The principles of management today certainly vary from one firm to another - anyone who knows anything about the two companies would never confuse the pro-labor atmosphere at Ben & Jerry's with the corporate-profits-uber-alles atmosphere of Wal-Mart. And yet, despite real and substantial differences amongst companies in terms of their corporate culture, there are also substantial structural and cultural similarities among nearly every company today - and the reason for these similarities lies in the work of Max Weber and Frederick Winslow Taylor. Although Weber's work covered a vast range of human society, much of his work (and that which we will focus on here) touched on the nature of work and the ways in which humans organize themselves and their labor to get work done, and how this organization can be changed to increase the workers' productivity and thus the profits that they can make for others. Taylor's own work was more focused and more pragmatic than that of Weber. Often referred to today as an efficiency expert, Taylor was generally interested in how to organize the workplace so that both the workers and the workplace were as efficient as possible. He was not the broad (or deep) thinker that Weber was, and the impetus of his work was certainly more conservative (i.e. more pro-management and pro-wealth than pro-labor). This paper examines the body of theory and practice that the two shared - the desire to understand how human labor in terms of factory and industrial production might be made more efficient and more productive as industrialism (not agrarianism) became the major economic mode of work.
Taylor's first major work in the field was a study of the ways in which sheet metal could be cut more efficiently - reducing the amount of scrap that was produced when workers at Bethlehem Steel cut components from sheets of prepared steel. The result was a significant savings for the company in terms of both materials and in ener...