Taylorism: the scientific management of work

In one line

Taylorism is the idea that work can be studied methodically, measured with a stopwatch and planned from an office, instead of letting each operator work it out in his or her own way.

What it is

Niebel and Freivalds present Frederick W. Taylor as the founder of modern time study in the United States, although they point out that in Europe timing was already being done earlier: in 1760 Perronet studied the manufacture of pins. Taylor started in 1881 at the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia and developed a system based on the "task": management plans each employee's work at least one day in advance and hands over written instructions, and each task has a standard time set by experts, who divide it into small "elements" and measure them separately.

In 1903 he presented "Shop Management," where he brought together the elements of what he called scientific management: time study, standardization of tools and tasks, a planning department, instruction cards for workers, bonuses for good performance and modern cost systems.

The article by Bellon Álvarez, drawing on Coriat, adds the deeper reading: Taylor "brought the clock into the workshop," and by measuring times and movements he made it possible to gradually replace the skilled craft worker with workers who had no prior qualification. In its classic version, the model has a specialized study department, planning separated from execution, assigned times to control the work, and a combination of low flexibility with high productivity.

What it was used for

Above all, it served to stop working by eye. Before Taylor, many standards depended on the supervisor's judgment or were inflated to protect the performance of each department. With the standard time, a common yardstick appears for measuring capacity, costs and wages. Everything explained in the article on time study inherits that logic.

Real example

Niebel and Freivalds recount two of Taylor's experiments at the Bethlehem Steel Company. In the iron ingots experiment (1898), with the correct method and an economic incentive, workers who loaded 92-pound ingots up a ramp onto a truck went from an average of 12.5 tons per day to between 47 and 48, with a wage increase from 1.15 to 1.85 dollars per day. In the shovel experiment, Taylor designed a different shovel for each load (short handle for the iron, long-handled scoop for the light coal) and the cost of handling the material fell from 8 to 3 cents per ton.

The same book cites a 1917 survey of 113 plants that had installed the system: 59 considered it a success, 20 a partial success and 34 a failure. And it recalls that the resistance was real: at the Watertown Arsenal the workers rejected time study so strongly that in 1910 the Interstate Commerce Commission investigated the method.

Benefits

• Standards based on measurements and not on a supervisor's opinion.
• A basis for capacity, costing and production planning.
• A method for improving tools and movements, not just for speeding people up: the shovel case is pure method improvement.

Limitations to keep in mind

• The separation between whoever designs the work and whoever executes it deskills the operator: Bellon Álvarez points to it as a central feature of the model and as one of the sources of its rigidity.
• Low flexibility: it is designed for repetitive, stable tasks, not for variety or changes in demand.
• If you do not explain to the team how a standard was set, it generates rejection, as the historical conflicts show.

In summary

Taylor left two legacies that are worth separating: the technique (measure, standardize, plan), which is still valid in any plant, and the organization of work (design on one side, execution on the other), which Fordism took to the assembly line and which Toyotism tried to correct.