Industrial & Scientific Management in administration are two basic concepts in public administration. Henri Fayol identified six industrial undertakings; among them were technical activities, commercial activities, and financial activities.
As on, for the six, he included management, which he observed was “quite distinct from the other five. To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control.”
The Concept of Industrial Management
According to Fayol, an organization consists of a social body and a material organism. The “corps social” consists of persons.
Persons perform activities. Activities can be classified according to their function in the corps social. These functions are technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting, and managerial.
The managerial function corresponds to a management process that consists of five sub-activities: to plan, to organize, to coordinate, to command, and to control. These sub-activities are defined as follows:
- To plan: lay out the actions to be taken.
- To organize: lie out the lines of authority and responsibility; build up the dual structure, material, and human, of the organization.
- To coordinate: lay out the timing and sequencing of activities…
- To command: put the plan into action; set the work in operation.
- To control: monitor and correct; see that everything occurs in conformity with established rules and expressed command.
Principles
The first five principles explain how the division of work, a clear command structure, and obedience to these commands can do work most efficiently. The second five principles contain refinements of the first five principles.
Principles 6 and 7 explain the nature of the contracts between the organization and personnel, resulting in a subordination of the individual interest to the general interest and fair remuneration of personnel.
Organizational Structure
Based on this analysis of the management process, we can conclude that the organizational structure is created by acts of planning, organization, and coordination. While work is done based on commands and obedience to commands. Obedience to commands and adherence to rules is stimulated by control activities.
Scientific Management
The broader implications of Scientific Management became clearer after Taylor’s death. In 1915, The work of Frederick W. Taylor, the engineer, inventor, and publicist who became the first American management theorist to reach a large, non-technical audience was largely discussed and debated in terms of industrial production.
A decade later, no one would have suggested that scientific management was “just” industrial engineering or even that its most important impact was on the operation of the factory.
World War I was the most immediate stimulus to a larger perspective. The conversion of substantial groups of academics and intellectuals to the cause of scientific management.
The continued growth of large organizations with extensive administrative bureaucracies committed to management as a self-conscious activity was also a significant contributing factor.
The possibilities of improving the performance of non-business institutions also help explain the popularity of the principles of scientific management.
Comparatively few Americans went as far as Mary Van Kleek, but there was widespread recognition of the possibilities of economic and social planning.
Principles
- Inefficiency is a great loss to the country.
- The remedy for inefficiency lies in systematic management, not in a search for extraordinary workers.
- The best management is true science. The fundamentals of scientific management are applicable to all fields of business activities.
What scientific management is not?
Scientific management is not an efficient device. It is not a new system of figuring costs; it is not a new system of paying men. It is not holding a stopwatch on a man and writing things down about him. It is neither a motion study nor an analysis of the movements of men. It is not divided foremanship. It is not any of the devices, which the average man calls to mind when scientific management is spoken of.
Word for word, scientific management is a complete mental revolution. Scientific management is a dynamic thing; its principles are the principles of growth and change and hence its progress since the war has been sure and swift.
The Global Reach
Scientific management has attracted surprisingly little attention in the United States in recent years.
Historians and social scientists specializing in European affairs have discovered or rediscovered indigenous scientific management movements that drew inspiration from the American pioneers but soon developed identities of their own.
The results of the new scholarship are most striking in the case of France, which had the most ambitious management movement outside the United States. But impressive studies in German, British, Russian, Italian, and Japanese history have documented the spread of ideas and techniques once assumed to be peculiarly American.
While it may be premature to speak of an international history of scientific management, it is clear that Taylor found enthusiastic disciples everywhere and that scientific management measurably affected the performance of institutions in many countries.
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