Lecture 2 - Grey Chapter 1 Bureaucracy & Scientific Management PDF

# A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations ## Indispensable and subversive. - Simon Caulkin, The Observer ## I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I appreciate your book - as evidenced by the coffee stains and frayed edges, it is a book I can...

# A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations ## Indispensable and subversive. - Simon Caulkin, The Observer ## I wanted to write to you to tell you how much I appreciate your book - as evidenced by the coffee stains and frayed edges, it is a book I cannot live without and I will use it as I continue my education and into my career. - Wanda V. Mitchell, The New School for Management and Urban Policy, New York ## A highly entertaining polemic.... This slim volume more than lives up to its title. - Stefan Stern, Financial Times ## Grey...has important things to say and he says them with rigour, warmth and a great deal of intelligence...He informs the analysis with humour and humility. It is the most valuable management book I have ever read. - Debora Campbell, Australian Financial Review BOSS Magazine ## Loved the book. I read it quickly. I will re-read it with a pencil in hand this time. - Patrick Nadeau, Software Consultant ## One of the most valuable and interesting books we have read during our MBA at Cardiff University...an inspiration to us. - Eleni Platitsa, MBA Student, Cardiff Business School ## Chris Grey has produced a book many of us have wanted to write for a long time, but have not had the guts to do. - Andreas Diedrich, Gothenburg University, Sweden # Chris Grey ## 1 Bureaucracy and Scientific Management The basis of what I will say in this book is the reading, writing, thinking, talking and listening about organizations that I have done, originally as an undergraduate student of economics and politics and subsequently as a PhD student and academic in the area of organization studies. I keep coming back to the iconic figure in early organization theory, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). I keep coming back to the iconic figure in early organization theory, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). I mention his dates because although his work is still highly relevant Weber also seems very much a man of a particular time. - One aspect of that is the extraordinary breadth of his interests in sociology, religion, economics, politics, history, music and much else besides. - Nowadays, in common with most other academics, organizational theorists restrict themselves to a much narrower canvas and this I think gives organization theory a peculiarly detached feeling. - Personally, I don't think there is a clear border between organization, public administration and political philosophy; or between organization, society, family and individual psychology. One of Weber's great insights was that what might hold a society together was some sense of authority – that people somehow submitted to the will of others because they believed those others had the right to give the orders. - That idea applies to organizations as well as whole societies. - For sure we could envisage a society or an organization just held together by brute force. Some dictatorships would be obvious examples or, thinking of smaller organizations, it is how criminal gangs might operate. - That brute force - whether we call it coercion or power - isn’t the same as authority though, which connotes people going along with the will of others through consent given on some basis other than just fear. Apart from moral objections to using coercion and fear to hold organizations together, doing so has many practical problems. - For one thing, people can't be relied upon to do what they're told unless they are constantly checked on, because they do not think the person giving them orders has the right to. - The bigger problem is that such organizations are always vulnerable to a bigger, stronger, more vicious person or people taking them over. - Authority is both morally and practically more durable. - From Weber, we get the idea that some societies or organizations get held together by the charisma of their leaders: the reason why their will is obeyed is because of their characteristic ability to inspire the devotion and obedience of others. - There's a complex psychology here - bred as much by the followers' desires as the leader's charisma - and it's still commonplace when talking about business leadership to suggest that it can or should be based on charisma. - Or authority might come from tradition: you obey because that's just the way things are and have always been. - The authority of the religious institutions or Royal houses are good examples. - We can't fully separate out power, charisma and tradition. Inspiring leaders often owe part of their charisma to a propensity to violence; the descendants of such leaders may become imbued with an authority that is purely traditional and anyway still backed up with force. According to Weber, in modern societies these forms of authority were being increasingly supplanted by something different: rational–legal authority. - Here, obedience was secured through a kind of due process: formal, logical, reasoned.