Chapter 5
The Primary Effects of Scientific Management
The generalized practice of scientific management, as has been noted, coincides with the scientific-technical revolution. It coincides as well with a number of fundamental changes in the structure and functioning of capitalism and in the composition of the working class. In this chapter, we will discuss, in a preliminary way, some of the effects of scientific management upon the working class; later chapters will return to this discussion after the necessary conditions for understanding it more fully have been established.
The separation of mental work from manual work reduces, at any given level of production, the need for workers engaged directly in production, since it divests them of time-consuming mental functions and assigns these functions elsewhere. This is true regardless of any increase in productivity resulting from the separation. Should productivity increase as well, the need for manual workers to produce a given output is further reduced.
A necessary consequence of the separation of conception and execution is that the labor process is now divided between separate sites and separate bodies of workers. In one location, the physical processes of production are executed. In another are concentrated the design, planning, calculation, and record-keeping. The preconception of the process before it is set in motion, the visualization of each worker's activities before they have actually begun, the definition of each function along with the manner of its performance and the time it will consume, the control and checking of the ongoing process once it is under way, and the assessment of results upon completion of each stage of the process—all of these aspects of production have been removed from the shop floor to the management office. The physical processes of production are now carried out more or less blindly, not only by the workers who perform them, but often by lower ranks of supervisory employees as well. The production units operate like a hand, watched, corrected, and controlled by a distant brain.
The concept of control adopted by modern management requires that every activity in production have its several parallel activities in the management center: each must be devised, precalculated, tested, laid out, assigned and ordered, checked and inspected, and recorded throughout its duration and upon completion. The result is that the process of production is replicated in paper form before, as, and after it takes place in physical form. Just as labor in human beings requires that the labor process take place in the brain of the worker as well as in the worker's physical activity, so now the image of the process, removed from production to a separate location and a separate group, controls the process itself. The novelty of this development during the past century lies not in the separate existence of hand and brain, conception and execution, but the rigor with which they are divided from one another, and then increasingly subdivided, so that conception is concentrated, insofar as possible, in ever more limited groups within management or closely associated with it. Thus, in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.
This paper replica of production, the shadow form which corresponds to the physical, calls into existence a variety of new occupations, the hallmark of which is that they are found not in the flow of things but in the flow of paper. Production has now been split in two and depends upon the activities of both groups. Inasmuch as the mode of production has been driven by capitalism to this divided condition, it has separated the two aspects oflabor; but both remain necessary to production, and in this the labor process retains its unity.
The separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step in the division of labor taken by the capitalist mode of production. It is inherent in that mode of production from its beginnings, and it develops, under capitalist management, throughout the history of capitalism, but it is only during the past century that the scale of production, the resources made available to the modern corporation by the rapid accumulation of capital, and the conceptual apparatus and trained personnel have become available to institutionalize this separation in a systematic and formal fashion.\*
The vast industrial engineering and record-keeping divisions of modern corporations have their origins in the planning, estimating, and layout departments, which grew in the wake of the scientific management movement. These early departments had to make their way against the fears of cost-conscious managers, whom Taylor sought to persuade with the following argument: “At first view, the running of a planning department, together with the other innovations, would appear to involve a large amount of additional work and expense, and the most natural question would be is [sic] whether the increased efficiency of the shop more than offsets this outlay? It must be borne in mind, however, that, with the exception of the study of unit times, there is hardly a single item of work done in the planning department which is not already being done in the shop. Establishing a planning department merely concentrates the planning and much other brainwork in a few men especially fitted for their task and trained in their especial lines, instead of having it done, as heretofore, in most cases by high priced mechanics, well fitted to work at their trades, but poorly trained for work more or less clerical in its nature." But to this he added the following caution: “There is no question that the cost of production is lowered by separating the work of planning and the brain work as much as possible from the manual labor. Where this is done, however, it is evident that the brain workers must be given sufficient work to keep them fully busy all the time. They must not be allowed to stand around for a considerable part of their time waiting for their particular kind of work to come along, as is so frequently the case."3 This is by way of serving notice that no part of capitalist employment is exempt from the methods which were first applied on the shop floor.
Effects of Scientific Management
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\* The Hammonds speak of Boulton, who in the eighteenth century conducted a large-scale machine-tool factory at Soho in England in association with James Watt, as an “adept in scientific management." But the very description they cite of his management method belies this notion, and highlights by contrast the methods of modern management; “While sitting in the midst of his factory, surrounded by the clang of hammers and the noise of engines, he could usually detect when any stoppage occurred, or when the machinery was going too fast or too slow, and issue his orders accordingly."l Boulton did, however, have a well-developed supervisory line organization.
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