Frederick Winslow Taylor
1856 – 1915 American engineer, management theorist
American engineer who founded scientific management, breaking work into timed tasks to raise output, a system praised for efficiency and attacked for treating workers as machines.
- Religion
- Quaker upbringing
- Affiliations
- Midvale Steel, American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Frederick Winslow Taylor developed what he called scientific management, studying and timing each motion of a job to set a single best way to do it and tying pay to output. Set out in his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, the approach reshaped factories worldwide and made time-and-motion study standard. Critics, including organised labour, argued it deskilled work, stripped workers of control, and drove speed-ups; a US congressional inquiry examined the system after unrest at the Watertown Arsenal. Later scholars also found that Taylor overstated and in places fabricated the results of his famous pig-iron experiments. His ideas remained hugely influential despite the criticism.
Connections
- associate of Edward Thorndike — Carried the logic of efficiency and measurement from Taylor's factory into the classroom.
- associate of Edward Thorndike — The efficiency and measurement Taylor brought to industry ran parallel to Thorndike's push to measure and sort pupils.
- associate of Henry Ford — Fordism industrialized the time-and-motion logic Taylor set out.
In the timeline
- 1911 Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management author
- 1911 Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management mentioned
- 1912 Frederick Taylor testifies before Congress mentioned