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Systematic Management: The Search for Order and Integration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Joseph A. Litterer
Joseph A. Litterer
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Management at University of Illinois
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Abstract

A comparative examination of late nineteenth-century worker productivity, machine utilization, and management methodology reveals the importance of process-oriented organization in American factories, where the highest technical skills were directed not at making products, as in Europe, but at making production lines. This orientation, together with a rapidly changing environment, required a particular kind of management and a new awareness of the management function.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Winter 1961 , pp. 461 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1961

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References

1 Taylor's first piece on Management, “A Piece Rate System,” appeared in the Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1895. A second and broader work entitled “Shop Management” appeared in the same journal in 1903.

2 As quoted in “The Low Wages ‘Boom’,” American Machinist, vol. 2 (Aug. 30, 1879), p. 8.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 Among notable earlier studies were those of Senior, Nassau William, Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages (London, 1830), particularly pp. 11–15Google Scholar, and Brassey, Thomas, Work and Wages (New York, 1872), particularly pp. 116–121Google Scholar.

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15 Ibid.

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