Principles of Management
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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 p
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safety of workers and that were often associated with sweatshop conditions.
Taylor argued that workers liked to work hard - appealing to the then-popular (and certainly still common) idea of the Protestant work ethic, one of the aspects of Anglo-American society that most fascinating Max Weber:
[Weber] opposed the orthodox Marxian view of the time that economics was the preeminent determining factor in social causation and instead stressed the plurality and interdependence of causes. Weber emphasized the role of religious values, ideologies, and charismatic leaders in shaping societies. In his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920, tr. 1930) he developed a thesis concerning the intimate connection between the ascetic ideal fostered by Calvinism and the rise of capitalist institutions (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/w/weberm1-g1er.asp).
Weber's description of the well-run bureaucracy mirrors Taylor's own protocols for the well-known factory:
A continuous organisation or functions bounded by rules
That individuals functioned within the limits of the specialisation of the work, the degree of authority allocated and the rules governing the exercise of authority
A hierarchical structure of offices
Appointment
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Approximate Word count = 1403
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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