SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT. 



By G. D. H. COLE, M.A. 



I make no apology for confining this paper within comparatively 

 narrow limits, or for enlarging principally on those features of ' Scientific 

 Management ' which seem to me both most immediately important 

 and of most vital concern to labour. I should like it to be understood 

 at the start that I am dealing not with the general questions of the 

 application of scientific principles to industrial management, but with 

 the more particular question of their application to human beings. 

 I shall therefore have nothing to say of many matters which fall under 

 the head of Scientific Management, where they do not directly and 

 immediately affect the human element in the factory. That the 

 application of scientific principles to industrial organisation is a good 

 thing we can all agree in the abstract ; and we can at least reach an 

 agreement in practice where only inanimate objects are affected. 

 The improvement of industrial research, of factory organisation, of 

 the estimating of costs of production, of the routing of jobs, of the dove- 

 tailing of orders, and of the co-ordination between factory and factory 

 undoubtedly call for more ' science,' and there can be no quarrel 

 with any attempt to apply science purely in such spheres. There is a 

 real sense in which industrial management is a science, just as there is 

 a real sense in which political government is a science. 



The advocates of the various systems which go by the name of 

 4 Scientific Management ' make, however, a far wider claim than this. 

 For Mr. Taylor, who invented the name if not the thing, the place of 

 ' science ' in industrial management is not merely important, but 

 all-embracing. His aim, at least, was to substitute in industry ' the 

 government of fact and law for the rule of force and opinion.' He 

 conceived industrial management not merely as a science, but as an 

 exact science, furnishing an absolute and unchallengeable answer to 

 every question, laying down natural laws with reference not simply 

 to the machinery of the factory, but also to the behaviour, motions, 

 tasks, and methods of remuneration of all the workers employed in it. 

 He claimed that his system was ' democratic,' not because it established 

 the principle of self-government by the workers in the factory, but 

 because it made government an absolute and exact science, no less 

 independent of the actual managers of any particular factory than of 

 the workers employed in it. 



The extreme claims of Mr. Taylor have been considerably modified 

 by his theoretical successors, and very much more modified wherever 

 Scientific Management has been applied in practice. Nevertheless, 

 in so far as Scientific Management is a doctrine at all. it does rest upon 

 the belief that industrial organisation is an exact science, and that in 



