Higher Education and Business Standards — John Shaqi
Higher Education and Business StandardsHotchkiss, Willard E. (Willard Eugene)
Philosophy
Higher Education and Business Standards
Hotchkiss, Willard E. (Willard Eugene)
Business education; Business ethics
More significant still has been the scientific management propaganda.
Mr. Brandeis's dramatic exposition of this movement in the railway rate
cases in 1911 at once made it a matter of public interest. Later
discussion may not have extended acceptance of scientific management,
but it has not caused interest in it to flag. The movement has become
essentially a cult. Its prophet, the late Frederick Taylor, by ignoring
trade-unionism and labor psychology in the exposition of his doctrines,
at once drew down upon them the hostility of organized labor; the
movement was branded as another speeding-up device. More serious than
the antagonism has been the spirit in which some of the scientific
management enthusiasts--not all--have met it. They seem to assume that
their science is absolute and inexorable, that it eliminates disturbing
factors and hence needs no adjustment to adapt it to the difficulties
met in its application. This air of omniscient dogmatism, together with
the disasters of false prophets, has somewhat compromised the movement
and has diminished its direct influence. However, business men have
been stirred up. They have become accustomed to using the words
"science" and "business" in the same sentence. They are in a receptive
attitude for ideas. The indirect influence has been great.
A final, and probably in the long-run the most permanent, influence
making for the extension of scientific method in business has been the
new viewpoint from which universities have been approaching the task of
educating men for business. Prior to 1900, university education for
business in the few universities that attempted anything of the sort
was confined to such branches of applied economics as money and
banking, transportation, corporation finance, commercial geography,
with accounting and business law to give it a professional flavor.
There were also general courses labeled commercial organization and
industrial organization, but these were almost entirely descriptive of
the general business fabric of the country, and had but the most remote
bearing on the internal problems of organization and management which
an individual business man has to face. The assumption was that a man
who was looking forward to business would probably do well to secure
some information about business, but there was little attempt at
definite professional training of the kind given to prospective
lawyers, physicians, or engineers.
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