INTRODUCTION

Scientific management has traditionally been closely associated with time and motion

studies, payment incentive schemes and industrial efficiency.1 The following discussion

reconsiders this portrayal by arguing that the combined effect of F.W. Taylor's

philosophy, principles and methods made his system sufficiently flexible to infuse non-

industrial spheres.2 Accordingly, scientific management's impact is evaluated by

reference to the educational reforms introduced in both the U.S.A. and Australia during

the first two decades of the twentieth century.

In order to explain why it appealed to progressive reformers in both countries, the paper

begins by identifying the ideological imperatives underpinning scientific management

and those of its features that were directed toward training. The diffusion of these

features is initially examined in terms of Taylor's influence on American educational

reformers and their practices. On this basis attention is given to the way that scientific

management permeated Australian educational reforms.

I

Delineating the contours of scientific management's cultural diffusion from the U.S.A. to

Australia, is no simple task; rather it is fraught with conceptual and methodological

difficulties. As Hobsbawm argues: 'Defining the difference between... developed and

non-developed parts of the world is a complex and frustrating exercise, since such

1 See for example: Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation

of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974); Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States 1880-1920 (The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1975); Peter Cochrane, `Job Security: The Frontier of Control,' Arena no.64, 1983, pp.121-130; Peter Cochrane, `Company Time: Management, Ideology and the Labour Process, 1940-1960,' Labour History No.48, May 1985, pp.54-68; C. Wright, `The Management Consultant and the Introduction of Scientific Management in Australian Industry,' in Mark Bray & Diana Kelly (eds) Issues and Trends in Australasian Industrial Relations (Proceedings of the 4th Biennial A.I.R.A.A.N.Z. Conference, University of Wollongong, February, 1989) pp.227-256; Chris Wright, 'Taylorism Reconsidered: The Impact of Scientific Management Within the Australian Workplace,' Labour History No.64, May 1993, pp.34-53.

2 It was this flexibility, argues Merkle, that helped it to 'gain universality.' Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980) pp.48-49.

1

classifications are by their nature static and simple,' and the reality was neither.3 Often,

too, comparative studies assume a linear social evolution 'in which such terms as

"civilized," "modern," "developed" - and presumably "Americanized" - are

interchangeable.'4

In order to avoid such assumptions5, I use the American experience as an analytical

device to make sense of analogous developments in Australia, such as for example the

compatibility between Taylor's principles and certain ideological currents present in

Australia during the early decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, however,

this approach highlights differences between the two countries; it focusses attention on

those uniquely Australian factors which partially assisted and partially inhibited the

spread of scientific management in N.S.W., such as the interventionist role of the state

and the structural barriers to industrial expansion inherent in Australia's political

economy.

Another more specific methodological problem inherent in studying this innovation's

diffusion relates to definitions of its nature. Much of the scholarship dealing with scientific

management avoids the issue of diffusion by restricting the field of study to the system's

technical features and their affect on the labour processes of specific enterprises. In

such cases evaluations of its influence have turned on how many firms and/or industries

adopted the mechanisms of scientific management as these were laid down by Taylor.6

3 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London,

1987) p.26.

4 Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History (New York, 1969) pp.190-191 cited in Ian Bickerton, 'The United States and Australia: Some Points of Comparison,' in Norman Harper and Elaine Barry (eds) American Studies Down Under (Proceedings of the Sixth and Seventh Biennial Conferences of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Victoria, 1976) p.45.

5 For examples see: L.G. Churchward, Australia & America 1788-1972 (Alternative Publishing Cooperative Ltd., Sydney, 1979); Norman Bartlett, 1776-1976 Australia and America Through 200 Years (Ure Smith, Sydney, 1976); M. Ruth Megaw, 'Some Aspects of the United States' Impact on Australia, 1901-1923' (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1966).

6 Wright, 'Taylorism Reconsidered...,' generally; Nelson, Managers and Workers..., pp.70-71. Nelson suggests that the impact of scientific management was limited to only 29 enterprises. These, he argues were 'Taylor firms' because they were

2

This quantitative methodology has given rise to the conclusion that only small and

medium size firms adopted the mechanisms of scientific management.7

Edwards thus argues that although scientific management was greatly debated among

professional management theorists, during the early decades of the twentieth century, it

was not generalised in American industry because the major corporations 'failed to give

it a try'; it was 'one of those failed (or only partially successful) experiments from which

much was learned.'8 Other scholars have similarly depicted it 'as an idea whose time

had not yet arrived.'9 Avoiding the role of different structures and the agency of

progressive reformers in the diffusion process, such conclusions have reinforced a

narrow association between scientific management and the industrial arena.

These types of measures of its success and significance can be traced to the writings of

the scientific managers themselves, as well as some of their allies. It was a popular

undertaking after 1910 to investigate how many firms had adopted Taylor's 'efficiency

methods'10; it provided a good way of validating the system, advertising it to the wider

American business community, and countering the claims of rival methods and the

criticisms of opponents. But the use of such quantitative methods by subsequent

systematized by Taylor's immediate followers and because they adopted the major features of the system which he identifies as: 1. preliminary technical and organizational improvements, including high-speed steel; 2. a planning department; 3. functional foremanship; 4. time study; and 5. an incentive wage system.

7 Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain:The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century, (Basic Books, New York, 1979) pp.101. Also see: Bryan Palmer, `Class, Conception and Conflict: The Thrust for Efficiency, Managerial Views of Labor and The Working Class Rebellion, 1903-1922,' Review of Radical Political Economics vol.7, no.2, 1975, pp.31-32.

8 Edwards, ibid., p.98, pp.101-102, p.104.

9 David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1982) p.146.

10 Nelson, Managers and Workers..., pp.68-9; American Society of Mechanical Engineers (A.S.M.E.), 'Report of Sub-Committee on Administration on the Present State of the Art of Industrial Management,' Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.34, 1912, pp.1131-1150; Robert Franklin Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labor (D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1915) pp.3-4; C.B. Thompson, The Theory and Practice of Scientific Management (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1917) pp.37-38.

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scholars is problematic. The organisations which developed partial applications of the

system without referring to Taylor or acknowledging him as the source cannot easily be

measured.11 As Drury commented in 1915:

not even the largest sounding of the estimates... would cover all the industry upon which scientific management has had some effect... We have noted... the large number of persons who have entered upon the work professionally or taken an active part in introducing changes into their own plants. Perhaps they do not completely understand scientific management, but they have read Taylor's books, or Emerson's, or caught their spirit, - and one or another of their principles is adopted.12

In addition, this quantitative approach avoids considering the effect of scientific

management on non-industrial fields. Accordingly, this paper does not give exclusive

attention to the 'nuts and bolts' of this new technology. As Layton points out, scientific

management represented complex combinations of process innovations which were too

difficult to transmit as a totality. Certainly direct borrowing occurred, but this was more in

the nature of what Kroeber refers to as 'stimulus' or 'idea diffusion,' according to which a

form of knowledge acts as a stimulus on others 'to do something similar, but in their own

distinctive way.'13

From this perspective, scientific management did not simply 'trickle down' to Australia

from the U.S.A. 14 It was transferred as a mass of ideas and orientations to work and

training. In this form it had a marked impact on the social dimensions of industrial

activity, even though it did not necessarily influence the labour processes of the majority

11 Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.50.

