The interest in all these problems of large concerns, in
transportation and factory work and complex industries, ought not to
make us overlook the fact that on principle the same problems can be
found in the simplest industrial establishment. Even the housewife or
the cook destroys economic values if daily she has to spend useless
minutes or hours on account of arrangements in the household which are
badly adjusted to the psychological conditions. She sacrifices her
energy in vain and she wastes her means where she herself is under the
illusion of especial economy. Scientific management would perhaps be
nowhere so wholesome as in kitchen and pantry, in laundry and cellar,
just because here the saving would be multiplied millionfold and the
final sum of energy saved and of feeling values gained would be
enormous, even if it could not be calculated with the exactitude with
which the savings of a factory budget can be proven. The profusion of
small attractive devices which automatically perform the economic
household labor and disburden the human workers must not hide the fact
that the chief activities are still little adjusted to the
psychophysical conditions. The situation is similar to that of the
masons, whose function has also been performed for thousands of years,
and yet which did not find a real adaptation to the psychical factors
until a systematic time-measuring study was introduced. A manufacturer
who sells an improved pan or mixing-spoon or broom expects success if
he brings to the market something the merits of which are evident and
make the housewife anticipate a decrease of work or a simplification
of work, but the development of scientific management has shown
clearly that the most important improvements are just those which are
deduced from scientific researches, without at first giving
satisfaction to the laborers themselves, until a new habit has been
formed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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