A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management Since Taylor

Ocientific management has attracted surprisingly little attention in the United States in recent years. The handful of books and essays that have appeared since the 1950s have focused on Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), the engineer, inventor, and publicist who became the first American management theorist to reach a large, nontechnical audience. They assume or imply that Taylor's influence did not die with him in 1915 but provide only the most general indication of the character of that influence. As a result, Edward Eyre Hunt's Scientific Management Since Taylor (1924) remains the last, best word on American scientific management in the post-Taylor era. In the meantime, historians and social scientists specializing in European affairs have discovered or rediscovered indigenous scientific management movements that drew inspiration from the American pioneers but soon developed identities of their own. The results of the new scholarship are most striking in the case of France, which had the most ambitious management movement outside the United States, but impressive studies in German, British, Russian, Italian, and Japanese history have documented the spread of ideas and techniques once assumed to be peculiarly American. While it may be premature to speak of an international history of scientific management, it is clear that Taylor found enthusiastic disciples everywhere and that scientific management measurably affected the performance of institutions in many countries.