12 Horace Bookwalter Drury, Scientific Management: A History and Criticism, (Columbia University Press, New York, 1915, revised 1922) p.187.

13 A.L. Kroeber, 'Stimulus Diffusion,' American Anthropologist XLII (Jan-March, 1940) p.1, cited in Edwin Layton, 'The Diffusion of Scientific Management and Mass Production from the U.S. in the Twentieth Century,' Paper Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science, The XIVth Proceedings, no.4, 1974, p.377.

14 For discussions of diffusion see: Peter McPhee, 'Historians, Germs and Culture-Brokers: The Circulation of Ideas in the Nineteenth Countryside,' Australian Journal of French Studies vol.23, no.1, 1986, p.116, p.121; Ian Bickerton, 'The United States and Australia...,' p.45.

4

of industrial firms at this time. In short, this paper demonstrates how 'invention,

development, and diffusion go on simultaneously,' both within and between nations.15

It is worthwhile remembering that scientific management's evolution was closely related

to far-reaching developments which occurred in the U.S.A. during the late nineteenth

century, such as the scientific-technical revolution, the formation of trusts, the rise of

'systematic management,'16 the growth of bureaucratic structures and the unification of

training and research in the modern university.17 Additionally, the 'philosophical

principles' underpinning scientific management had significant ideological implications.18

Stark argues that it represented the articulation of an engineer's ideology. And Merkle

concludes that it was 'an ideology about management and for managers' which has had

profound effects upon 'the ideology of the modern state and its industrial and business

enterprises.'19 But Taylor's ideas on training and his involvement in educational reform

associations also indicate that this ideology had immense cultural ramifications.20

15 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of

Imperialism, 1850-1940 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1988) p.19, p.6. Also see, A.K. Cairncross, Factors in Economic Development (Allen and Unwin, London, 1962) pp.173-175.

16 Taylor's contemporaries stressed, however, that `there is a vast difference between systematized management and Scientific Management.' Henry P. Kendall, `Unsystematized, Systematized, and Scientific Management,' and Professor Charles W. Mixter, Discussion of Edwin F. Gay, 'Academic Efficiency,' in Dartmouth College Conferences, First Tuck School Conference - Addresses and Discussions at the Conference on Scientific management Held October 12, 13, 14, Nineteen Hundred and Eleven (Hive Publishing Company, Easton, republished 1972) pp.112-141, p.304.

17 Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.68, p.71, pp.279-282, p.286; Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990) pp.12-13; Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1977) p.136.

18 See generally: Craig R. Littler, 'Understanding Taylorism,' British Journal of Sociology vol.29, no.2, June 1978, pp.185-202.

19 David Stark, 'Class Struggle and the Transformation of the Labor Process,' Theory and Society vol.9, no.1, 1980, p.102; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.3, pp.86-87, p.93, p.97.

20 F.B. Copley, F. W. Taylor: Father of Scientific Management (originally published in 1923, reprinted by Augustus M. Kelly Publishers, New York, 1969) vol. 2: pp.260-280; David F. Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate

5

In what ways were these manifested? First, the integration of scientific management

with the educational reforms implemented in the U.S.A. during the first two decades of

the twentieth century encouraged the professionalisation of many occupations. Second,

the increased occupational division of labour fostered by the system gave professionals

an influential role in shaping the training given to workers.21 I contend that in both

regards Taylor's underlying aim was to initiate a new industrial culture in which

professional engineers would be more central and powerful; and relatedly, to inaugurate

a preliminary separation of planning and execution of work in the educational arena.

In fact, the connection that developed between scientific management and

professionalisation in the U.S.A. affected the degree to which Taylor's ideas spread to

various other industrialised and/or industrialising nations. McGuffie argues that Britain's

highly segmented class structure limited the influence of scientific management

because British universities 'remained bastions of privilege and monitors of class rank.'

Likewise, Merkle concludes that the absence of 'technocrats of uncertain social origins'

in Britain meant that 'there was no group whose greatest interest lay in the propagation

of scientific management as a profession.'22 By contrast, in France, Henri Le Chatelier

promoted a French variant of the system because he 'believed that Taylorism's

methodology was perfectly designed to... restore the professional engineering elite to its

Capitalism (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1977) pp.131-163, pp.184-189, pp.202-203. See further: Lucy Taksa, 'Technique or Cultural Ideology?' Journal of Industrial Relations vol.34, no.3, September 1992, pp.365-395.

21 Noble, ibid., pp.33-65, pp.167-256; Larson, The Rise of Professionalism..., pp.2-8, pp.136-158; Robert H. Weibe, The Search for Order 1877-1920 (Macmillan, London, 1967) pp.111-132; Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order (South End Press, Boston, 1984) pp.17-56; Desley Deacon, `Taylorism in the Home: The Medical Profession, the Infant Welfare Movement and the Deskilling of Women,' A. & N.Z.J.S. vol.21, no.2, July 1985, pp.161-173; Kerreen M. Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home: Modernizing the Australian Family 1880-1940 (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985).

22 Chris McGuffie, Working in Metal: Management and Labour in the Metal Industries of Europe and the U.S.A. 1890-1914 (Merlin Press, London, 1986) pp.110-112, p.104, p.151; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.228. For a comprehensive outline of the rise of the British engineering profession and its relationship to management see: Sydney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (Edward Arnold Ltd., London, 1965) pp.130-133, pp.138-159.

6

proper role within modern capitalist society.'23 The spread of scientific management in

different national contexts thus depended on two interrelated preconditions: first, a fluid

class structure that enabled the ascent of professionals; and second, an integrated

educational system which fed into the social relations of production and facilitated the

professionals' social mobility.

At the very time when Taylor's theories 'of job design and labour management' were

being diffused in industrial America, so too were they being positively received by certain

Australian professionals and manufacturers.24 Contrary to the conclusions drawn by

both Rowse and Cochrane, this paper maintains that Australian intellectuals did make a

'concerted' effort to generalise plans 'for the scientific reconstruction of the civil and

industrial administration' during the second decade of this century. This, despite the

absence in Australia of large scale manufacturing.25

Certainly, the structural limitations of Australia's political economy influenced the way

that local engineers and manufacturers reacted to scientific management. Additionally,

the system's Antipodean diffusion was mediated by British precedents. But it was not

entirely constrained by these factors. Australians were particularly receptive to American

approaches to a range of economic, political and social activities during this period

precisely because of the U.S.A.'s rising pre-eminence in the global economy.

Consequently, as in the U.S.A., professional members of the new middle class26 played

23 Drury, Scientific Management..., p.190; G.G. Humphreys, Taylorism in France, 1904-

1920: The Impact of Scientific Management on Factory Relations and Society (Garland, New York, 1986) pp.121-123, pp.41-55.

24 H.K. Hathaway (ed) 'Tributes to Frederick W. Taylor,' Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.37, 1915. See for example, R.F. Irvine, 'National Organisation and National Efficiency,' in R.F. Irvine, National Efficiency (Victorian Railways Printing Branch, Melbourne, 1915) pp.15-16; Bernard Muscio, Lectures on Industrial Psychology (Angus & Robertson Ltd., Sydney, 1917) p.13; Anon, 'Tungsten, the Key-Metal of To-day,' Australian Manufacturer (A.M.) 5/1/1918, p.21; J.G. Law, 'Industrial Efficiency,' Proceedings, Royal Society (R.S.) of N.S.W. vol.51, 1917, p.xlix, and J.G. Law, 'The New Industrialism,' A.M. 24/3/1917, pp.19-20.

