The consequences of taylorism

In some labour organisations, taylorism made it possible to substantially increase production output. It also made it possible to replace skilled labour, once necessary owing to the complex nature of the tasks to be performed, by unskilled labour. It also led to a loss of worker authority. This is why sociologists qualified SOL as a worker subordination method.

SOL also led to work being split up and broken down into individual operations. The repetitive nature of the tasks resulted in a feeling of monotony and boredom for the workers. There was a sharp increase in the worker turnover rate. It reached 380 % a year on the first production lines of Henry Ford before he doubled the daily wage. Taylorism was thus gradually assimilated with de-motivation, boredom, fatigue and accidents. Taylor's recommendations were to exert considerable influence up to the present day. They were also physically applied to production machinery, in particular the assembly line which, with its precise breakdown and sequencing of tasks, imposed the rate at which workers had to produce.

Although the idea of the division of labour does not come from Taylor, his methods certainly stretched the degree to which work was analysed and broken down. Based on Taylorian principles, dividing up labour into basic tasks can involve a breakdown to the finest detail. Thus, a task such as taking a customer's order in a fast-food restaurant can itself be sub-divided into several sub-tasks. Each sub-task can be formalised and backed up by methods and performance indicators. it is possible to specify, for example, that the employee must:

1. Smile.

2. Sincerely welcome the customer

3. Look the customer in the eye.

4. Know the food codes without having to look for them.

5. Understand customers' orders without having to ask them to repeat themselves.

6. Memorise small orders (minimum of four products).

7. Suggest other products. Similarly, the other sub-tasks, e.g. the preparation of the order, its delivery to the customer, payment and final thanking of the customer, can be broken down according to the same level of detail.

Such effects of taylorism on work were not without generating a certain amount of resistance. Although, to begin with, productivist trade unionism and the war effort got this labour organisation method accepted in workers' circles in the 1920% the trade union struggle gradually turned against SOL and the de-qualification that it entailed. In 1936, in France, the working class "discovered its force" and threw itself into a campaign to denounce the damage caused by taylorism.

In intellectual circles too, taylorism began to be criticised. In the 1930's, sociologists went out into the industrial field, and also came to denounce the negative effects of task splitting. Believing at one point that this had something to do with the unavoidable effects of implementing technology, they then discovered that there was a certain amount of indeterminacy in technology. The relatively damaging consequences did not only depend on technology, they also depended on choices with respect to social policies and management; choices that were made by company directors. The sociology of work was to demonstrate that employers had a certain social responsibility with respect to the consequences of taylorism. This criticism was later given further weight with the discovery of other phenomena at work within organisations: logic of feeling, human motivation, factors of satisfaction, etc. These discoveries were an invitation to go beyond taylorism.

Organisational analysts also reproached Taylor for his simplistic vision of the company, comparing it to the workshop and ignoring all the other corporate functions such as the firm's political system. Furthermore, his vision seemed to be out-of-date, too micro-economic and linked to a conception of the company dating back to the 19^th century. In fact, right from the start of the 20^!h century, big companies began to develop alongside the work of the "visible hand of the manager". TAYLOR at times seemed to be no more than a small tradesman, a champion of workstation rationalisation, blind to the problems of task coordination, which were to increase in size throughout the century.

TAYLOR was also criticised for his overly basic conception of the social system: workers are considered as resources or agents, motivated by economic factors alone and defined only in terms of how they adjust to the production system. Meanwhile, engineers gradually moved on to a conception of the company as a complex system in which human beings are not just operators, but regulating agents. The issues of fatigue, vigilance and ergonomics were thus better taken into consideration, at least some of the time.

In spite of the criticism to which taylorism was subjected, it nevertheless seemed to grow. The stopwatch was replaced by video recordings and by information being picked up directly from the workstation via electronic equipment (for example, cash registers in large supermarkets). New versions of taylorism were developed and taught to production engineers under modem names, thus hiding their origins. Even the quality management standards, which became widespread in the 1990's, encompass a certain number of aspects that smack of taylorism. Indeed, one might ask to what extent formal procedures (as part of the Quality approach), are not simply a new form of taylorism?

