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Toward Systematic Management: Alexander Hamilton Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Mariann Jelinek
Mariann Jelinek
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Amos Tuck School
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Abstract

Dominated as it is by the powerful personality of Frederick W. Taylor, the history of scientific management thought has neglected important figures like Alexander Hamilton Church. Professor Jelinek shows that whereas Taylor's contribution was to move thinking down one “level of abstraction” to concrete shop operations, Church moved it up one level to construct a pattern of observations useful for management planning and evaluation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , Spring 1980 , pp. 63 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1980

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References

1 See Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar for the definitive treatment of this development. Prof. Chandler's contributions to the ideas in this paper are gratefully acknowledged.

2 Tregoing, John, A Treatise on Factory Management (Lynn, Mass., 1891), iiiGoogle Scholar, cited in Litterer, Joseph A., “Systematic Management: The Search for Order and Integration,” Business History Review, XXXV (Winter, 1961), 473.Google Scholar (Hereafter, “Order and Integration”.)

3 “Works Management for the Maximum of Production: Organization as a Factor of Output,” Engineering Magazine (1899), 59. Cited in “Order and Integration,” 469.

4 Taylor and Church were preceded by other important contributors to systematic management, perhaps most notably by Daniel C. McCallum, General Superintendent of the Erie Railroad. McCallum, as early as 1854, devised an organized system for managing the details of railroad operation. More than any other business entity of the times, the railroads were definitively big business in the 1850s. In comparison, the largest manufacturing firm (Pepperell, in textiles) had expenses in excess of $300,000 in only one year during the 1850s while the New York and Erie spent $2,861,875 and the Pennsylvania $2,149,198 in 1855. Much of this was obviously due to heavy capital investment in locomotives and track; however, employment figures provide a similar picture: the Pepperell mills in the 1850s employed about 800 hands, on average, while the Erie had more than 4000 employees by the mid-fifties. By the later 1880s the Pennsylvania had close to 50,000 employees. Railroad operations were complicated by geographic dispersion. Here too, as in manufacturing (see the substance of my argument in this paper), the answers were systematic organization and records. Where McCallum organized to facilitate the personal supervision and direct accountability of his employees, however, Taylor sought to build an organization. independent of particular individuals and emphatically institutional. (For a more extensive discussion of McCallum and his contribution, see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., ed., The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business [New York, 1965]Google Scholar, from which the foregoing information is drawn; and Professor Chandler's recent book, The Visible Hand.)

5 My obligation to an article by Litterer, Joseph A., “Systematic Management: The Search for Order and Integration,” Business History Review, XXXV (Winter, 1961)Google Scholar, for the first portion of this paper especially will be apparent to anyone familiar with Prof. Litterer's work. The paper has also benefited from the helpful comments of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

6 “The Low Wages ‘Boom’,” American Machinist, II (August 30, 1879), 8; Schoenhof, J., The Economy of High Wages (New York, 1893), 22–25, 116–121.Google Scholar

7 Although, as Litterer notes, the developments, problems, and solutions were by no means limited to metal working industries, or indeed to manufacture. Litterer, , “Systematic Management: Design for Organizational Recoupling in American Manufacturing Firms,” Business History Review, XXVII (Winter, 1963), 369–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 371, n. 10.

8 “Technology” is used here in its widest sense, as “knowledge of how to do something,” rather than being limited to machinery, to scientific knowledge, or production techniques. Specifically, programs and protocols are included here, following Litterer, , Analysis of Organizations (New York, 1973).Google Scholar This expanded definition is particularly appropriate for discussing management, and “management technology.”

9 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (London, 1776).Google Scholar

10 Babbage, Charles, “On the Division of Labour,” from On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers (Philadelphia, 1832)Google Scholar in Merrik, Harwood F., ed., Classics in Management (American Management Association, 1970), 32.Google Scholar Babbage is also cited at length in Wren, Daniel A., The Evolution of Management Thought (New York, 1972), esp. pp. 71–73.Google Scholar

11 Orcutt, H. F. L., “Machine Shop Management in Europe and America. VI. Comparisons as to Efficiency and Methods,” Engineering Magazine 17 (June, 1899), 384.Google Scholar Cited in “Order and Integration”, 464.

12 Litterer, “Order and Integration,” 466–467.

13 Rushing, William, “Hardness of Materials as Related to Division of Labor in Manufacturing Industries,” Administrative Science Quarterly 13 (1968), 229–245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 See Meyer, Marshall W., “The Two Authority Structures of Bureaucratic Organization,” Administrative Science Quarterly 13 (September 1968), 211–228CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a theoretical discussion.