25 Cochrane, `Company Time...,' p.54, pp.57-58, p.67; Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Kibble, Victoria, 1978) pp.62-63.

26 My understanding of this social formation and the value of the term - 'the new middle class' - is informed by the following: Larson, The Rise of Professionalism..., pp.137-

7

a pivotal role in spreading the gospel of scientific management in Australia and applying

it through the reform of industry-related training in ways that ensured them a prominent

position.

II

During the first twenty-odd years of its evolution, Taylor's system of management was

identified by a number of titles including the 'Piece-Rate System,' 'Task Management'

and 'the Taylor System,' although it was the latter which was most widely used before

1910. Nevertheless, Taylor argued that the system 'should be properly called by some

generic term which could be and ought to be acceptable to the whole country' on the

grounds that it had universal possibilities.27 The principles of scientific management

could, he wrote, 'be applied with equal force to all social activities'; to the management

of homes, philanthropic institutions, schools, universities and government

departments.28

After 1910 such universal claims were promoted by others. During the proceedings of

the Eastern Rate Case in that year, when the north-eastern railroad companies

appealed to the United States Interstate Commerce Commission for an increase in

freight charges, Louis D. Brandeis, the lawyer representing the eastern shipping

139, pp.142-145; Weibe, The Search for Order..., pp.44-75, pp.111-113; Stabile, Prophets of Order..., pp.17-28; Reiger, The Disenchantment..., p.3, pp.11-29; Desley Deacon, Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989) pp.1-17.

27 F.W. Taylor, 'Taylor's Testimony Before the Special House Committee' in F.W. Taylor, Scientific Management (Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York, 1947) pp.5-7, p.88. This was originally published as Report, Special Committee to Investigate the Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management (62nd Congress, Second Session, House Report 403, 1912).

28 F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1911) p.8; F.W. Taylor, 'Government Efficiency,' Bulletin of the Taylor Society December, 1916, pp.7-13. This argument was reiterated by Taylor's followers and it justified the use of Taylor's methods in government and educational administration. See Morris L. Cooke, Academic and Industrial Efficiency: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulletin no.5, 1910; Morris L. Cooke, 'The Influence of Scientific Management Upon Government - Federal, State and Municipal,' Bulletin of the Taylor Society vol.9, no.1, 1924, pp.31-38; Copley, F. W. Taylor..., vol.1: p.358, vol.2: p.372-3; Drury, Scientific Management..., p.205, p.209.

8

concerns, sought 'expert guidance' from members of Taylor's immediate circle of

followers. Together, these men devised the title 'scientific management' as the most

appropriate 'descriptive handle to use in the case'; it supported Brandeis's argument that

no increases would be needed if the railroads overcame their inefficiency. The evidence

presented by expert witnesses, such as Taylor and Harrington Emerson,29 caused a

sensation that, according to Merkle, transformed Taylorism 'from an obscure obsession

of certain middle-class engineers to an amazing and highly publicized nostrum for the

evils of society.'30 The notion of science, so clearly embedded in this new title, not only

invested the system 'with an aura of impartiality,' but also allowed progressive industrial

managers, politicians and social scientists to promote the system in the very universal

terms espoused by Taylor.31 On this basis he and his apostles engaged in a publicity

campaign that succeeded in sparking wider interest among engineers, managers and

even educators, many of whom become ardent publicists of his brand of business

management.32 The evidence presented during the Eastern Rate Case captured the

imagination of significant members of the American middle class. Additionally, the

evangelical fervour with which scientific managers promoted their 'harmony of interests'

gospel and its practical 'scientific' manifestations, through their consultancies and

29 After being engaged as a consulting management engineer to reorganise the Atchison

and Topeka workshops of the Santa Fe Railroad, Emerson became Taylor's chief rival. Inadvertently, Emerson's evidence during the Eastern Rate Case helped to advertise scientific management. His methods for 'integrating shop procedures' were 'analogous' to those of Taylor. Although less precise, they included time studies, bonus payments, standard cost accounting and planned maintenance. Drury, ibid. pp.138-149; L. Urwick, The Golden Book of Management: A Historical Record of the Life and Work of Seventy Pioneers (Newman, Neame Ltd., London, 1956) pp.138-142, p.53. See Harrington Emerson, The Twelve Principles of Efficiency (The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1913).

30 Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol.1: pp.6-7, (vol.2) p.320, p.366; Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962) pp.19-23; Milton Nadworny, Scientific Management and the Unions 1900-1932: A Historical Analysis (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955) pp.34-35; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.58.

31 John Zerzan, 'Taylorism and Unionism: The Origins of Partnership,' Telos no.60, Summer 1984, p.141.

32 Drury, Scientific Management..., pp.122-147, pp.149-151; Hoxie, Scientific Management..., p.4, p.7; C.B. Thompson, The Theory and Practice..., pp.49-62.

9

popular literature, simply reinforced the efficiency craze which swept the U.S.A. during

this period.33

The growing concern for efficiency was integrally related to the restructuring of capital

which occurred in America between 1890 and 1920. The expansion in the scale of

enterprise as well as the revolution in transport and communications technologies

disrupted existing industrial and social relations. The employment of increasing numbers

of workers in the rapidly growing corporate enterprises eliminated the personal contact

between employers/sub-contractors and workers that had previously characterized the

function of authority in the workplace.34 The social problems that accompanied these

changes forced middle class reformers to consider a wide range of solutions.

Against this background, scientific management became renowned because it offered to

adapt industrial practices to the larger scale of manufacturing; its methods increased the

degree of co-ordination and control over the production process in ways that established

new forms of contact between management and labour. Only Taylor's synthesis

simultaneously focussed on technical and social problems. Hence, many of Taylor's

contemporaries became especially interested in using his ideas to bridge the growing

gulf between capital and labour - a detachment between employers and their workers

which was evident in both America and Australia.35

33 Hoxie, ibid. p.8; Callahan, Education and the Cult..., p.42; Merkle, Management and

Ideology..., p.11; Stabile, Prophets of Order..., p.61; Zerzan, 'Taylorism and Unionism...,' p.141.

34 Drury, Scientific Management..., p.212; Noble, America By Design..., pp.54-55; Nelson, Managers and Workers..., pp.48-49; Edwards, Contested Terrain..., p.19, p.24, pp.27-30; p.37, pp.41-45, pp.52-7; W.J. Heisler, 'Work Alienation, 1900-1975,' in W.J. Heisler & John W. Houck (eds) A Matter of Dignity: Inquiries into the Humanization of Work (University of Notre Dame Press, London, 1977) p.66; David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979) p.91, p.113; Basil M. Manly, Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations 1914-1915 (Government Printing Office, Washington, 1916) pp.26-27.

35 Edwards, ibid., p. 19, pp.47-49; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.10, p.98, p.244; John Rickard, Class and Politics: New South Wales, Victoria and the Early Commonwealth, 1890-1910 (A.N.U. Press, Canberra, 1976) pp.294-295. Also refer to comments made by J.F. Holloway in the discussion following F.W. Taylor, 'A Piece-Rate System, Being A Step Toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem,' Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.16, June 1895, p.898.