¹ Perhaps the key point is that it is not arbitrary - the whims of leaders - but comes from a system. - Laws are decided, codified and applied to all citizens. - Within organizations, this authority takes the form of rules, procedures and duties. - Thus the authority vested in, say, a chief executive is of a particular sort. - First it comes from the job itself, not the person. - We obey (if we do) the chief executive because they hold that job and not (or not primarily) because of their charisma or membership of a particular family. - When a new person takes on that role, the authority transfers to them. - And the role places a limit on what kinds of obedience can be called for. - Again, it is not arbitrary. - As an academic I can legitimately ask a student to write an essay but not to clean my car. The differences and tensions between charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority can be illustrated by the recent presidency of Donald Trump. - Part of his appeal, to his supporters, was based on his force of personality or charisma. - Part of it was traditional, in the sense of the traditional authority of any presidency, but also the way that, a bit like a traditional monarch, he would put family and favoured friends into positions of power. - Part of it came from the rights and responsibilities of the system of rules, for example those codified in the American Constitution. - Ultimately, it was this last source of authority that was the most important: for all that he tried to hang on to power after he lost the election in 2020, and for all the violence of some of his supporters, the Constitution and the rule of law were stronger. Rational-legal authority was dominant and, ultimately, the authority of the President was shown to come from the job or office. - It doesn't belong to the person who holds it. The kind of organization that emerges from the complete application of the rational-legal principle isn't just about the authority of its leader, it is one which is entirely defined by rules and a series of hierarchical relationships – a bureaucracy. - People's jobs are defined: you work on the checkout of the supermarket but don't stack the shelves. - Then they are refined: you stack the grocery shelves but someone else does the pharmacy section. - And the more the organization grows, the more refined, or specialised, the jobs become. - Equally, you don't do the jobs any old how, according to your own choice. - Crucially, you do them exactly in a way established for you by rules which you are taught when you start the job. - That way, it is possible to be certain that the job is being done in the most rational and efficient manner. - In this sense, rational-legal organization entails the complete removal of discretion - meaning judgement or choice - from work. - You also work under orders from those above you in the hierarchy and report to them. - The removal of discretion and the fact that authority comes from the role and not the person mean that another kind of arbitrariness disappears as well: appointment to a job and promotion are based strictly on experience and qualifications, not on personal relationships or preferences. Although in many ways not a bureaucracy, something of this process can be seen when, for example, a group of students share a house. - Normally, it won't be a matter of the strongest or most charismatic person forcing or persuading the weakest one to do all the chores. - We would think it odd and, a key point, illegitimate if it was. - More likely, the group will draw up a rota defining who will do jobs like cleaning and cooking, and on which days (all too often a document which experience shows to have been hopelessly optimistic). - It defines responsibilities and is usually animated by some notion of legitimacy, such that the work is shared fairly. - It may also be attentive to the particular skills that individuals have (for example, an ability to cook) so there may be specialization. - As I say, this isn't a bureaucracy but it shows how even a very simple organization can make use of principles of systemization, division of labour and authority. Weber was by no means a partisan for the emergence of rational-legal or bureaucratic organizations. - On the contrary, he was alarmed by their rapid spread through the state, business and institutions to the point where he feared that the world was becoming 'enclosed in an iron cage' of rationalization. - But why were they becoming dominant? - Because, says Weber, they represent the most technically efficient and rational form of organization. ## 2 What is Rationality? This proposition, its meaning, and its difficulties define a whole set of issues which have resonated through both organization theory and practice ever since. - It might almost be said that there is a fault line on organization theory which doesn't just stem from, but also runs through, Max Weber. - The crucial issue is what it means to be rational. - That is a big question and I am not a philosopher (and in any case, philosophers do not agree on the answer). Roughly speaking, one of the key shifts in human history was that period, around the last half of the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment philosophy emerged, along with empirical science and industrial production. - That philosophy was committed to secular rather than religious explanation, and the idea that the application of reason