scientific management

Approach to management asserting that measurement improves productivity. Scientific management is associated with its originator, industrial engineer and inventor Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor, chief engineer at the Midvale Steel Works at the beginning of the 20th century, noticed that his fellow workers were ‘soldiering’, that is deliberately working at a slow pace. The workers were only able to do this because no one had thought to study the process of work and how long the tasks the men were carrying out should actually take. Armed with a stopwatch, Taylor set about measuring the time individual tasks should take, making him a favourite of managers, and the enemy of workers across the globe. Employees were, according to Taylor, nothing more than components in a machine.

Taylor's theories were outlined in his management classic, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).