapel Hill that state, “In Roy We Trust!” Of course, all organizations—even large bureaucracies—have elements of all three forms of authority. Indeed, an organization based on exclusively rational–legal principles would be an extremely sterile and soulless place to work. Weber’s Critique of Bureaucracy and the Process of “Rationalization” Weber was not simply an uncritical advocate of bureaucracy. As such, it is important to address the extent to which he was skeptical about the direction in which a bureaucratized, rational society was heading (Clegg, 1994; Kalberg, 1980). Although he was not a critical theorist in the sense that Marx and the Frankfurt School researchers were, his model of society nevertheless had a strong critical element. Much of this critical element centered on Weber’s analysis of what he called the rationalization process in modern society. For Weber, rationalization referred to the process by which all aspects of the natural and social world become increasingly subject to planning, calculation, and efficiency. Such rationalization was an important hallmark of modernity, he argued. But while rationalization was an efficient process that helped fuel the massive growth of capitalism, it also led to a narrowing of human vision and limited appreciation of alternative modes of existence. While a rationalized world is a predictable, efficient, and calculable world, it is not necessarily a fulfilling world in which to live. In recognizing these negative consequences, Weber referred to the “iron cage of bureaucracy” in which everyone had become imprisoned. Innumerable examples of this rationalization process are all around us. The shift from shopping at the local “mom and pop” store to shopping at department stores and malls is one example of everyday life being rationalized and stripped of enchantment. While department stores may be cheaper, more efficient, and offer a wider selection of goods, they undermine our sense of community and destroy our connections to one another. As we saw earlier in our discussion of the legacy of scientific management, department stores try to compensate for this process of rationalization by employing greeters and instructing employees on how to be “friendly” to customers. Of course, the irony is that this kind of “emotional labor” (Hochschild, 1983) is itself a form of rationalization. Many businesses engage in the commercialization of human feeling and emotion in order to improve their efficiency and profitability. The rationalization process is not confined to the corporate world, however. Any social context that can be subject to rational calculation exhibits such qualities. For example, universities are increasingly subject to rationalization as administrators look for ways to increase organizational efficiency and accountability. So, for instance, professors are under increasing pressure to provide quantitative assessments of their classroom performance. Whether such assessments provide actual evidence of classroom performance seems less important than the fact that these measures exist as “data” administrators can use when lobbying the state legislature for funding. In the same vein, many students adopt a “means–end” approach to education, in which the actual process of learning is viewed as less important than the grades (and, ultimately, the job) received. In this instance, the educational process is rationalized to fit within an instrumental worldview. The Legacy of Bureaucracy Weber was a theorist who tried to make sense out of the process of modernization as it occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His aim was not to provide a model of organizational life but, rather, to show how various systems of rationality and authority emerged in different historical and cultural contexts. Moreover, he was concerned with how these systems of rationality enabled people to make sense of the world and order it into meaningful regularities (Kalberg, 1980, p. 1174). Weber, then, was a modernist theorist but not an uncritical advocate of the modernization process. While he recognized the superiority of bureaucracy and its underlying democratic impulses, he also expressed great concern about the ways modernity limits the richness and possibilities of human existence. Indeed, despite Weber’s writing in the early part of the 20th century, the process of rationalization is arguably even more applicable to current organizational life than in Weber’s own time. In this sense, Weber’s writings are quite prophetic. Sociologist George Ritzer’s (2000) work, mentioned earlier in the chapter, takes up Weber’s notion of “rationalization,” showing how this process has come to pervade every aspect of our lives, organizational and otherwise. Like Weber, Ritzer is concerned that rationalization has led to the “disenchantment” of everyday life, with everyone subject to a daily diet of calculated, mass-produced, carefully controlled, predictable experiences. figure Critical Case Study 3.1 Rationalizing Emotions My oldest brother hates the service in U.S. restaurants. Sure, he thinks the service is fast and efficient, but he can’t stand the way servers try to create a synthetic connection with the customer (“Hi, my name is Julie, and I’ll be your server—how are you guys this evening?!”). He feels manipulated, arguing that it’s simply an effort to sell more food and increase the size of the tip. He much prefers the service in Spain, where being a server can be a career, the pay is good, and service is discreet, knowledgeable, and professional. But one of the legacies of both scientific management and bureaucracy is efforts to micromanage and rationalize social interaction, and emotional labor in the service industry is part of that legacy. In recent years, scholars have documented how for-profit organizations increasingly co-opt employees’ emotional expressions as a way to increase profitability (Raz, 2002; Tracy, 2000, 2005). Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) coined the term emotional labor to describe this process of putting emotion to work for profit. In describing Hochschild’s study of flight attendants’ use of emotional labor, Kathy Ferguson (1984) states: The flight attendant’s smile is like her makeup; it is on her, not of her. The rules about how to feel and how to express feelings are set by management, with the goal of producing passenger contentment. Company manuals give detailed instructions on how to provide a “sincere” and “unaffected” facial expression, how to seem “vivacious but not effervescent.” Emotional laborers are required to take the arts of emotional management and control that characterize the intimate relations of family and friends … and package them according to the “feeling rules” laid down by the organization. (p. 53) In her ethnographic, participant-observation study aboard a cruise ship, organizational communication scholar Sarah Tracy (2000) describes similar control efforts, discussing in detail how she became a “character for commerce,” largely forfeiting any rights to personal emotions not expressed in the service of the cruise line. The reality is that in a 21st century service economy we all expect efficient, friendly, and helpful service from employees. We generally give little thought to the stresses and strains the employee might be experiencing as we revel in the knowledge that the customer is “king.” On the other hand, many of you have worked or currently work in such positions and so have intimate knowledge of the kinds of emotional labor employers expect of you to ensure that customers have a positive experience. You know what it’s like to work a long shift, all the time having to maintain a sunny and positive disposition as you interact with customers who are often demanding and surly. In class or group discussion, address the following questions related to emotional labor: