| This thesis traces the growth and development of the scientific management movement in Britain from its origins in the British engineering workshop of the 1890s to the 1940s when the Bedaux system of labor measurement and labor management became the standard by which all other such systems were measured. The central argument is that the willingness of past historians to place far too much emphasis on the life of Frederick Taylor and less emphasis on actual applications of the "new management" has done more harm than good. This is especially the case in applications of scientific management outside the United States. Through an analysis of various plans of workshop reorganization, the application of Taylorism at Hans Renold, the appearance of industrial psychology and a detailed treatment of the Bedaux system, a much broader understanding of scientific management in Britain has resulted. It is suggested that scientific management in Britain developed out of the engineering workshop around the turn of the century and was conditioned by that experience. The ideas and methods of scientific management which emerged from this period were subsequently refined by industrial psychologists in the inter-war years. However, in the late 1920s, the efficiency engineer and international jet setter Charles Bedaux brought his system of labor management to Britain from the United States. Bedaux combined the principles of Taylorism, efficiency engineering and entrepreneurial skill in order to produce the most successful system of scientific management in the inter-war years. By 1945, almost six hundred British firms had bought his industrial services with varying degrees of success. The Bedaux system is important because its appearance illustrates the persistance of the Taylorian ideal in a post-Taylorite industrial world. The thesis also suggests that by 1945, scientific management was much less recognizably Taylorian than it was a complex set of ideas, beliefs and practices of which Taylorism had been a part. The result was a new mental attitude of the management of labor as well as the organization of management. |
