I had hoped that this would go more into the failures of taylorism but from quickly skimming through, it didn't seemt to be. I recommend people read at least some of the many critiques, starting with the ones linked in the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management#Critic...
The interesting thing is article seems more humane and worker-centric than the current philosophy of shareholder supremacy. At least they're giving lip service to improving workers rather than talking about shedding them at the first opportunity.
>...It is hoped that some at least of those who do not sympathize with each of these objects may be led to modify their views; that some employers, whose attitude toward their workmen has been that of trying to get the largest amount of work out of them for the smallest possible wages, may be led to see that a more liberal policy toward their men will pay them better; and that some of those workmen who begrudge a fair and even a large profit to their employers, and who feel that all of the fruits of their labor should belong to them, and that those for whom they work and the capital invested in the business are entitled to little or nothing, may be led to modify these views.
This is ironically coming from the point of view of Scientific Taylorism which many cite as the prime example of vicious selfish pro-executive greed. How strange. Have we taken a step backwards with global supply-chains, corporate citizen-hood, and the ever-increasing "gig-economy" where workers are transient and expendable?
Our center is just way outside and to the right of people's overton windows from 100 years ago with regard to some of those policies.
Not all of them though. They thought tip-only wages, child labor and openly paying different rates based on people's ethnicity were all reasonable practices. Ford would have people inspect his workers home and would dump them if they were being too "foreign", I mean we are talking Lochner era here.
It's a mixed bag. Culture is some amorphous blob, stretching one way and ceding ground the other. You could get a decent paying union job in 1920 without a highschool education but you could be fired for infidelity with your wife, miscegenation, being gay, etc. And just forget about gender equality.
It'd be nice if we could "buffet" practices from the past and skip over the ones we find distasteful.
> Have we taken a step backwards with global supply-chains, corporate citizen-hood, and the ever-increasing "gig-economy" where workers are transient and expendable?
The war described in the article is waged on both sides. The workers themselves are acting as mercenaries - understandable given the conditions. And clearly a business can't extract maximum value from a worker that has absolutely no loyalty.
On a whole though I find the article weak. It's just a hope for an ideal situation with no idea of how to get there. "Can't we all just get along?" - it's clear that no, that state of affairs does not simply spring itself into being.
The article is authored by Frederick Taylor, who had quite a strong sense of what he thought would improve this situation: Scientific Taylorism mixed with higher wages resulting in a shift of worker attitudes.
While today we can debate the growing chasm between worker productivity and wages, it iss important to remember that for over 60 years after this article was written:
- Management practices continued to become more rigorously productivity oriented
- Wages rose in tandem and in proportion to productivity
For all of the faults debated over taylorism and the defects that have developed in our system a century later, on the merits of those points I would say this article has aged well.
I think shareholder supremacy is from Milton Friedman, who promoted the idea of the share price as the important thing to observe, leading to the use and misuse of strategies like stock buybacks:
A framing on this that Friedman made, which many would find more charitable is that executives of a corporation should not be engaged in social policy within a democracy. Corporations are bound by the laws and regulations established by democratically elected bodies, but they are too powerful and prone to capture to allow the c-suite to try to shape society themselves. Individual owners are free to use profits from businesses they have invested in to do whatever they want, because as citizens they are the best unit of participation in democratic society.
That sounds more palatable. But usually in the context of issues like the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, lack of corporate accountability is not an easy thing to digest. Especially these days, if corporations are "people having opinions", as in the Citizens United ruling, why not hold corporations accountable to the same degree as people?
BTW, I don't think Friedman was arguing that corporations should engage in criminal negligence - just that they should not be working explicitly for the good of the society. What was paramount was shareholder value. Probably it is understood that maximizing shareholder value is to be done within legal limits.
Citizens United was explicitly about whether the state could categorize a documentary produced by one company (Citizens United’s Hillary the Movie) as regulated speech, vs documentaries produced by another company (Dog Eat Dog Film’s Fareinheit 911). In both cases there was evidence that the film was produced by a corporation whose shareholders and management explicitly intended to affect an election by engaging in political speech. It was a limit on the state’s capacity to limit one group of people’s speech rights and not another’s.
