Down to a Science

While studying the seemingly mundane question of what lighting level made factory workers most productive, researchers at a plant near Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s discovered something surprising. They found that just about any type of tinkering with the lighting, other than leaving people in the dark, boosted productivity.

The researchers’ conclusion: Simply by conducting the experiments, management was paying extra attention to the plant’s workers and treating their duties as important--and that, in itself, had a positive impact.

Known as the Hawthorne studies, the lighting experiments helped spawn American industry’s so-called human relations movement, based on the notion that social relationships powerfully influence job performance.

What’s more, the Hawthorne studies and their aftermath embodied the spirit of U.S. business management throughout the 20th century. Leading American business executives and theorists have continuously explored how to adjust workplace conditions and people-management practices to yield the best results, and they have overhauled their approaches time and again.

Their overall success will lead business historians to regard this as “the management century,” predicted Warren Bennis, a USC management professor and author of more than two dozen books on management topics. “What industrialization was to the 19th century, is what management has been to the 20th century.”

The 20th century evolution in American management practices essentially began with Frederick Winslow Taylor. An engineer, inventor and efficiency expert, Taylor was the author of the seminal 1911 book, “Principles of Scientific Management.”

Although he came from a wealthy family and was educated both in this country and Europe, Taylor worked in his late teens and early 20s as a manual laborer. He quickly moved up through the ranks at Midvale Steel Co. in Philadelphia, and started systematically evaluating shop-operating methods. At one point, while studying workers shoveling coal, he trimmed the edge of the shovels to reduce the weight and recorded the impact on the day’s output.

The practices that came to be known as Taylorism or scientific management included time-and-motion studies, standardized tools and materials and simplified production methods.

Taylorism also dovetailed with a management style known as command-and-control, an almost military-like approach to administration with sharp dividing lines between managers and their subordinates. Like other management trends, it was a response to product and labor market conditions of the era, said UCLA labor economist Daniel J. B. Mitchell.

Mitchell said that in Taylor’s case, some of the key factors were the nation’s large labor force of unskilled immigrant workers with limited English skills and technology that favored mass-production techniques.

An eventual criticism of Taylorism was that it treated ordinary workers as no more than cogs in a system, and considered pay the only issue that mattered to employees.

“There was very little wiggle room for employees to make informed decisions on their own,” said Barbara Ettorre, editor of Management Review, a monthly publication of the American Management Assn.

Today, however, Taylorism lives on to a significant degree. But instead of dominating the kinds of industrial settings where it first was applied, Taylorism may be more apparent today in service industries. Take a look at the typical fast-food restaurant, where workers are closely supervised and jobs are sharply divided between the chefs and the order-takers.

At the same time, some experts say that concepts such as re-engineering and total quality management that gained a following among big companies in the 1980s and 1990s can be traced to Taylor’s focus on improving work processes.

Pioneering auto manufacturer Henry Ford embraced, and expanded upon, Taylor’s management concepts. Ford’s low-cost Model T created a mass market for autos, and his company kept up with consumer demand with groundbreaking assembly-line production methods.

Although Ford came to be a controversial figure who espoused anti-Semitic views, he was praised in 1914 when his company announced a $5 daily minimum wage. It was considered an innovation in employment compensation that stabilized the company’s work force and made a job at a Ford plant a prized commodity.

Eventually, Taylorism and Fordism were eclipsed by the human relations movement that dated back to the Hawthorne studies. It recognized the importance of worker psychology and group dynamics and used social science insights to motivate and retain employees and to bolster productivity. The trend was spurred, in part, by large shortages in the years after World War II.

The human relations movement led to the development of personnel departments, increased employee benefits, worker training and, to some extent, the corporate stability and conformity memorialized in the 1956 book, “The Organization Man.” The movement flourished at a time when union membership was booming, and gave managers a tool to try to blunt labor-organizing by independent, militant unions.

Probably the leading management theorist of the second half of the century is Austrian-born Peter Drucker. The author of more than 30 books, Drucker continues to teach in Southern California at Claremont Graduate University.

He is credited with such concepts as “management by objective.” It is, as Ettorre put it, the idea that “you have goals, you plan for them, you have strategies, and you move the organization forward in line with those strategies. He made it like a science.”