Service sector tai/lorisation developed in the 1920's and exerted renewed and greater influence in the 1990's. This managerial theory of the organisation is far from having become unfashionable. Many forms of it can be found in the way service activities are organised, such as the fast-food sector, banking and telephone hotlines, where operators are obliged to follow a script describing what they should say and do down to the last detail (including "smiling over the phone"). Albeit adapted and transformed, these ideas are still at work; they even seem to be continuing to make headway in industry and the service sector even though the principles behind them were called into question a long time ago, including by management specialists themselves.

Further reading on Taylor:

Cohen, Y. (2001). Organiser à l'aube du taylorisme. La pratique d'Ernest Mattern chez

Peugeot, 1906-1319. Besançon, Presses universitaires franc-comtoises. Cohen, Y. 1997 'Scientific Management and the Production Process', in J. Krige and D. Pestre (eds) Science in the Twentieth Century, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Copley, F. (1923). F .W .Taylor, father of scientific management, Harpers.

Coriat, B. (1982). L'atelier et le chronomètre. Essai sur le taylorisme, le fordisme et la production de masse. Paris, Christian Bourgois. Duval, G., L'entreprise efficace à l'heure de Swatch et McDonald's, La seconde vie du taylorisme, Paris, Ed. La Découverte & Syros, 1998

Fridenson, P. 1978 "The coming of the assembly line to Europe', Sociology of the Sciences II: 159-175.

Gardner-Hayward, E. (1951). Classified guide to the F.W.Taylor collection, Stevens Institute of Technology. Grêlon, A. (1998). "Et la France découvrit Taylor ... Les logiques de l'entreprise. La rationalisation dans l'industrie française entre les deux guerres (Moutet A.).

Note critique." Revue Française de Gestion (118): 140-142. Haber, S. (1964). Efficiency and uplift. Scientific management in the progressive area.

Chicago, Chicago University Press. Hatchuel, A. (1994). F. Taylor, une lecture épistémologique. L'invention de la gestion. In P.

Bouilloud and B.-P. L'écuyer. Paris, L'Harmattan. Kanigel, R. (1999). Tlie One best way - Frederick Winshw Taylor and the Enigma of

Efficiency, Penguin Putnam Inc. Kennedy, C. (1991), Guide to the management gurus : the most comprehensive and

authoritative guide to management thinking, London, Business Books. Linhart, D., La modernisation des entreprises, Paris, La Découverte, 1994 Linhart, R., Tlie assembli line, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1981 Montmollin, M. d. (1981). Le taylorisme à visage humain. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.

Montmollin, M. d. and O. Pastre, Eds. (1984). Le taylorisme. Paris, La Découverte. Smith, S. 1989 'Information technology in banks: Taylorisation or human-centered systems ?' inT. E. Forester (cd) Computers in the human context, Cambridge: MIT

Press. Taylor, F. W. (1909). Workmen and their management. Cambridge, MA, Harvard

lectures. Taylor, F. W. (1900). On the art of cutting metals; an address made at the opening of the

annual meeting in New York, December 1900. New York: The American society

of mechanical engineers. Taylor, F. W. (1903). Shop management. (Reprint of the article published in

Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, v. 24, 1903),

London : Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993. Taylor, F. W. (1911). Principles of Scientific Management. (Originally published: New

York : Harper & Bros), London : Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993. Taylor, F. W. (1919). A piece-rate system, (originally published in: Two papers on scientific management, 1919), reprint Bristol : Ovcrstone, 2000.

Thompson C.B. (1993). Scientific management: a collection of the more significant articles describing the Taylor system of management. London: Routledge/Thoemmes. Comprising: shop management, the principles of scientific management, testimony before the special House committee by Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Wolff, C. J. de, S. Shimmin and M. de Montmollin (1981) Conflicts and contradictions: work psychologists in Europe, London; New York, Academic Press

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