Simon Heard on Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Scientific Management’s Influence on Society (Blog plus Extra Credit)

                In his talk on Frederick Winslow Taylor, Simon Head reviewed the history and development of Taylor’s process of scientific management.  In addition to the history of the technique itself, Head also spoke on its effects on manufacturing and its transition into the age of information technology.  His different points about the effects of scientific management’s implementation exemplify the process of technological determinism, the theory of technology’s profound influence on the developmental direction of society at large.

                According to Head, Taylor’s process further developed into Henry Ford’s automation process, flexible mass production at GM, and into generalized mass production in the civilian economy after the Second World War.  Considering scientific management as a driving technology, it enabled the creation of the consumer culture which dominates our country today.  This culture relies on cheap, mass produced goods which can only be made by increasing efficiency and manufacturing speed far beyond what was possible with methods employed before the implementation of scientific management. In previous models, such as those requiring skilled labor to manufacture goods, the manufacturing process was slow, both to develop and to operate; workers had to be trained to become proficient, and the processes themselves usually involved large volumes of handiwork, with the workers taking time to create individual parts, as in the case of the old style of automobile manufacture before Ford.  Scientific management facilitated the extreme increase in production that enabled the rise of our consumption based societal structure.

                This ramping up of production capability also influenced the course of World War II.  Through unprecedented production efforts, the United States was able to manufacture an endless stream of war material, evinced by FDR’s so called Arsenal of Democracy.  This was accomplished via an application of GM’s flexible mass production methods, based on Taylor’s designs, to transition civilian manufacturing complexes into factories of war.  The US’s manufacturing capabilities were an essential part of the war effort, and no argument needs to be made that the outcome of the Second World War profoundly and permanently influenced the course of history.

Additionally, by migrating workers’ skill from the low level production jobs up to management, scientific management catalyzed a decrease in the influence held by unions, which had been constituted mainly of highly skilled labor capable of leveraging their importance for better working conditions and higher pay.  The deskilling of labor via Taylorism took the power out of the hands of the employees; management could simply hire more unskilled labor to replace any striking workers.  This has also enabled companies to increase employees’ workload; Head gave the example of Amazon warehouse workers being pushed to exhaustion to speed up the shipping process. 

                Head also discussed the effects of Taylorism abroad; by introducing a methodical approach to manufacturing, his approach allowed Japanese companies such as Toyota to perfect methods to manufacture inexpensive, quality goods to sell to the US; in this instance, scientific management effected not only US society, but also worldwide trade politics.  The US’s transition to a service economy has been precipitated by outsourcing overseas to cheap, unskilled labor, and this, arguably, would not be possible without scientific management enabling the manufacture of complex goods by unskilled workers.  In all of the above ways, the technology of scientific management influenced the path which our society is currently following.