rather than tradition or dogma would not only better explain the world but also allow its improvement. - In one way, this was extraordinarily emancipating. - The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his 1784 essay 'What is Enlightenment?' (in Reiss, 1991), says that enlightenment lies in daring to know, in having the courage to use one's own reason rather than rely upon the authority of others. - This could be said to be the foundational text of modern Western thought. It connects with what Weber said about authority in organizations, because it means that people don't just do what they are told blindly, but act on the basis of individual reason or 'rationality. - Yet the rationality envisaged by bureaucracy seems to be the exact opposite of this, for it is precisely the use of one's own reason that is prohibited when the capacity for discretion is removed. - The rationality of bureaucracy resides in the system of rules, not in the judgement of individuals, except those, usually high up in the organization, who make the rules and who do retain discretion to some degree. - And so from its inception, bureaucracy sets up a dichotomy of systemic and individual rationality. Max Weber identified another kind of dichotomy. Bureaucracies are rational in one particular sense of the word - formal or instrumental rationality. - The idea here is that the means adopted to achieve a particular end are the most efficient for that purpose. - This might mean that they minimize wastage and maximize production. - And so, although bureaucracy nowadays connotes inefficiency and red tape, its Weberian form suggests otherwise. - Yes, there are rules, but these are the price to pay for avoiding the calamities that come from not following the rules. - Interestingly, current-day attempts to reduce bureaucracy so as to foster innovation frequently run into appalling disasters when, freed from rule-following, organizations take risks which do not come off - the 'light touch' regulation of financial markets and the subsequent crisis, discussed in Chapter 5, being one example. - Flexibility, too, has its price tag. - For Weber, the bureaucracy with its machine-like operation, its complete harmony of individual actions untainted by discretion, could routinely outperform any other kind of organization. - Small wonder that it was taking over the world, and still is, according to Ritzer's (2021) updated version of Weber, evocatively titled The McDonaldization of Society. Weber's other kind of rationality was substantive or value rationality. - Here the question was whether the 'ends' of action were in and of themselves rational. - Thus, suppose that I decide to murder someone at random. - This is substantively irrational - the end or purpose is irrational, the act of a madman. - But if I do so with a swift karate blow to the heart, this is formally rational (because it is the most efficient means) despite being substantively irrational. - However, if I proceed by slapping my victim with a wet fish for several days, then this is neither formally nor substantively rational. - Bureaucracies are formally rational but they don't 'do' substantive rationality. - This does not mean that they are never substantively rational, but it does mean that they may not be and need not be. - They simply don't consider that domain of rationality because they are not concerned with ends, only with means. My murder example is a silly one, but it has a horrifying real-world counterpart in the Nazi Holocaust. According to Zygmunt Bauman's extraordinary and in some ways controversial book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), the genocide instigated by the Nazis represents the extreme application of a bureaucratic logic. - For what makes the Holocaust so peculiarly appalling is the way in which it was conducted industrially - with a system of rules, impersonally applied, which made it as technically efficient as genocide could be. - The capacity to register and monitor populations - Jews, Communists, gypsies, homosexuals and the other 'categories' to which the Nazis were so murderously opposed - was itself a considerable administrative 'achievement'. - The shipping of these people to the camps was another, and their systematic extermination a third. - Bureaucratic practice, the impersonal, scientific, ethically neutral pursuit of means, made the Holocaust formally rational whilst, clearly, not being substantively rational. - Bauman says that we should not, therefore, see the Holocaust as an aberration or anomaly when compared with mainstream Western culture: rather, it was a manifestation of the habitual ways of organizing within that culture. - Of course this is an extreme case, but its logic is very common and is found whenever we detach ends from means and if it is a case that seems extreme and remote now, remember that it was very real indeed as recently as our parents' and grandparents' generation. ## 3 Bureaucratic Dysfunctionalism To understand this, I find it helpful to think about a set of classic studies of bureaucracy, sometimes called the 'bureaucratic dysfunctionalist' literature. - It is now quite old, but still has many useful lessons. - This literature suggests that bureaucracies in practice have not just the problem of a deficit of substantive rationality but, even, a deficit of formal