It is here only necessary to enumerate these divisions. Each
will be made the subject of a chapter.
DERIVATION OF THESE DIVISIONS.--These divisions lay no claim to
being anything but underlying ideas of Scientific Management, that
embrace varying numbers of established elements that can easily be
subjected to the scrutiny of psychological investigation.
The discussion will be as little technical as is possible, will
take nothing for granted and will cite references at every step.
This is a new field of investigation, and the utmost care is
necessary to avoid generalizing from insufficient data.
DERIVATION OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT.--There has been much
speculation as to the age and origin of Scientific Management. The
results of this are interesting, but are not of enough practical
value to be repeated here. Many ideas of Scientific Management can
be traced back, more or less clearly and directly, to thinkers of
the past; but the Science of Management, as such, was discovered,
and the deduction of its laws, or "principles," made possible when
Dr. Frederick W. Taylor discovered and applied Time Study. Having
discovered this, he constructed from it and the other fundamental
principles a complete whole.
Mr. George Iles in that most interesting and instructive of
books, "Inventors at Work,"[15] has pointed out the importance, to
development in any line of progress or science, of measuring devices
and methods. Contemporaneous with, or previous to, the discovery of
the device or method, must come the discovery or determination of
the most profitable unit of measurement which will, of itself, best
show the variations in efficiency from class. When Dr. Taylor
discovered units of measurement for determining, _prior to
performance_, the amount of any kind of work that a worker could do
and the amount of rest he must have during the performance of that
work, then, and not until then, did management become a science. On
this hangs the science of management.[16]
OUTLINE OF METHOD OF INVESTIGATION.--In the discussion of each
of the nine divisions of Scientific Management, the following topics
must be treated: