<P> Taylor began the theory's development in the United States during the 1880s and' 90s within manufacturing industries, especially steel . Its peak of influence came in the 1910s; Taylor died in 1915 and by the 1920s, scientific management was still influential but had entered into competition and syncretism with opposing or complementary ideas . </P> <P> Although scientific management as a distinct theory or school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its themes are still important parts of industrial engineering and management today . These include: analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation . </P> <P> Taylor's own names for his approach initially included "shop management" and "process management". However, "scientific management" came to national attention in 1910 when crusading attorney Louis Brandeis (then not yet Supreme Court justice) popularized the term . Brandeis had sought a consensus term for the approach with the help of practitioners like Henry L. Gantt and Frank B. Gilbreth . Brandeis then used the consensus of "scientific management" when he argued before the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that a proposed increase in railroad rates was unnecessary despite an increase in labor costs; he alleged scientific management would overcome railroad inefficiencies (The ICC ruled against the rate increase, but also dismissed as insufficiently substantiated that concept the railroads were necessarily inefficient .) Taylor recognized the nationally - known term "scientific management" as another good name for the concept, and adopted it in the title of his influential 1911 monograph . </P> <P> The Midvale Steel Company, "one of America's great armor plate making plants," was the birthplace of scientific management . In 1877, at age 22, Frederick W. Taylor started as a clerk in Midvale, but advanced to foreman in 1880 . As foreman, Taylor was "constantly impressed by the failure of his (team members) to produce more than about one - third of (what he deemed) a good day's work ." Taylor determined to discover, by scientific methods, how long it should take men to perform each given piece of work; and it was in the fall of 1882 that he started to put the first features of scientific management into operation . </P>

Features of the human relations and scientific management approaches were combined in the