Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

Weber, the political control of Wilson and the merit appointments and political
neutrality of Northcote–Trevelyan. This was found in the scientific management
principles put forward for the private sector by Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1911). As Dunsire argues, the addition of scientific management ideas led to
a complete model of administration and ‘the twin ideas of the politics/administration
dichotomy and Scientific Management, gave a form and purpose,
a self-confidence to both the practice and the study of administration in the
1920s and 1930s’ (1973, p. 94).
Scientific management
The Traditional Model of Public Administration 27
Frederick Taylor (1911) is usually credited with formulating scientific management.
There were two main points to Taylor’s theory: standardizing work,
which meant finding the ‘one best way of working’ and ‘controlling so extensively
and intensively as to provide for the maintenance of all these standards’
(Kakar, 1970, p. 3). Scientific management involved (i) time-and-motion studies
to decide a standard for working; (ii) a wage-incentive system that was
a modification of the piecework method already in existence; and (iii) changing
the functional organization. Taylor did not invent time-and-motion studies, but
did carry them out more thoroughly than predecessors. There was a series of
famous experiments with shovel size, bringing the work closer to the worker,
reducing the number of movements, all carried out with the ever-present stopwatch.
Taylor advocated paying workers by a modified piecework method, so
that someone who produced above the measured standard for a day’s work
would be paid more for the entire output, while performance below the standard
would attract the normal rate (Kanigel, 1997, pp. 210–11).
Scientific management became an evangelical force in the early years of the
century (Copley, 1923). What Taylor sought was a fundamental change as efficiency
and science replaced ad hoc decision-making, even a societal change as,
through scientific management, the interests of employees and employers
could be shown to be the same.
The factory assembly line was the main area influenced by Taylor’s ideas,
but it was not long before scientific management was applied to governments.
Enthusiasts thought the ideas could be applied to the public sector. Taylor himself
thought that scientific management could be applied to government since,
‘in his judgment, the average public employee did little more than one-third
to one-half of a good day’s work’ (Fry, 1989, p. 47). It is easy to see why the
bureaucracy adopted scientific management. It offered a way of operationalizing
the bureaucratic form of organization within government and it was Taylor
and his followers ‘who were major carriers of the bureaucratic model’
(Golembiewski, 1990, p. 133).
Scientific management fits very well with the theory of bureaucracy: the skills
of the administrator, the compilation of manuals to cover every contingency, the