10

Taylor's system was directed toward ameliorating such social conflict. As Taylor put it:

Scientific Management.... has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the two [employers and employees] are one and the same...and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants - high wages - and the employer what he wants - a low labor cost - for his manufactures.36

Yet technically scientific management was not entirely new. It codified and restated a

range of planning, co-ordination and control practices which had been evolving since the

inception of the industrial revolution.37 Taylor, in fact, acknowledged that the originality of

his approach was essentially based on 'a certain combination of elements which have

not existed in the past.'38 Some therefore conclude that Taylor's work only 'made a new

synthesis out of old practises.' If this is the case, then the real novelty of Taylor's

approach can be identified in his insistence on combining scientific methodology with

'the unifying force of a clear-cut philosophy.'39 Taylor's point that 'one best way' could be

discovered for the performance of any task, given sufficient investigation, was not only a

central pivot of his system, it also became an important slogan which was disseminated

far beyond America's shores.40 As Taylor told those who attended a conference on

36 Taylor, The Principles..., p.10.

37 British industrialists and commentators were the most vociferous in pointing out that many features of scientific management had been predated by British developments. They, together with other writers, have therefore claimed that the work conducted in England by Charles Babbage during the 1820s and 1830s provided the foundation for Taylor's ideas. See, Edward Cadbury, 'Some Principles of Industrial Organisation, The Case For and Against Scientific Management,' Sociological Review vol.7, no.2, April 1914, pp.99-117; C.G. Renold, 'Comment on Cadbury's Paper,' Sociological Review vol.7, no.2, April 1914, p.122; L. Urwick, The Making of Scientific Management Vol.2 (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London, 1957) p.7.

38 Taylor, The Principles..., pp.139-140.

39 Urwick, The Making..., pp.8-9, p.217; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.99; Taylor himself recognised that scientific management did not involve 'the discovery of new or startling facts.' But this posed no real problem for his contemporaries. As James M. Dodge, one of Taylor's followers, commented, 'we were impressed that Mr. Taylor in formulating his system had taken good points of management from various sources and had skilfully combined them in a harmonized whole.' Taylor, The Principles..., pp.139-40; James M. Dodge, 'A History of the Introduction of a System of Shop Management,' Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.27, 1905-1906, p.723.

40 F.W. Taylor, 'Shop Management,' in Taylor, Scientific Management..., p.21, p.101, p.177 [first published in 1903 in Trans., A.S.M.E.]; Taylor, The Principles..., p.25,

11

scientific management in 1911, scientific mangers usually approached workers by

saying:

We do not know the best; we are sure that within two or three years a better method will be developed than we know of; but what we know is the result of a long series of experiments... these standards that lie before you are the results of these studies... the moment any man sees an improved standard... come to us with it; your suggestion will not only be welcome but we will join you in making a carefully tried experiment... If that experiment shows that your method is better... everyone of us will adopt that method until somebody gets a better one.41

E.E. Hunt, the Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce and a member of the American

Committee on the Elimination of Waste in Industry remarked some time later: 'scientific

management is a dynamic thing; its principles are the principles of growth and

change.'42 Taylor's contemporaries evidently understood that his advocated 'one best

way' of doing things was a mutable standard that required constant refinement through

experimentation. His insistence on the documentation of experiments and their results

was 0similarly novel. As Hollis Godfrey remarked in 1924, he had seen 'nothing more

significant than the constant advance in selective written records on industrial matters.'

Before Taylor emphasised the need to record industrial processes, he added, written

records had not been used as guides for the future.43

The philosophy of scientific management and its methods were essentially linked by the

assumption that traditional ways of doing things, as well as ways of thinking about the

world, had to be discarded. Decades later Urwick stressed that basically scientific

management meant 'thinking scientifically instead of traditionally or customarily about

p.106, p.122; Taylor, 'Taylor's Testimony...,' p.62, pp.104-105, p.143, p.196, p.199. See for example: A.M. 8/9/1917, p.23.

41 Frederick W. Taylor, 'The Principles of Scientific Management,' in Dartmouth College Conferences, Address and Discussions at the Conference on Scientific Management..., p.54.

42 Edward Eyre Hunt, Scientific Management Since Taylor (originally published in 1924; republished by Hive Publishing Co., Easton, 1972) p.xii.

43 Godfrey was a member of the National Council of Defence during World War One and subsequently he became the President of the Engineering-Economic Foundation located in Boston. Cooke, 'The Influence of Scientific Management...,' p.35.

12

the processes involved in the control of social groups who co-operate in production and

distribution.'44

How did Taylor's philosophy reflect this modern way of thinking? It defined four

principles which advocated that management should assume new duties. They were:

1. the gathering together of the traditional, 'rule-of-thumb' knowledge, previously possessed entirely by craft workers, and developing a 'true science' by 'classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae.'

2. scientific selection of workers;

3. scientific education and development of workers;

4. the promotion of intimate friendly cooperation between the management and labour.45

Taken together with the methods of scientific management, these principles introduced

a number of fundamental changes to the organisation of production. Time and motion

studies and the standardisation of methods and tools resulted in a greater division of

labour than had previously existed.46 And the creation of a planning department, where

experts co-ordinated information gleaned from the studies before passing it on to the

workers in the form of written instructions, allowed the separation of planning and

execution. In turn, the numbers, importance and power of supervisory, engineering and

clerical staff were strengthened. The planning department operated like Bentham's

Panopticon; it was a laboratory which 'could be used as a machine to carry out

experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals.'47

44 C.B. Thompson, The Theory and Practice..., p.244; L. Urwick & E.F.L. Brech, The

Making of Scientific Management Vol.1 (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd., London,1957) p.9.

45 Taylor, The Principles..., p.36, pp.128-30; Taylor, 'Taylor's Testimony...,' pp.40-45.

46 Taylor, ibid., The Principles..., pp.77- 80, p.117; Taylor, 'Shop Management...,' pp.58-60. Drury suggested that scientific management introduced 'a greater differentiation than ever before between the various employees' so that there was no longer 'two large groups of persons, one at the top and the other at the bottom.' Drury, Scientific Management..., p.221.

47 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Penguin, London, 1987) p.203, p.205.

13

From this angle, Taylor's combination of scientific and bureaucratic methods with an

ideology which promoted social harmony and consensus between capital and labour

made scientific management much more than the sum of all its component parts. Its

methods were simultaneously directed toward increasing production and consumption

and implementing social change.48

III

Taylor's dream of an ordered, individualized, sanitised, hierarchically differentiated and

essentially rational industrial world focussed the trajectory of his system not only on the

culture of work but also that of training. Those members of the new middle class who

accepted and promoted scientific management did so precisely because of their

empathy for Taylor's vision; it fitted neatly with their own general aims.49 Middle class

reformers therefore fixed their attention on two related spheres. The first centred on the

most pivotal 'site' for the internalisation of power relations - the workplace.50 Here,

scientific management was used to institutionalise new forms of communication

between managers and workers. In this respect, it advocated the introduction of a formal

system of information exchange based on written instructions.