rationality. - Crozier's (1964) study of French bureaucracy shows how, contrary to du Gay, bureaucrats continued to indulge their own prejudices and preferences in their conduct. - They were no more ideal-typical than Melville Dalton's Men Who Manage (1959) who found considerations of gender, race, religion, and even what suburb someone lived in relevant to their decision-making. - Two decades later, Rosabeth Moss Kanter found that managers in a bureaucracy liked to appoint those who shared their own background, gender and education (Kanter, 1977), and this 'homosociality' of recruitment continues to occur in many contemporary organizations despite attempts at equal opportunity and diversity initiatives. - Nowadays we sometimes refer to this as 'unconscious bias', where we assume that someone from our own background is 'the right fit' for a job. To continue, Gouldner's (1954) investigation of a gypsum mine revealed the presence of 'mock bureaucracy', where an impressive array of rules and regulations, the hallmark of formal rationality, existed. - The only problem was that they were ignored. - It's common (and this was one of Gouldner's examples) to have safety regulations that staff don't, in fact, respect. - This is seen at the present time in relation to cyber-security, which is itself a form of safety issue. - Organizations typically have extensive rules about, for example, secure password use or not clicking on risky links in emails, yet these are routinely flouted by employees (Knapp et al., 2009). - For example, many people still use things like '123456' or even 'password' as their passwords. - Or, to take another common case, a friend and colleague of mine once researched equal opportunities for women in organizations. - 'All taken care of', he was told, 'We have a policy' - and a large manual of equal opportunities procedures was proudly displayed. - But, my colleague asked, were there in fact equal opportunities for women? - Procedures and practices aren't necessarily the same thing, because actual people in organizations may ignore them. This idea, that there might be a disjuncture between the formal rules of a bureaucracy and what actually happens, is given an elegant twist in the work of Blau (1955). - He noted that one of the most potent weapons in the arsenal of trade unions is the 'work to rule'. - For example, in October 2019 school support workers in Ottawa, Canada, undertook a work to rule whereby office staff would no longer supervise students, and education assistants would refuse to be left in classrooms if no teacher was present. - In such cases, workers agree only to follow the letter of what they are obliged to do by contract and job description. - Why? - To disrupt the organization in pursuit of a union aim, perhaps a pay rise. - Yet if following the rules is disruptive, it cannot be the case that those rules do indeed prescribe the most efficient of outcomes. - Instead, there is a gap between the rules and what people actually do that contributes to efficiency and, therefore, formal rules and efficiency are not identical. Perhaps the best-known version of bureaucratic dysfunctionalism is Merton's (1940) argument about 'goal displacement'. - Bureaucracies have an inbuilt tendency, because they focus on means and not ends, to degenerate into a situation where the means becomes an end in itself. - In other words, following the rule becomes the point, not the point of the rule. - Suppose a security guard is taking care of a factory. - He (let us assume it is a man) is told to follow a rule, and the rule is that no one is to be admitted without a pass. - The purpose or end of the rule is to protect the factory. - The means is the security guard checking passes. - One fine day the Managing Director arrives early for a meeting. - The factory is in trouble and the MD is meeting with creditors. - But she (let us assume it is a woman) has not brought her pass. - The security guard recognizes the MD, of course, but will not let her enter without a pass. - Rules, he says, are rules. - So the MD fails to make the meeting and the factory closes down. - The security guard's goal or end (protecting the factory) has been displaced, so that the means (checking passes) has become an end in itself. - Thus, in bureaucracy, formal rationality can overwhelm substantive rationality, just as systemic rationality overwhelms individual rationality. It's a situation summed up in the comedy catch phrase 'computer says no', when perfectly reasonable requests are met with refusal because they supposedly break 'the rules'. ## 4 Formal and Informal, Intended and Unintended All of these examples and arguments serve to point up two interesting things. Both of them seem to me to be central to understanding organizations. - The first is that there is a disjuncture between the formal and the informal organization. - Trivial examples might be that 'formally' you have to be at work by 9 a.m., or that you cannot use work Internet access for private purposes, but 'informally' you don't have to be in exactly on time, or can use the Internet privately if you're not busy and don't do it too much. - The formal organization of rules, procedures, what is 'meant to happen, is not the same as the organization itself. - The organization itself includes – and in some senses it is – what actually happens. - This could