Taylorism
Taylorism or Scientific management is the name of the approach to management and Industrial/Organizational Psychology initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Taylorism is often mentioned along with Fordism, because it was closely associated with mass production methods in manufacturing factories. Taylor's own name for his approach was scientific management. It relied upon time and motion study: Taylor believed that productivity could be increased if the fastest and most accurate workers were identified, and the reset of the workforce were then trained to adopt the methods of the most successful.
While this principle has a certain logic, in practice it has two obvious deficiencies:
- it ignores individual differences; the most efficient way of working for one person may be inefficient for another;
- it ignores the fact that the economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's methods would frequently be resented and sometimes be sabotaged by the workforce.