15 Morris, H. M., “A Simple and Effective System of Shop Cost-Keeping,” Engineering Magazine 16 (1898), 385.Google Scholar Cited in Litterer, “Order and Integration,” 470.

16 The phrase is Norris's, in “Shop System,” Iron Age 54 (November 1, 1894), 746. Cited in “Order and Integration,” 473.

17 In Shop Management, first published in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1903.

18 Copley, F. B., Frederick Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (New York, 1923), I, 235.Google Scholar Taylor's accomplishment in specifying what the actions and their times should be is an important step beyond Charles Babbage's use of a watch in recording the operations and times necessary in the manufacture of pins. Taylor's approach was “analytic” and “constructive,” rather than merely descriptive, as was Babbage's. Taylor's aim was to prescribe specific movements and times. See Wren, Evolution of Management Thought, 117–118 for a comparison of Taylor's time-study with the work of Babbage.

19 Alexander Hamilton Church considerably predates the better-known Harrington Emerson, and is much more accessible than another contemporary, Russell Robb. Robb's appreciation of the management task and the benefits of specialization is, like Church's, quite sophisticated. In his Lecturers on Organization (“delivered in the course on industrial organization in the Graduate School of Business Administration of Harvard University” and privately printed in 1910), Robb opens by commenting: “As an industry or business begins to involve large size, great numbers, and complexity, organization becomes necessary simply for the direction, control, and handling of affairs, quite aside from any question of direct economy. It becomes necessary to set off groups of workers, to divide responsibilities, duties, and processes, so that affairs may be kept within the scope and ability of those who are directing the undertaking.” Church's special contribution was the application of the principles of specialization, specification, and replicability to the management task. This application is imperative for the effective management of increasingly large, complex organizations so characteristic of modern times. In the following discussion, I have drawn heavily upon an excellent article by Litterer, Joseph A., “Alexander Hamilton Church and the Development of Modern Management”, Business History Review, XXXV (Summer, 1961), 211–225CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as upon Church's own works.

20 Church, Alexander Hamilton, “The Meaning of Commercial Organization,” Engineering Magazine 20 (1900), 392–393.Google Scholar Cited in Litterer, “Alexander Hamilton Church,” 213.

21 Church, “The Meaning of Commercial Organization,” 395. In Litterer, “Church,” 213.

22 Church, Alexander Hamilton, The Science and Practice of Management (New York, 1914), 1.Google Scholar

23 Church, Science, 7n.

24 Church, Science, 57. Emphasis in the original.

25 Church, Science, 24–25.

26 Church, Science, 29.

27 Church, Science, 29–30.

28 Church, Science, 31.

29 Church, Science, 32; see also 79–88.

30 Church, Science, 57.

31 Church, Alexander Hamilton, “Distribution of Expense Burden,” American Machinist (May 25, 1911), 991.Google Scholar

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Church, “Distribution,” 996.

36 Church, “Distribution,” 996.

37 Church, Alexander Hamilton and Alford, Leon Pratt, “The Principles of Management,” American Machinist, XXXVI (May 30, 1912), 857–861.Google Scholar Reprinted in Classics in Management, 169–189. In his preface (p. v) to The Science and Practice of Management (New York, 1974), which collects several papers previously printed in the American Machinist discussing this framework, Church notes: “These three regulative principles were afterward endorsed and adopted in the majority report of the special committee appointed by the American Society of Technical Engineers to investigate the new systems of management – a fourth principle, namely the transfer of skill, being added to them by the committee.”

38 Church and Alford, “Principles,” 171.

39 Clearly the list could be expanded substantially; in the field of accounting systems alone, Church must stand for a company that includes J. Slater Lewis, whose student Church was; Capt. Henry Metcalfe, whose Cost of Manufactures and the Administration of Workshops, Public and Private stated the proposition that there was a generally applicable “science of administration” and proposed a system for cost and material control as early as 1885; Hugo Diemer, who wrote on “The Functions and Organization of the Purchasing Department” in Engineering Magazine 18 (1900), 833, setting out rules for economic ordering quantities and taking advantage of cash discounts, as well as advocating the use of specialists to keep track of raw material stocks; and others too numerous to mention. In this paper, Taylor and Church are representatives, rather than only or even the best known of their school.