Written instructions enhanced the disciplinary power of the additional numbers of

technical experts required by the system, as well as their capacity for surveillance. At the

same time, these instructions provided an additional method of domination through their

ability to constitute: 'the individual as a describable, analysable object... under the gaze

48 Taylor, The Principles..., p.136, p.139, p.142. Also see: Craig R. Littler,

'Understanding Taylorism...,' p.186; Mike Davis, 'The Stop Watch and The Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World,' Radical America vol.9, no.1, Jan/Feb. 1975, pp.69-95; Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1974) p.281.

49 Merkle, Management and Ideology..., p.51, p.81.

50 Foucault, Discipline and Punish... pp.143-44, p.200-209; Kim Humphrey, 'The Great Divide: Some Notes on Australian Social History and the Post-Structuralist Debate,' Melbourne Historical Journal vol.18, 1987, pp.59-61, p.63.

14

of a permanent corpus of knowledge.' Taylor's arrangements sought to transform the

individual worker from 'a subject in communication' to an 'object of information'.51

The second field targeted for 'reform' by scientific managers and their progressive

supporters centred on industry-related training, at both technical and professional levels.

Taylor's advocacy of new training methods was based on an attempt to communicate

and generalise the ideals and practices of scientific management. The reorganisation of

education effectively provided scope for increased surveillance and discipline similar to

that exercised in the workshop. Taylor appears to have implicitly recognised that the

'disciplinary' nature of educational institutions differentiated individuals from each other

in a hierarchical manner, homogenised them, and provided the means for punishing or

excluding those who were unwilling or unable to conform.52

Raymond Williams points out that what is conceived of as 'education' is 'in fact a

particular selection, a particular set of emphases and omissions.' Williams and Harvey J.

Graff both argue that the industrial training reforms introduced in most industrialising

countries, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not simply

designed to extend literacy and the range of technical skill. More significantly, they

sought to inculcate a 'pattern of culture' and of power relations through the spread of

particular values, morals and discipline concerning group loyalty, authority, justice, and

lifestyle.53 Dore therefore concludes that the promotion of literacy 'constitutes a training

in being trained'; it effectively increases the likelihood of a positive response to further

training.54

51 Foucault, ibid., pp.174-175, pp.190-191, p.200. For evidence of this shift refer to Lucy

Taksa, 'All A Matter of Timing: The Diffusion of Scientific Management in New South Wales Prior to 1921.' (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of NSW, 1994) Chapter Nine.

52 Foucault, ibid., pp.183-184.

53 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Penguin, London, 1961) pp.145-146; Harvey J. Graff, 'Literacy, jobs and industrialization,' in Harvey J. Graff (ed) Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981) pp.258-259.

54 R.P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Routledge, Kegan Paul, London, 1967) p.292.

15

Essentially designed for precisely such ends, Taylor's advocated training methods

revolved around the combination of record-keeping, written instructions, payment

incentives and 'functional foremanship'. Literary artefacts and bureaucratic techniques

were pivotal features of scientific management. They included accounting and wage

records, time cards, lists of mnemonic symbols for the identification of tools and

manufactured articles, drawings, timetables, reports, charts and order of work slips.

Drury commented that adequate records of past achievements enabled 'closer touch'

with workers because records provided information on each individual's performance,

punctuality, attendance, integrity, rapidity, skill, accuracy and, as Taylor put it, each

worker's 'attitude towards his employers and fellow-workmen.'55

Under scientific management the use of written instruction and return cards was

intended to provide the chief means for instructing both foremen and workers in all the

particulars of their work. Included in such cards were all accounting details, descriptions

of work procedures and specific tools to be used, the exact time allowance for each

element of the work and the particular pay rate for the job.56 In addition, their form

differed depending on the nature of the instructions to be conveyed. Taylor wrote that in

some cases the card 'should consist of a pencil memorandum on a small piece of

paper... while in others it will be in the form of several pages of typewritten paper.'57

Taylor argued that written instructions provided an important tool for altering the

relationship between workers and their supervisors. The latter became 'teachers'

55 Taylor, 'Shop Management...,' pp.115-6; Taylor, The Principles..., p.23, pp.36-

38,p.119; Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol.2: p.137; Drury, Scientific Management..., p.202, p.222; Taylor, 'A Piece-Rate System...,' p.857, p.862. Other efficiency experts, such as Harrington Emerson and H.L. Gantt, also laid great emphasis on record keeping systems in their own publications. See for example, H.L. Gantt, Work, Wages and Profits (The Engineering Magazine Co., New York, 1919) Chapter 12, and Emerson, The Twelve Principles..., Chapter 8.

56 Taylor, The Principles..., p.68. These were precisely the details that were included in the Card System adopted by the N.S.W. Railways and Tramways Department in July 1917; a version of Taylor's system that sparked the NSW General Strike in August of that year. Refer to Taksa, 'All A Matter of Timing...,' Chapter Nine.

57 Taylor, The Principles..., pp.68-69; Taylor, 'Taylor's Testimony...,' pp.58-59; Frank B. Gilbreth, The Primer of Scientific Management (Hive Publishing Company, Easton, 1973; originally published, 1914) p.17.

16

responsible for helping workers perform their duties according to the details outlined on

the cards.58 But because workers resisted this source of managerial control, Taylor also

devised a number of supplementary techniques to ensure compliance in the pursuit of

industrial harmony.59 First, he promoted the adoption of rigid standards because he

believed this would force workers to obey directions. Second, he linked the payment of

additional wages to the exact performance of written instructions. For example, at the

Bethlehem Steel Works, Taylor adopted Gantt's bonus pay scheme which offered a

daily bonus of 50 cents to every worker who accomplished the task set out on

instruction cards.60

Taylor also advocated the division of supervisory functions among numerous specialist

foremen, an innovation he entitled 'functional foremanship.'61 The training implications of

this aspect of his system were recognised by his contemporaries. Nicholas Thiel Ficker

pointed out in an Australian manufacturer's journal that when 'Frederick W. Taylor

inaugurated a new epoch "of functional effort",' he demonstrated the 'dearth of properly

trained' people and 'a corresponding necessity for some systematic scheme of industrial

education along scientific lines to fit men (my emphasis) for positions of industrial

58 Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol. 1: p.323, p.328; C.B. Thompson, The Theory and

Practice..., p.135; Taylor, 'Taylor's Testimony...,' p.45, p.50, pp.58-59.

59 Taylor, The Principles..., p.123. Taylor wrote: 'Human nature is such, however, that many of the workmen, if left to themselves, would pay but little attention to their written instructions.' Copley, ibid. p.272.

60 Taylor, 'Shop Management...,' p.78, p.101, p.108, p.128; Copley, ibid., vol. 1: p.261, vol.2: p.128; Gantt, Work, Wages and Profits..., p.107, pp.254-5. Also see: Gilbreth, The Primer ..., p.23.

61 'Functional foremanship' fragmented the traditional foreman's job into eight parts in order to enable more direct supervision of workers and to systematize the evaluation of work. Functional foremanship was thus divided as follows: 1. gang bosses 2. speed bosses 3. inspectors 4. repair bosses 5. order of work and route clerks 6. instruction card clerks 7. time and cost clerks 8. shop disciplinarian. Taylor, 'Shop Management...,' pp.100-106.

