Pyramids and many other huge monuments and structures were built, armies and governments were organized and civilizations spread over vast territories. This took organization and management. There are some writings from antiquity that suggest that systematic approach to management and organization did evolve and were transmitted to others. But the primary influences in organizations and management today stem from more recent events.
Some would claim that to begin to understand our organizations today we need to look at the Protestant Reformation. A new ethics began to evolve; an ethics that shifted the orientation of one's life from the "next world" to this world. This ethics is best embodied in quotes from Luther that all men possess a calling in the world and the fulfillment of its obligation is a divinely imposed duty and Calvin who argued that disciplined work raises a person above the calling into which he was born and is the only sign of his election by God to salvation... The soul is naked before God without Church or communion-religion is a personal matter; worldly success and prosperity are construed as signs of God's approval.
Over time, the Protestant Reformation provided an ideological foundation for the modern industrial society by suggesting that work be now a profound moral obligation, a path to eternal salvation. The focus is this world and materialism, not next world. The individual's obligation is self-discipline, and systematic work. It should be clear that the factory system, which began to evolve late in the 18th Century, could never have flourished without the ideological underpinnings of this profound shift in philosophy as, exemplified by Ethics.
The Scientific Management
The Industrial Revolution that started with the development of steam power and the creation of large factories in the late Eighteenth Century lead to great changes in the production of textiles and other products. The factories that evolved created tremendous challenges to organization and management that had not been confronted before. Managing these new factories and later new entities like railroads with the requirement of managing large flows of material, people, and information over large distances created the need for some methods for dealing with the new management issues.
The most important of those who began to create a science of management was Frederic Winslow Taylor, (1856-1915). Taylor was one of the firsts to attempt to systematically analyze human behavior at work. His model was the machine with its cheap, interchangeable parts, each of which does one specific function. Taylor attempted to do to complex organizations what engineers had done to machines and this involved making individuals into the equivalent of machine parts. Just as machine parts were easily interchangeable, cheap, and passive, so too should the human parts be the same in the Machine model of organizations.
This involved breaking down each task to its smallest unit and to figure out the one best way to do each job. Then the engineer, after analyzing the job should teach it to the worker and make sure the worker does only those motions essential to the task. Taylor attempted to make a science for each element of work and restrict behavioral alternatives facing worker. Taylor looked at interaction of human characteristics, social environment, task, and physical environment, capacity, speed, durability, and cost. The overall goal was to remove human variability.
The results were profound. Productivity under Taylorism went up dramatically. New departments arose such as industrial engineering, personnel, and quality control. There was also growth in middle management as there evolved a separation of planning from operations. Rational rules replaced trial and error; management became formalized and efficiency increased. Of course, this did not come about without resistance. First the old-line managers resisted the notion that management was a science to be studied not something one was born with (or inherited). Then of course, many workers resisted what some considered the dehumanization of work. To be fair, Taylor also studied issues such as fatigue and safety and urged management to study the relationship between work breaks, and the length of the work day and productivity and convinced many companies that the careful introduction of breaks and a shorter day could increase productivity. Nevertheless, the industrial engineer with his stop watch and clip-board, standing over you measuring each little part of the job and one's movements became a hated figure and lead to much sabotage and group resistance
The Human Relations Movement
Despite the economic progress brought about in part by Scientific Management, critics were calling attention to the seamy side of progress, which included severe labor/management conflict, apathy, boredom, and wasted human resources. These concerns lead a number of researchers to examine the discrepancy between how an organization was supposed to work versus how the workers actually behaved. In addition, factors like World War I, developments in psychology (eg. Freud) and later the depression, all brought into question some of the basic assumptions of the Scientific Management School. One of the primary critics of the time, Elton Mayo, claimed that this alienation stemmed from the breakdown of the social structures caused by industrialization, the factory system, and its related outcomes like growing urbanization.
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