Science and management: Popular knowledge, work, and authority in the twentieth-century United States

Richard Swen Lindstrom, Purdue University

Abstract

This study explores the role of science as a source of authority in twentieth-century American culture, demonstrating how popular notions of the power of science have obscured the variety of human agency. Management consultants like Frederick Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth claimed that they had developed systems that could increase output, ease workers' strain, and solve labor disputes by allowing for simultaneously higher wages and lower costs. They called their methods “scientific management,” contending that they had discovered methods based on natural laws of work. Though the scientific managers claimed to have achieved fantastic increases in production through their methods, examination of their efforts to reform production in factories reveals that they rarely achieved the spectacular results they described. Most consulting contracts ended in failure. Despite these failures, consultants managed to gain a prominent place in the history and practice of American industry by using popular ideas of the power of science to claim authority for their work. For managers, the idea of science was more rhetorical tool than organizational system. In factories, they had to engage in management, a process of negotiation and adaptation that allowed working people to exercise far more agency than managers' science allowed them. This agency, however, disappeared in “scientific” accounts of factory management. Workers became objects who conformed to cultural expectations about race, gender and class rather than individuals making choices about their work and their identity. The idea of science made their systems appear to function as designed. Over the course of the century, scientific management became less about management than science. Instead of engaging in the delicate negotiations of management, consultants sold their theories of science to clients. They also articulated a version of the past of scientific management that ignored the experience of workers, making them automatons, victims of technology. While such versions of the history of management conform to many current theories of the power of technology to control people's lives, this study reveals that workers' loss of agency was more rhetorical than actual.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Gabin, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American history|Science history|Management|Industrial engineering

COinS