17

leadership.'62 In effect, functional foremanship represented a direct attack on traditional

modes of co-operative training among workers.63

Taylor's ideas on written instructions and training were taken up and widely

disseminated by followers, such as H.L. Gantt, F.B. Gilbreth, M.L. Cooke, C.B.

Thompson and F.A. Parkhurst, amongst others.64 It was through them that Taylor's

'gospel' was spread internationally.65 Cooke, in fact, broadened the scope of scientific

management by applying its principles and adapting its methods to suit universities in a

study he conducted on academic efficiency, under the auspices of the Carnegie

Foundation.66 Gantt, on the other hand, did the most to extend Taylor's ideas on

vocational education.

62 A.M. 10/2/1917, p.23.

63 Taylor, 'Shop Management...,' pp.99-100, p.106; Taylor, The Principles..., p.118; Montgomery, Workers' Control..., pp.14-15. See Taksa, Scientific Management: Technique or Cultural Ideology...,' for a detailed discussion of this aspect of functional foremanship and John Shields, 'Craftsmen in the Making: The Memory and Meaning of Apprenticeship in Sydney between the Great War and the Great Depression,' in John Shields (ed) All Our Labours: Oral Histories of Working Life in Twentieth Century Sydney (NSW University Press, Kensington, 1992) pp.86-122, for an example of traditional, co-operative training.

64 Drury, Scientific Management..., p.153.

65 For example: C.B. Thompson, 'Distributing a Foreman's Duties,' A.M. 21/10/1916, pp.10-12; C.B. Thompson, 'The Stop Watch as Inventor,' A.M. 13/1/1917, pp.10-12; H.L. Gantt, 'Manager and Workmen' A.M. 20/1/1917, pp.21-22; C.B. Thompson, 'How to Pay for Work,' A.M. 3/2/1917, pp.19-20; William Kent, 'A New Method of Determining Factory Costs,' A.M. 10/3/1917, pp.20-22. In his evidence before the Curlewis Royal Commission, the General Secretary of the Amalgamated Railway and Tramway Service Association also referred to Frederick A. Parkhurst's Applied Methods of Scientific Management (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1912). See Mr. Justice Curlewis, Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Effects of the Workings of the System known as the Job and Time Cards System introduced into the Tramways and Railways Workshops of the Railways Commissioners, N.S.W. Parliamentary Papers (P.P.), 1918, vol.6, p.37.

66 Cooke, Academic and Industrial Efficiency.... This Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Bulletin no.5, 1910) was received by the Royal Society of N.S.W. See Proc., Royal Society of New South Wales (R.S. of N.S.W.) vol.44, 1910, p.xxiii.

18

Traditional training undertaken 'in the atmosphere of the union' promoted and

perpetuated hostility to employers instead of co-operation, thought Gantt. Accordingly,

he wrote: 'To avert this hostility we must begin by giving workmen a different training';

'the policy of the future,' he stressed, 'will be to teach and lead, to the advantage of all

concerned.'67 From his perspective, the instruction card method was 'a system of

education with prizes for those who learn.'68 In his own task and bonus system, much

like Taylor's 'differential' and Gilbreth's '3-rate' pay schemes, rewards were given to

those workers who co-operated with the management in exactly following instructions.

And although Gantt thought that the methods associated with scientific management

were 'simply the means to an end,' he argued that they could 'never be utilized properly

until the rank and file have been trained to operate them.'69 'To my mind,' he wrote, 'the

training of workmen... is one of the most important functions of the management,' and

although slow and expensive 'it is the only method which holds out any hope of

producing even a partial solution of our present industrial problems.' He concluded:

If these methods were introduced extensively, it is without question that the habit of the shop would influence that of the community, and there would be a general increase in efficiency.70

Gantt's view echoed that of Taylor's.

IV

The demand for management to take on the training of workers appeared in all of

Taylor's major publications. It illustrated an astute judgement of his contemporaries'

anxieties about the influx of unskilled immigrants and the alleged obsolescence of the

traditional apprenticeship system. The tendency for both developments to reinforce the

67 Gantt, Work, Wages and Profit..., pp.111-112.

68 Gantt, ibid. p.256.

69 Ibid. p.8; and see p.19, pp.25-30, pp.67-73, pp.106-109, pp.154-155, pp.161-162, pp.171-203, p.238, pp.270-285, p.289.

70 Ibid. p.148, pp.220-21.

19

prevailing social and industrial dislocation greatly perturbed America's social

reformers.71

Taylor and his colleagues responded by proclaiming that scientific management

constitued a 'practical system of vocational guidance and training,' an idea which

impressed Professor Hoxie, who commented that if scientific management could 'show

the way through practical vocational adaption... to the elimination or alleviation of’ evils,

such as 'discontent, degeneracy, crime, inefficiency and poverty,' then it deserved 'the

support of all classes whatever be its limitations and shortcomings.' So, even though his

own investigation revealed the sweeping claims of scientific managers to be

unsubstantiated, Hoxie praised the attention given to instruction and training in scientific

management shops because it was generally greater than in similar 'modern

establishments.'72

The social and political problems that characterised the U.S.A.'s progressive era created

a general receptivity to the idea of reforming a wide range of activities according to the

principles of scientific management. These principles appealed to middle class

professionals because, according to Nelson, they ratified 'an aristocracy based on

technical knowledge, formal education, and organizational skills rather than inherited

wealth, social and family ties, or business acumen.'73 Taylor's social background and

training located him squarely in the milieu of America's professional middle class and led

to his involvement in a plethora of formal and informal occupational and reform-oriented

associations. He participated in the political mobilisation represented by progressivism,

using a variety of media outlets to establish a nexus between his ideas and practices

and those espoused by progressive reformers.74 Of particular importance, in this regard,

71 Nelson, Managers and Workers..., p.95; David Brody, Workers in Industrial America:

Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (Oxford University Press, New York, 1980) pp.14-19; Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976) p.15, p.19, p.21-27.

72 Hoxie, Scientific Management and Labor..., p.13, pp.34-37.

73 Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor..., p.ix.

74 Taylor, The Principles..., pp.5-7; Louis D. Brandeis, 'Forward' in Gilbreth, The Primer ... pp.vii-viii; Merkle, Management and Ideology..., pp.243-244; Samuel Haber,

20

was the mutual esteem that was publically expressed by Taylor and Theodore

Roosevelt for each other's interests in national efficiency. To legitimate his system's

focus on the reduction of human effort, Taylor invoked President Roosevelt's appeal for

conservation and the elimination of waste in the introduction to his Principles of Scientific

Management. Roosevelt, on the other hand, remarked that: 'Scientific management is

the application of the conservation principle to production.'75 Yet Taylor's links with

progressivism built on his purposeful involvement with other professionals concerned

about the reform of engineering and industrial education. In 1906, during his term as

President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (A.S.M.E.), Taylor's links

with the field of education and academics grew substantially when he became vocal on

the subject of educational reform. During his dedication of a new million dollar

engineering building at the University of Pennsylvania, an event which saw him receive

an honorary doctorate, Taylor attacked existing educational methods and presented

proposals for the reform of industrial and professional education.76

Subsequently printed as a pamphlet, this address attracted extensive attention in

academic circles. In November 1907, Professor Ira N. Hollis from Harvard University's

Division of Engineering wrote to Taylor:

Your ideas on the subject of education seem to me well worth spreading, and I am looking for missionaries to the cause here at Harvard. Would you be willing to serve on the Visiting Committee for Engineering, at this university?

