<P> Scientific management may have exacerbated grievances among workers about oppressive or greedy management . It certainly strengthened developments that put workers at a disadvantage: the erosion of employment in developed economies via both offshoring and automation . Both were made possible by the deskilling of jobs, which was made possible by the knowledge transfer that scientific management achieved . Knowledge was transferred both to cheaper workers and from workers into tools . Jobs that once would have required craft work first transformed to semiskilled work, then unskilled . At this point the labor had been commoditized, and thus the competition between workers (and worker populations) moved closer to pure than it had been, depressing wages and job security . Jobs could be offshored (giving one human's tasks to others--which could be good for the new worker population but was bad for the old) or they could be rendered nonexistent through automation (giving a human's tasks to machines). Either way, the net result from the perspective of developed - economy workers was that jobs started to pay less, then disappear . The power of labor unions in the mid-twentieth century only led to a push on the part of management to accelerate the process of automation, hastening the onset of the later stages just described . </P> <P> In a central assumption of scientific management, "the worker was taken for granted as a cog in the machinery ." While scientific management had made jobs unpleasant, its successors made them less remunerative, less secure, and finally nonexistent as a consequence of structural unemployment . </P> <P> It is often assumed that Fordism derives from Taylor's work . Taylor apparently made this assumption himself when visiting the Ford Motor Company's Michigan plants not too long before he died, but it is likely that the methods at Ford were evolved independently, and that any influence from Taylor's work was indirect at best . Charles E. Sorensen, a principal of the company during its first four decades, disclaimed any connection at all . There was a belief at Ford, which remained dominant until Henry Ford II took over the company in 1945, that the world's experts were worthless, because if Ford had listened to them, it would have failed to attain its great successes . Henry Ford felt that he had succeeded in spite of, not because of, experts, who had tried to stop him in various ways (disagreeing about price points, production methods, car features, business financing, and other issues). Sorensen thus was dismissive of Taylor and lumped him into the category of useless experts . Sorensen held the New England machine tool vendor Walter Flanders in high esteem and credits him for the efficient floorplan layout at Ford, claiming that Flanders knew nothing about Taylor . Flanders may have been exposed to the spirit of Taylorism elsewhere, and may have been influenced by it, but he did not cite it when developing his production technique . Regardless, the Ford team apparently did independently invent modern mass production techniques in the period of 1905 - 1915, and they themselves were not aware of any borrowing from Taylorism . Perhaps it is only possible with hindsight to see the zeitgeist that (indirectly) connected the budding Fordism to the rest of the efficiency movement during the decade of 1905 - 1915 . </P> <P> Scientific management appealed to managers of planned economies because central economic planning relies on the idea that the expenses that go into economic production can be precisely predicted and can be optimized by design . The opposite theoretical pole would be laissez - faire thinking in which the invisible hand of free markets is the only possible "designer". In reality most economies today are somewhere in between . Another alternative for economic planning is workers' self - management . </P>

Scientific management theory and the ford motor company
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