Discuss your own experiences both giving and receiving emotional labor in service contexts. What limitations, if any, should be placed on employers’ ability to use employees’ emotions as a way to sell their products and services? What are the limits of customer rights to demand friendly and attentive service from employees? Discuss the following comment by Herb Kelleher, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, responding to the question, Aren’t customers always right?: “No, they are not. And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’” (Freiberg & Freiberg, 1996, p. 268). There are numerous examples of rationalization, but let me just briefly provide two: “Theme” restaurants such as Applebee’s, Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, etc., all of which have rationalized the process of creating a “unique” dining experience for customers. Think about how Jennifer Aniston’s manager criticizes her for not exhibiting enough “flair” in the movie Office Space and you’ll get the picture of how creativity gets rationalized and bureaucratized. The conduit model of education discussed in Chapter 1 certainly fits the process of rationalization. Education focuses less on the engaged learning process and more on the efficient and calculated production of graduates with marketable skill sets. Lest I leave you with the wrong impression, the legacy of bureaucracy is by no means all bad. Although Weber worried about rationalization and the iron cage of bureaucracy, he still saw the bureaucratic institution as the bedrock of Western democracies. And, to a large degree, this is still the case. While we will see in later chapters that many commentators have criticized the bureaucratic organization for being too cumbersome and inflexible in times of rapid change and fast, global capitalism, some theorists have argued that it remains an essential feature of our organizational society (Du Gay, 2000; Perrow, 1986). In fact, one might argue that the emergence in the past 20 years of “postbureaucratic” organizations with flexible structures, decentralized decision making, rapid adaptability to changing environments, and so forth (see Chapter 8) has created greater opportunities for corporate malfeasance (e.g., think about the various corporate and financial institution scandals in the past few years) as well as a more unstable work environment for employees. The idea of “sine ira et studio—without hatred or passion” is still an essential characteristic of organizational life that helps create greater opportunities for everyone’s advancement. figure CONCLUSION: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF “CLASSIC” THEORIES OF ORGANIZATION The classic theories of scientific management and bureaucracy have both made significant contributions to the nature of organizational life as we know it today. Although both theories are widely regarded as limited in their conception of organizational behavior, the effects of each are still felt in the modern organization, with both scientific management principles and rationalization processes widely applied. The machine metaphor of order, efficiency, and predictability underlying both perspectives has by no means been abandoned, although it is practiced in a more sophisticated manner than in the days of Taylor and Weber. Table 3.1 provides a summary comparison of these two important theories. From a critical perspective, how might we characterize the relationship between Taylor’s and Weber’s views of organizations and society? First, Taylor’s writings can be described as prescriptive, while Weber’s are largely descriptive. In other words, Taylor is arguing vigorously for the adoption of his principles as a way to improve work performance. Weber, on the other hand, is providing a comparative analysis of the systems of authority and rationality that emerged in various societies. In some ways, Taylor’s model is less about social science than it is about promoting a set of work principles. In contrast, Weber is a trained social scientist interested in the systematic exploration and analysis of human social behavior. Table 3.1 Comparing Scientific Management and Bureaucratic Theory figure Second, Taylor and Weber differ greatly in terms of the levels of analysis at which they are working. We might describe Taylor’s work as operating at the “micro level,” focusing on the individual worker (or, more specifically, the individual worker’s body). Weber, in contrast, has a “macro-level” focus; his interest lies in explaining the conditions underlying the development of whole societies. Third, both Taylor and Weber are modernist theorists insofar as they believe in the role of science and rationality in human progress and liberation from oppression. However, Taylor’s belief in the “one best way” suggests his uncritical equation of science and truth. For him, science and rationality are the only roads to truth and social harmony. For Weber, science and rationality are viewed with much greater skepticism. While the rationality of modern human society reflected liberation from myth and superstition, it also signaled entrapment in the iron cage of bureaucracy and rationalization. The accompanying “disenchantment” of the world led to an impoverished sense of community and human identity. Thus, Weber is much more critical of the path that modernization and capitalism have taken than is Taylor. Finally, we can compare their conceptions of communication. In comparison with some of the theories we will discuss in later chapters, both Taylor and Weber have relatively crude models of communication. For Taylor, communication involves merely the correct transmission of information to employees about how a particular task should be performed. In this sense, he adopts a simplistic transmission model of communication. Weber’s model of bureaucracy contains a similar conception, in that communication is conceived as the task of transmitting information amongst employees through a formal organizational structure. However, Weber’s perspective is a little more complex if we view his larger theory of society as an examination of how people develop a system of values with which to make sense of our world. In studying the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, for example, Weber is examining how a particular value system was used to order the world in a particular way. Having examined closely two of the earliest theories of management and organization, in the next chapter we turn our attention to the human relations school of organization. As we will see, this next perspective introduced an important shift in how organizing processes were understood.
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Running head: FORD AND SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY

Ford and Scientific Management Theory
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FORD AND SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY
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Ford and Scientific Management Theory
Taylorism (scientific management), in simpler terms, is a management theory
rationalizing and standardizing the techniques of production with a goal to improve product and
efficiency. Fredrick Winslow Taylor developed the theory publishing it in ‘The principles of
scientific management’ (DeWinter, Kocurek & Nichols, 2014). He did formalize relationships
with employees and their work re-designing the process of work. Henry Ford is understood as a
visionary man under his visionary thinking. His purpose was manufacturing cars under the title
‘Ford Motor Company’. Through such a deal, the company was after achieving cost efficiency in
the process of production and increasing its market share. To achieve such an objective, the
company has to completely change i...


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