mean that bureaucracy is less efficient than Weber anticipated (because breaking the rules can make the organizations work better, as the Blau example shows) and less ethical than du Gay hopes (because people ignore the rules, as the Crozier and Gouldner examples show). - It means that alongside impersonal rules and procedures we have to consider highly personal prejudices, motivations, choices and actions. It means something else, too. Bureaucracy has been criticized for dehumanizing people. - It is not hard to see why. - In the ideal-type, people are no more than parts of a well-oiled machine - devoid of discretion, passion, prejudice and personality. - Devoid, in a sense, of agency – the capacity to make choices and act of their own free will. - Yet, for good or ill, this is not so once we recognize the informal aspect of organization. - Instead, the recalcitrant or complaining, lazy or hardworking, laughing or frowning, angry or sad, competent or incompetent, trusting or cynical person comes back into focus. - I will say much more about this later, but for now I will just make one caveat. - The formal and informal organization are not unrelated, independent spheres; they are interdependent and mutually constitutive; one could not exist without the other, and the precise nature in any particular case of the one will influence the other. Then there is a second implication, especially arising from goal displacement. - What is done in organizations - for example, establishing rules - will always carry with it the possibility, and in fact near certainty, of having both intended and unintended consequences. - This idea is a very powerful one. - It suggests that whenever people act towards some purpose, the outcomes will be a mixture of what was hoped for by the action and what was unforeseen and possibly undesired. - Think of a situation where there are anticipated disruptions to food or other supplies, as sometimes happened during the Covid-19 pandemic. - In the UK, a particular example was supposed shortages of toilet rolls. ## 5 Taylorism and Scientific Management To do this, I will introduce another of the iconic figures from organization theory, from a similar time to Max Weber's, but a man of a very different stamp: Frederick Winslow Taylor. - Taylor (1856-1917) was no theorist, he was an engineer working in one of the toughest of industries (iron and steelmaking) during one of the most remarkable periods of technical and managerial innovation the world has seen: the industrialization of the United States following the American Civil War. - In one way, it was remarkable that Taylor was doing this job at all. - Born into a wealthy Philadelphia family, he seemed destined for a career in the law when he took the unusual decision to go into the steel business, initially as an apprentice. - His childhood had been rigidly controlled, with all his activities – sport, walking, sleeping position and country dancing - minutely analysed and prescribed (Fineman, 1996: 545). - This might lead us to understand his life's work in primarily psychological terms, but to do so would be a mistake to the extent that it was also historically rooted (structure and agency again). For one thing that is worth saying at the outset is that a great many other people, many of them engineers, were developing similar ideas to Taylor's at a similar time in a similar place. - But it is Taylor's name that has become inseparable from this general movement, usually known as 'scientific management'. - By recognizing that this was a general movement, it is possible to see that it reflected a particular set of problems, assumptions and attitudes; it did not emerge by chance, and its context is really quite important. Pennsylvania in the 1870s was a revolutionary place. - Its smoke-stacks bore testament to industry on a scale and pace that had never been seen before, even in the English Industrial Revolution. - It is almost no exaggeration to say that it was out of this cockpit that management, and a good part of what has defined human society since, at least in the West, emerged. - It did so in a form that gave management what Yehouda Shenhav (1999), in one of the finest historical studies of the subject, has called its engineering legacy. - It is no coincidence that it was also in Pennsylvania that the world's first business school, Wharton, was founded in 1881, nor that Joseph Wharton was both the founder of that school and the owner of one of Taylor's workplaces. The steel industry (and others) was in large part the creation of immigrants and in ways that had an interesting pattern, right from the beginning (see Grey, 2020). - The mill owners and many of the engineers were often from Scottish families and were often (like Taylor) Protestant or Nonconformist in religion. - Weber knew all about Taylor, and regarded his work as emblematic of the advance of rationalized organization. Taylor identified a problem based on his early experience as a machine operator. - He was working in some of the biggest of the iron and steel plants, at Midvale and Bethlehem (this was the one owned by Joseph Wharton) in Pennsylvania, and his problem was one that is familiar to anyone who, like me, knows nothing about cars. - When I go to the garage to have my car fixed, the mechanic may say to me that I have a serious problem, that it will