Then, more than 20 years ago, he came up with the idea of the “knowledge worker,” a concept still current today. He was one of the first, Ettorre said, to recognize that the “accumulated knowledge of workers in a company was a real asset for the company.”

But before the United States emerged as the champion of the new information economy in the mid-1990s, managers of the nation’s big companies were buffeted by stiff challenges. In the 1970s and 1980s, managers increasingly worried about hostile takeovers and the challenges presented by Japan’s emergence as an economic powerhouse.

Many companies, particularly industrial concerns, rushed to adopt Japanese-style management concepts such as quality circles, which emphasized greater teamwork among employees and called for tapping the knowledge of ordinary workers.

At the same time, unionized companies adopted tougher stances on labor relations issues. As unions ossified, companies more vigorously resisted their strikes, negotiating positions and recruiting efforts.

The Reagan administration’s breaking of the air traffic controllers strike in 1981 set a tone that was followed by companies such as Caterpillar Inc., which warred with the United Auto Workers for much of the 1990s, until battered-down union locals agreed to a concessionary contract last year.

A harder-nosed attitude also emerged at companies with large nonunion and white-collar work forces. By the end of the 1980s, companies once considered bastions of lifetime employment, including IBM, began resorting to layoffs to cut costs.

Companies that once emulated Henry Ford’s concept of an integrated company--as exemplified by the way the Ford Motor Co. not only assembled autos, but also produced the steel and glass going into the cars--shifted gears. Instead, many streamlined operations, drawing ideas from the 1993 book, “Reengineering the Corporation.”

A key demographic trend influencing management over the last couple of decades has been the influx of minorities and, particularly, women into management jobs.

The roles women traditionally have played as mothers and in working in such areas as nonprofit organizations and schools may have encouraged a flexibility that is helpful in today’s corporate world, said Mary A. Yeager, a business and economic historian at UCLA. Their experience as negotiators, and in handling various roles simultaneously outside of the old-fashioned command-and-control corporate style, “are now coming to be seen as competitive advantages in the fast-moving, globalizing environment,” she said.

The growing role of women also has spurred the increasing focus on ways to help workers balance the demands of work and family. Still, Yeager says, unless men start sharing an equal burden of responsibilities at home, women’s progress in the workplace will continue to be held back.

In recent years, new technologies and intensified global competition have created new incentives and pressures for American managers. On the one hand, the industrial barons of the new economy, led by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and other titans of high technology, have fostered a new breed of entrepreneurship.

At the same time, the pace of change has vastly complicated the task of running major companies, and appears to be shortening the tenures of many chief executive officers. “There are so many uncontrollables, so many factors to keep in mind,” Bennis said. “It’s a very tough racket.”

In various respects, the work force management practices of some of today’s most sophisticated companies parallel the modes of big businesses a century ago.

Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written about this phenomenon, notes that these supposed cutting-edge 1990s companies are doing such things as emphasizing their “core competencies.” Along with that, they likely are “outsourcing”--in other words, hiring outside firms--to handle other necessary business functions.

Cappelli also points out that many businesses now shun the notion of lifetime or long-term employment.

Instead, the relationships between these employers and their workers are considered temporary affairs, with the jobs lasting only as long as they suit both sides.

Although the terminology has changed, Cappelli says, these essentially are the ways business operated in the 1800s, when the norm was to rely heavily on outside suppliers and contractors.

As just one example, Cappelli points to the practices of DuPont in the late 1800s. The company then relied on 215 independent agents--rather than employees--to handle relationships with sellers of DuPont products across the country.

The difference today, Cappelli said, is that a century of innovation has created a business world where executives have many more management approaches to consider.

“There are still companies that have big, internalized operations, and employ people for long periods of time. There are also fast-moving companies that are hiring people, and dropping them, all of the time,” Cappelli said. No longer, he said, is there “a clear, dominant model the way there was until the early 1980s or so.”

Since the early 20th century days of Taylor, the role of business managers--particularly top executives of the nation’s leading companies--has been revolutionized, many experts say.

“We’ve gone from his concept of the manager as a measurer to the manager as a thinker,” Bennis said.