Taylor accepted this invitation and the following year he reiterated his views to the

Harvard Engineering Society, as well as in a letter he wrote to Dr Alexander C.

Humphries, President of the Stevens Institute, where some of the professors had

Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1964) p.29.

75 Taylor, The Principles..., p.5; Theodore Roosevelt, cited in Gilbreth, ibid., p.2.

76 The oration was entitled: 'A Comparison of University and Industrial Methods and

Discipline; Being a Protest against the Excesses of the Elective System and Loose

University Discipline, and a Plea for Bringing Students Early into Close Contact with

Men Working for Their Living.'

21

become his active followers.77 Support of this nature was forthcoming because scientific

management idolised 'experts' and gave them a tool for monopolising scientific

knowledge. The system's influential supporters, such as the President of the Carnegie

Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Henry S. Pritchett ensured that Taylor's

ideas were diffused beyond the factory; they were embodied in the 'business training'

offered to American engineers by both technical schools and universities.78

Taylor's interest in reforming industrial education built on the middle class engineers'

involvement in adapting engineering education to meet the needs of their new role as

inventors and professional regulators of modern technology. To this end, engineering

educators had formed the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education (S.P.E.E.)

in 1894, an organisation in which Taylor became an active participant. In co-operating

with the nation's trade associations, various engineering societies and the National

Association of Corporate Schools (N.A.C.S.), the 'corporate reformers' within S.P.E.E.

worked to bring college and apprentice training into line with industrial requirements.79

Papers presented before the A.S.M.E. during 1907 and 1908 thus focussed increasing

attention on 'Industrial Education,' and the discussions which followed provided a forum

in which Taylor and his supporters could exchange views with representatives of some

of America's leading corporations. Scientific management's emphasis on training

through 'instruction cards' in order to specifically outline the task to be done, how it was

to be done and the time allowed to do it, dovetailed nicely with the corporations' growing

interest in supplementing the 'instruction' of 'green' apprentices with formal classes held

during working hours.80

Even after the expiry of his term as A.S.M.E. President, Taylor continued to extend his

personal links with educational reform associations. When the National Society for the

77 Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol.2: p.260, pp.265-266, p.269.

78 Copley, ibid., pp.267-9.

79 Noble, America By Design..., pp.44-5, pp.203-4; See Trans., A.S.M.E., vol.29, 1907, pp.475-77, pp.483-485, pp.488-9; Discussion, pp.490-491.

80 Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.29, 1907, pp.1121-1143; vol.30, 1908, pp.1037-1048, p.1061.

22

Promotion of Industrial Education (N.S.P.I.E.) was formed in 1906-1907, he joined its

first board of managers, together with other founding members, such as Charles A.

Coffin (President of General Electric), C.R. Dooley (Westinghouse) and Dugold Jackson

(Massachussetts Institute of Technology). Additionally, Theodore Roosevelt's public

approval of this new body reinforced Taylor's links with progressivism.81

V

The belief that scientific management was applicable to non-industrial activities spread

because of its emphasis on the provision of specialised training not covered by

traditional apprenticeship schemes. It offered a way of bridging the gap between the

university or technical college and the factory floor. Both obliquely and overtly scientific

management infused industrial training. First, some of the charter members of N.A.C.S.

had earlier been reorganised by Taylor's earnest followers, Gantt and Barth.82 Second,

the Dean of the College of Engineering at Cincinnati University, Herman Schneider, was

instrumental in consciously spreading Taylor's principles of scientific selection and

scientific education. His Cincinnati Plan inaugurated a co-operative course in 1906

through which students alternated between the classroom and the factory. The Plan

spread to 75 companies which had adopted the course by 1919. It was also replicated

by the University of Pittsburg. Similar arrangements were then also made by other

universities and institutes, notably the Municipal University of Akron, Case in Cleveland,

Drexel in Philadelphia, Union in Schenectady, Marquette in Milwaukie, Harvard in

Cambridge, and New York University in New York City.83 As McGuffie points out, the

new industrial training which accompanied the 'displacement of the old contracting petite

81 Bernice M. Fisher, Industrial Education: American Ideals and Institutions (University of

Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1967) pp.130-131.

82 At different times Gantt was hired by the American Locomotive Company, the Westinghouse Electric Company and the Remington Typewriter Company, while Barth reorganised the Yale and Towne manufacturing Company, whose President Henry R. Towne was a significant advocate of scientific management. Drury, Scientific Management..., pp.124-125, p.129, p.150.

83 Noble, America By Design..., p.52, pp.182-190, pp.196-7.

23

bourgeoisie by a new petite bourgeoisie' effectively translated 'the ideology of

professional management... into practice.'84

Scientific management's educational influence soon extended beyond industrial training.

At the height of its popularity, the administration of public education was being attacked

by muckraking journalists and corporate leaders for mismanagement and inefficiency. At

the same time, an increasing demand for industrial training and an accompanying

campaign to extend vocational education to public schools, exacerbated the pressure on

American educators and school administrators to become more concerned about

efficiency.85

The demand for educational reform climaxed in 1910, at the very time when American

education was being strained by the arrival of large numbers of new immigrants, as well

as by the effect of new child labour and compulsory school attendance laws. The

growing potency of business values, coupled with a cost-conscious reform-minded

public, helped spread Taylor's 'gospel'. Courses on his principles were soon launched at

various educational institutions. In 1910 scientific management began to be taught

formally at both the Harvard Business School and at the Amos Tuck School at

Dartmouth. Soon, too, these principles were applied to virtually all aspects of secondary

schooling.86

As school administrators enthusiastically embraced scientific management numerous

articles, books and reports on economy, efficiency and standardisation in education

were published. In addition, the main topic of discussion during the 1913 convention of

the Department of Superintendence was 'Improving School Systems by Scientific

Management.'87 Educational methods were rapidly influenced by these developments.

In 1911 the Efficiency Committee of the National Education Association (N.E.A.)

84 McGuffie, Working in Metal..., p.79, p.86.

85 Callahan, Education and the Cult..., pp.1-7, p.9, p.11, pp.14-15, pp.42-64.

86 Callahan, ibid., pp.14-18, p.22; Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol. 2: p.277.

87 Two notable examples of the literature produced were 'Scientific Management and High School Efficiency' by Harrington Emerson, published in 1912 and Scientific Management in Education by J.M. Rice, published in 1914.

24

recommended that teachers use 'printed outlines, seating plans, recitation cards,

attendance sheets and other "labor saving devices".' Increasingly, pupils were

represented as the raw material of the education business and the school was likened to

a factory. Educational administrators thus identified those aspects of education which

could be measured for efficiency. They began to refer to standards and instructions,

records, selection, training and rating of both pupil and teacher efficiency, 'pupil cost,'

'investment per pupil' and 'school plant.' In this way Taylor's record keeping and

accounting techniques pervaded the field of education so that notions of investment,

waste and the standard unit costs of the 'student hour' formed the criteria for measuring

the relative value of different subjects, like maths, English or Latin.

