Intentional rigidity of rules — the influence of Frederick Taylor
Later, as a direct result of Taylor’s work, almost all natural and organic processes throughout the world which relied on judgement, participation, and common sense were replaced by a way of thinking about process, which relied on rules, rigidly applied, codification of category, task, function.
What we know as the modern organization with machinelike repetition of processes, came from Frederick Taylor.
What we know as modern bureaucracy — American, British, Russian, Swedish, or Chinese — with its system of rules, questions and answers, which make little provision for human actuality or human difference, came from the application of Frederick Taylor’s ideas to large human institutions.
Three principles of Taylorism are:
(1) Disassociate the labor process from the skills. Labor must be independent of craft, tradition, and knowledge (Taylor spent years putting his own trade of machinist onto index cards).
(2) Separate conception from execution.
(3) Gain monopoly over knowledge to control labor process.
The increased productivity of identical widgets created by application of these principles, decreased labor cost and increased management control. As Taylor himself wrote:
“The full possibilities of my system will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainment, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system.”
To replace structure-destroying transformations with structure-preserving transformations — in short, to re-introduce living processes throughout society — we must succeed, slowly, over a period of years, in transforming the effect of Frederick Taylor’s thinking.
I have given a short summary of Taylor’s ideas because even those of us who are thoroughly sick of the bureaucratic and machinelike character of modern society, will, in general, not be aware of the extent to which it all started with the work of one man, nor the extraordinary extent to which these changes were deliberate, conscious, willful. Obviously, if all this was created by the deliberate thought of an individual — and indeed it was — it becomes easier for us to conceive the possibility of changing it.
A living process takes the condition of a place, and asks, “What must be done, what is the most appropriate to that place, to heal it?” That question is answered by the process. And when that has been done, the living process asks, again, what must be done now, to heal the half-formed form which has emerged so far. And when that has been answered, then the living process will ask, again, what must be done now, to heal that state of the half-formed form, what detailed development must be supplied.
The social revolution in part originating from the work of Frederick Taylor, must be held responsible for the loss of this most important feature of any life-creating process. It caused this loss at almost every level of modern society.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/19 Massive process difficulties#