I agree that maximizing shareholder value is expected to be done within legal limits, but also basic ethical limits. I’m not an expert in Union Carbide’s history, but I was under the impression that the company was hollowed out after selling off assets to pay the Bhopal settlement, and Dow eventually acquired it along with its liabilities for a fraction of what its market cap would have been without the disaster. Criminal negligence can erase a huge amount of shareholder value.
In a different or malfunctioning legal system you could imagine the Indian courts not holding the shareholders responsible for their negligence, the way the US justice department failed to hold the financial industry responsible in 2008 for instance. Smarter people than I have pegged the rise of populist politics in the US as a delayed response to this political and legal failure to wipe out shareholders of corporations that took risks which harmed the economy.
I used to be a regular reader of Lapham's. Back then they'd more or less present folks' words without any comment _except_ the implicit comment of the other pieces in the magazine. Considering that https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/technology/technical-error is also present in the issue I'd say they've kept this structure up.
That quote of Kaczynski's
seems to recur in my experience, and I suppose I understand why; out of his whole manifesto, I recall nothing else that so succinctly states his thesis. (If you haven't read it, that such an extended excerpt should be fairly called "succinct" may yield some idea.)
In any case, as implicit criticisms of Taylorism go, this one doesn't strike me as being worth much, because for all his intellect, Kaczynski lacked the wisdom to think through all the consequences of the success toward which he aspired. I have tried to amend that error on his behalf, he being presumably unable to do so from whatever deep hole he's been thrown in. I can't speak to whether he would appreciate the likely outcome past the revolutionary moment, however fleetingly transcendent that might be - I don't think he understood that all revolutions become both permanent, and nothing like themselves. But neither do I feel any real need to gain his imprimatur.
The consequences of Taylorism can be, and deserve to be, criticized on their merits, and without reference to Kaczynski. I haven't been a close reader of Lapham's, but what I know of their reputation suggests they could be expected to do better for such critique than this.
It is almost as if "maximum prosperity" and "maximum efficiency" aren't universally relevant to everybody.
It becomes especially irrelevant if the benefits accrue unevenly, but even if people are well-incentivized, there are often other goals that are more important. E.g "My family" is a popular answer for many people. "Ethics" comes to mind, too.
If we cannot see the world if not through a lens of efficiency, we'll fail to understand it.
Yeah, FWT was original Agile manifesto author. Using sports example to elevate daily work grind. I wonder Mr Taylor really considered sportspersons played at top level for few months a year is about same thing as repetitive daily grind all year round for an average worker.
Perhaps this is why I find agile terminology of Epic/Story/Saga/Sprint so infuriating when it is mostly used for same half assed frontend on a database crap repeated 10000th time for next microservice.
It is strange with so much rise in literacy and education people are still so dependent on fake praise for work done.
Early Agile people had a lot of contempt for Taylor and Taylorism. The whole point of the Agile Manifesto [1] was rebelling against a top-down system of blindly imposed, mechanistic "ideal" process, putting power back in the hands of workers.
I will of course grant that the existing system of top-down control entirely won the war. The main effect of the Agile movement at most places was fancy new labels on the same terrible dynamics. These days processes and tools (coughjiracough) have won out over individuals and interactions. But let's try to remember that intent was different.
As I’ve gotten older, it’s hard to fight the cynicism I feel anytime someone touts a new process or technology whose main feature is empowerment. I now always think “Who will centralize this? How will they do it? What are their motives?”
Nothing but the opposites of AM are being implemented, as taught by consultants. Interesting to note as fake agility gained traction, budgets and power concentrated to top leadership only.
To be fair though, not sure how to turn a tanker without centralized controls.
