Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators — John Shaqi
Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for EducatorsMarot, Helen
Science
Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators
Marot, Helen
Business and education -- United States; Technical education -- United States; Working class -- Education -- United States
As machine power rivalled hand work, promoters of industry until
recently relied for its advancement on the perfection of technology,
giving little thought to the perfection of labor. It was confidently
assumed that labor, out of its own necessities, would adapt itself
automatically to the new requirements of the machine, and to the
shifts of business interest. When it was discovered that there were
limitations to labor's voluntary adaptation under the conditions laid
down, intelligent business in America decided that the responsibility
for realizing labor's adaptation or "labor's coöperation" as they
call it, must be assumed by the management of industry and that that
management must be scientifically worked out and applied.
Scientific management is scientific as it subjects the labor
operations on each job, each specific job to be performed in a
factory, to a testing out of the energy consumed; to discovering
how to secure labor's maximum productivity without waste of time or
energy. It is scientific as the manager's state of mind towards the
physical and psychological reactions of the workers is one of inquiry
and a readiness to accept, as facts of mechanical science are
accepted, the reaction of the workers. A scientific manager, or
engineer as he is often called, bears the same relation to the labor
force in a factory that an electrical engineer bears to the electrical
equipment. If his attention to the emotional reaction of the workers
is less detached than scientific standards require, it must be
remembered that he is trying to make adjustments which must first of
all meet definite business conditions. Where the reactions of the
workers interfere with the whole scheme of business administration,
(and interfere they ceaselessly do), he has to substitute measures
which are not strictly speaking scientific. On these occasions he
adopts humanitarian schemes, which are generally spoken of as welfare
work. It is the introduction of these schemes which look like a "slop
over" from science to charity, that makes it difficult for outsiders
to tell just what scientific management is and what it is not.
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