take several days to fix, and that it will cost me a large amount of money. - I have no way of knowing if this is true. - I don't know what the fault is, I don't know if it could be fixed more quickly, I don't know what parts will be needed. - What I do about all this will in large part depend upon the extent to which I trust the mechanic. - Taylor's problem was similar. - He was working in an industry where it was normal for workers to organize their own work. - Work gangs hired their own crew, worked at their own pace, used their own tools and, crucially, knew far more about the work than did their supervisors. - Work was assigned and done on a 'rule of thumb' or 'guesstimate' basis. - Taylor reckoned that workers tended to, as he called it, 'soldier' (nowadays we would say slacked off) either because of 'natural soldiering' - they were naturally lazy and would work as little as they could - or 'systematic soldiering' - they would deliberately restrict output so as to keep their jobs and maximize employment levels for themselves and their friends. - It's noticeable that this implies that Taylor didn't trust the workers much, and here the cultural context may be important: it probably reflects in part the stereotypical attitude of work-ethic Puritans towards the supposedly feckless and dishonest Catholics. The solution lay in scientific management, which Taylor articulated in many different ways but most famously in his four principles, familiar no doubt to every student of management and organizations: - A science of each element of work. - Scientific selection and training of workers. - Division of labour between workers and managers. - Co-operation between managers and workers. In practice, what the first of these meant was time and motion (T&M) studies. - T&M meant managers using a stopwatch and standing over a worker to measure the time taken for each tiny component of the job being done. - Imagine the act of drinking a glass of beer: Starting position: Standing at bar Movement 1: Hand to glass (2 seconds) Movement 2: Grip glass (0.5 seconds) Movement 3: Lift to horizontal (1 second) Movement 4: Lift to lips (1 second) Movement 5: Swallow 0.05 litres beer (2 seconds) Movement 6: Move arm to horizontal (1 second) Movement 7: Move glass to bar (1 second) Movement 8: Release grip on glass (0.5 seconds) Movement 9: Belch (1 second) End position: Standing at bar Total time for operation: 10 seconds In practice, of course, it would be an industrial process operation but the principle is the same. - It establishes the optimum time for the operation with no wastage (from the point of view of the operation itself) from other activities: no pausing to smile, or go for a cigarette, or pop to the loo, or chat to the person next to you at the bar. - It's easy to see why this technique attracted Weber's attention, for it is an exemplar of formal rationality. Having established the time for each motion in the process, it becomes possible to set benchmarks. - If one operation can be completed in 10 seconds then 6 can be done in a minute, 360 in an hour, and 2,880 in an eight-hour shift. - And a pay rate for the shift could be set, with a bonus for exceeding it and a pay cut for failing to reach it. - Of course, in the beer-drinking example, or in an industrial process, you might say that the rate that the operation can be done might decrease over time - But this was no problem for scientific management: it measured, and factored in, fatigue time. At a stroke, this system solved the 'soldiering' problem by effecting a very fundamental redistribution of power. - No longer was it possible for workers to give unrealistic estimates of the time needed to perform a task. - How long will it take to drink half a litre of beer? 100 seconds - no more and no less. - The manager with the stopwatch now has the power, not the person performing the task. I have chosen the example of beer drinking as an illustration because we would normally think of something like having a drink as an unregulated activity over which we ourselves have choice, and this, to a degree, was how industrial work was, pre-Taylorism." - The impact, or more accurately the intention, of Taylorism and scientific management, was to evacuate all discretion (i.e. choice, agency) from work processes so that the organization would become akin to machines and workers akin to machine parts. That workers were regarded as no more than components in the organizational machine is important. - It reflects very much an engineering mindset, in which the machine was an obvious model and metaphor. - It perhaps reflects a derogatory attitude towards the supposedly almost less than human Catholics and foreigners that comprised the workforce, or more generally of managers towards workers. - But it also reflects a pragmatism: these techniques overcame many of the problems of communication between people who spoke different languages. Perhaps most interesting of all, it reflected a particular kind of ethic, in a way which recalls du Gay's defence of bureaucracy. - For Taylor believed that his system embodied an impersonal fairness: the fairness of 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. - It is easy to understand how this might be. - Workers would no longer be dependent upon the patronage of a work gang leader, but would be paid and worked according to a fixed system. - This would be of particular importance to, for example, an immigrant worker from Eastern Europe faced with the established position of an Irish foreman hiring and firing from within his own ethnic group. - It is also the case that Taylor's system could make for a safer workplace. - At a time when industrial injuries were rife, a system that devised a standard way of working which, if followed, would not just be more productive, but would also avoid accidents did have an appeal for workers. - Taylorism has its problems, as I will explain, but it would be overly facile to completely dismiss the specifically ethical claims that Taylor made for it. On the other hand, as one of the most prominent and insightful critics of the Taylorist system, Harry Braverman (1974) points out, for Taylor a fair day's work effectively meant the maximum amount of work a person could physically do without collapsing, and a fair day's pay meant the minimum amount that could be paid to induce the worker to give this level of effort. - Braverman remarks that you might just as well say that a fair day's work would be that amount of work which produces an output of equivalent value to what the worker is paid. - But if that were so, the process would not yield a profit. - Thus, from Braverman's perspective, scientific management must be understood in terms of its value to capitalist profit-seeking and not as any kind of fairness. The introduction of scientific management provoked an enormous reaction. - It is easy from a current-day perspective to see it as a natural and unremarkable development in industrial organization. - Because it, in fact, it did happen, it's tempting to think it had to happen. - But that it happened was the outcome of a struggle which at the time did not seem determined, any more than present-day arguments about how to organize have a preordained outcome. - Shenhav (1999) shows how scientific management was a part of a whole 'standardization movement' (which included things like the standardization of tool sizes and machine parts) that was bitterly contested. - Many critics said that standardization was inimical to American individualism, and would sap innovation and entrepreneurship. Taylorism, specifically, was extensively resisted by workers and their embryonic trade unions. - It is not hard to see why. - The system entailed a massive transfer of power from workers to managers. - It reduced autonomy, eroded working conditions and threatened unemployment (as more could be done with fewer people). - Fundamentally, as Braverman and many others have explained, Taylorism implemented a radical and near complete separation between 'conception' and 'execution', meaning planning and decision-making, on the one hand, and carrying out orders on the other. - This was the division of labour set out in Taylor's principles. - Managers would decide, workers would act accordingly. - One of the key decisions was over the hiring and training of workers, previously carried out by the work group itself. - This is why Taylor's principle included the scientific selection and training of workers. Given all of this, the meaning of Taylor's final principle, co-operation between managers and workers, was a rather truncated one: workers had to undertake to do the work in the prescribed manner in return for the wages on offer (or fines for noncompliance), and leave everything else to the managers. Everywhere that scientific management was introduced it caused conflict. - Workers went on strike or left their jobs, and T&M studies were actually banned for a time in US defence plants. - Interestingly, it was not just workers who reacted against Taylorism. - Owners and some senior managers objected too. - For the system created a new breed of powerful managers, mainly production engineers. - If, previously, workers had had the power that came from knowledge of how to do work, now it was these engineers who had privileged access to a baffling array of new knowledge. - With their stopwatches, their myriad sheets of benchmarks and pay rates, they presented a threat not just to workers but also to owners and some managers. - Taylor himself was sacked, because his employers did not appreciate the industrial unrest his system engendered. - Embittered, he insisted that his ideas had not been properly implemented. - But, importantly, he inspired a devoted group of followers who propagated and developed his ideas well into the twentieth century. If the development of scientific management was contested, a watershed came with the First World War (1914-1918). - Now there was a patriotic imperative to maximize production of armaments. - Workers and others were asked to set aside their reservations in the interests of the war effort and, by and large, they agreed. - But once the war was over, those methods were established and maintained. - This is not to say that resistance ceased. - On the contrary, Taylorist systems continued to provoke a wide array of responses. - Sabotage, absenteeism and high staff turnover were the most obvious, but more insidious, perhaps, was the tendency of such systems to breed low commitment and low quality What was going on here was a kind of unintended consequence of a type I indicated earlier. - Taylorism treated workers as being motivated in a very simple way - carrot and stick