Yup. You've put your finger on what I think is one of the big mistakes of the Agile movement. I wrote about it some a decade ago. [1] Early on it was a lot of well-meaning idealists. I'm not sure if people failed to imagine it becoming the dominant paradigm or if they weren't sufficiently cynical about what would happen once it did.
I'm honestly not sure if they could have avoided the current outcome. It was always a pretty loose coalition. But I think trademarking Agile and setting down some strong minimum standards could have helped. But even that might have been washed away by Scrum's "certifying" anybody who could fog a mirror and the attendant revenue for people whose personal interest was in watering things down.
And practically, Agile removed all individual autonomy, decision making and accountability entirely. And replaced boss by complicated social process in which people get to constantly fight for dominance in back-handed ways.
I don't think that's true. Places that value individual and team autonomy can get that using agile techniques. That's certainly been my experience. Places that didn't value individual autonomy also got what they wanted using Agile™.
>The majority of these men believe that the fundamental interests of employees and employers are necessarily antagonistic
Taylor's ideas were quite good in the context of labor practices at the time. People were getting paid a buck a day to come work at the factory, and companies employed speed bosses to walk the floor and yell at employees to hurry up. Speed bosses and management got production bonuses, workers got a buck regardless of productivity.
Taylor and Gantt instead had companies give bonuses to both staff and management for extra output, which resulted in higher productivity.
For history buffs here is a picture of an original "Gantt chart" where he is comparing workers folding textiles after putting in the Scientific Management system. More black in the chart is an indication of workers earning the bonus more often.
It should be noted, given some replies, that this is a historical document and should probably not be taken as as a productivity "How-To" for any budding industrialist.
In particular, the (empirical) answer and, for most, refutation of Taylor's scientific management tenets came relative soon - from the Hawthorne studies
and, considering the wider area of management of economics, the "Carnegie school" approach led by scholars like March, Simon and Cyert - expanding upon the classical assumptions of profit maximization and rational actors in economics and management.
> But only five workers took part in the study, Dr. Ross said, and two were replaced partway through for gross insubordination and low output.
>
> A psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Richard Nisbett calls the Hawthorne effect ''a glorified anecdote.''
"Weberian bureaucracy" looks in principle to be benign and technocratic, idealizing government as a well run business. From a business perspective, the Carnegie School philosophy looks like the right mix to me. But, is there a prevailing model that supercedes March & Simon's "Organizations", from 60 years ago?
I've recently noticed how odd it is to read "man" in older documents where we would now write "person" (or "workman" rather than "worker" or "employee"). In this essay in particular it stood out.
Sorry, I mean inherited in that the children of the founders ran the place.
My assumption (which I also need to verify), is that at the time this was written (1911), the number of companies run by heirs of the founders was higher.
What I'm trying to tease out is whether the distrust ("war", as the author states), is a result of a child who grew rich, and thus often had encounters where workers would try to take them for a ride, relative to a founder who grows up poor. So the latter would be more on the same side of the workers, whereas the former might have a bias toward a more antagonistic relationships. Pure speculation. Haven't looked at data yet.
Are they? My gut says its very difficult to conclude anything in a vacuum here, or even to make generalizations across the companies. I don't think we can simply conflate success and productivity and call it a day.
As an example, take a look at how many developers are employed at Twitter or Facebook over time; its difficult to look at that geometric growth in developers and exclaim that high productivity is self evident.
When the same workman returns to work on the following day, instead of using every effort to turn out the largest possible amount of work, in a majority of the cases this man deliberately plans to do as little as he safely can—to turn out far less work than he is well able to do—in many instances to do not more than one-third to one-half of a proper day’s work. And, in fact, if he were to do his best to turn out his largest possible day’s work, he would be abused by his fellow workers for so doing, even more than if he had proved himself a “quitter” in sport.
...is where Taylor makes his pitch to his clients.
Strange historical fact: V.I. Lenin at first criticized Taylorism as an example the cruelty of capitalism. Later, he thought the Soviets needed Taylorism because Russians were such shite workers. Soviet economic planners were enthusiasts for all kinds of "scientific" management systems.