These methods were then spread through the Gary Plan which was adopted in the

schools of Gary, Indiana. In 1912, in an article on 'The Elimination of Waste in

Education,' John Franklin Bobbitt argued that the Plan's value was based on its adoption

of scientific management principles.88 Although the Gary Plan was not adopted

extensively prior to 1914, after that year it spread quickly so that by 1925 it had been

implemented in 632 schools in 126 cities.89

VI

Scientific management spread at a much slower rate in Australia than in the U.S.A.

primarily because of the former's subordinate position in the international division of

labour. At the turn of the century manufacturing only made up 12 percent. of Australia's

gross domestic product.90 Despite this structural difference between the two nations,

88 This was evident by the way the Plan (i) promoted the continuous use of education

plant through the scheduling of continuous classroom use; (ii) reduced the number of workers to a minimum through the advent of specialised teachers; (iii) eliminated waste due to ill-health by providing additional outdoor recreational activity; and (iv) developed 'the raw material into that finished product for which it is best adapted' as this entailed altering each student's programme to fit his/her abilities.

89 Callahan, Education and the Cult..., p.23, p.16, pp.52-58, p.62, p.69, p.85, p.88, p.154, pp.161-162; pp.128-134.

90 E.A. Boehm, Twentieth Century Economic Development in Australia (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1979) p.8.

25

however, scientific management did affect Australian ideas and practices after about

1912.

Socio-economic developments in N.S.W. after 1870 were comparable to, albeit

quantitatively different from, those that occurred in the U.S.A. in roughly the same

period. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, as a result of economic

restructuring, labour and capital became increasingly polarised, a new middle class

began to emerge, manufacturing became more significant and the state assumed a

more interventionist role in Australia.91 In dealing with the resulting social and industrial

problems, Antipodean professionals began to consider the applicability of American

models to a wide range of activities and enterprises. It was on this basis that scientific

management pervaded Australian ideas and practices.92 The problem of industrial

training that had been vexing the minds of American industrialists and educators also

worried intellectuals and manufacturers in Australia. From the late 1880s entrepreneurial

mechanical engineers in N.S.W. had begun to allege that the apprenticeship system

was extinct. As Shields points out, this demise was, in fact, slow in arriving.93 But the

similarity of such anxieties with their American counterparts, as much as their concern

for the relationship between labour supply, vocational training and national efficiency,

91 See generally: Bartlett, 1776-1976...,; Churchward, Australia & America...,; Richard

White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1981); Deacon, Managing Gender...; Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home...; R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving, Class Structure In Australian History (Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1980) pp.21-22; Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelwright, No Paradise For Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia, 1788-1914 (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988).

92 Irvine, National Efficiency..., generally; Correspondence between George Beeby and Frederick W. Taylor, 1912 and Correspondence between Charles G. Heydon and Birge Harrison and Frederick W. Taylor, 1914 in Frederick W. Taylor Collection, Samuel C. Williams Library, Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey; Correspondence, H.B. Higgins to Felix Frankfurter, 1914 and 1915 in Higgins Collection MS.2525, Australian National Library. And see further: Taksa, 'All a Matter of Timing...,' Chapters Six and Seven.

93 The continuing belief in its decline was evident in A.B. Piddington's Royal Commission Report on the shortage of labour in 1912, as well as in a N.S.W. Board of Trade Report in 1920. John Shields, 'Skill Reclaimed: Craft Work, Craft Unions and the Survival of Apprenticeship in New South Wales 1860 to 1914' (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1990) pp.2-3.

26

made middle class Australians receptive to American reforms in this particular arena.94

Indeed, some publicised the link between scientific management and American

educational models.95

The findings of J.W. Turner and G.H. Knibbs, who travelled to the U.S.A. in 1902 to

inquire into instruction methods for the Royal Commission on Primary, Secondary,

Technical and other Branches of Education, laid the basis for a positive reception to

American reforms. Turner commented in the Report, produced in 1905, that American

models were far superior to British ones. He thought that the former were more

appropriate for Australia since both countries belonged to the New World.96 Peter Board,

the N.S.W. Under-Secretary and Director of Education from 1904, reiterated Turner's

sentiments in 1909 when reporting on his observations of the way secondary education

was organised in the U.S.A.97

As early as 1903, following a trip to Europe, Board produced a report that promoted the

reform of teacher training, inspection and examination and the adoption of scientific

methods in primary education which included amongst other features, the use of time-

94 See: Barraclough, Annual Address to Engineering Section, Proceedings, R.S. of

N.S.W., vol.39, 1905, p.xxiv; S.M.H 1/11/1910; Peter Board, 'Australian Citizenship,' Royal Australian Historical Society Journal vol.5, Part 4, 1919, pp.198-200; Peter Board, 'Vocational Training and the Community,' Australian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology vol.1, no.1, March 1923, pp.45-104; G.V.M. Turner, 'Works Schools and Their Methods' in N.S.W. Board of Trade, Apprenticeship in Industries No.5 (Government Printer, Sydney, 1920) pp.8-16.

95 For example, Bernard Muscio commended J.M. Rice's book entitled, 'Scientific Management in Education' to Australian readers in 1917. Muscio, Lectures on Industrial Psychology..., p.12. See also: Wm. H. Ledger, Presidential Address, Proc., Sydney University Engineering Society, vol.20, 1915-16, p.10.

96 G.H. Knibbs and J.W. Turner, Report of the Commissioners on Primary Secondary, Technical and Other Forms of Education, N.S.W.P.P. 1905, vol. 4, p.211. Also see: Megaw, 'Some Aspects of the United States' Impact...,' pp.364-367.

97 Peter Board, Report Following Upon Observations of American Education (N.S.W. Department of Public Instruction, Government Printer, Sydney, 1909) p.v; Alan Barcan, Two Centuries of Education in New South Wales (N.S.W. University Press, Sydney, 1988) p.183, p.186.

27

tables, uniform classifications and standards of proficiency.98 Board then began to

implement such artefacts at all levels of the education system, beginning in 1906 with

the introduction of the first centralised school syllabus which included detailed

timetables. This development, asserts Snow, altered the temporal dimensions of

schooling and supplemented the move to professionalise teachers. Insofar as the new

syllabus promoted scientific principles and practices related to industry, it also equated

education with 'work.'99

Board's 1909 Presidential Address before the Education Section of the Australasian

Association for the Advancement of Science (A.A.A.S.) explained the aims underpinning

these reforms. The meaning of education had to be extended in Australia as it had in the

U.S.A., Board argued here, if Australia was to prepare the ground for a science of

education. Accordingly, he suggested that observation, experiment, analysis and

synthesis had to be substituted for 'imitative methods' because 'freshness and originality

in industry and business' could only develop if an ever-increasing proportion of the

population 'had its eyes opened to the methods of science.'100

This rhetoric of science and efficiency was soon adopted by other Australian

intellectuals when praising American educational reforms and their value for Australian

circumstances.101 The spread of American literature, coupled with the increasing

number of Australians, such as Turner, Knibbs and Board among many others, to visit

America also helped to spread American notions of efficiency to Australia where they

soon informed expectations about, and programmes for, future development. In turn,

98 Peter Board, Report on Primary Education (N.S.W. Department of Public Instruction,

Government Printer, Sydney, 1903) pp.4-5, pp.11-12 and generally. Here Board commented favourably on the Moseley Commission's findings regarding American educational practices.

99 Dianne Snow, 'Transforming Children's Labour Through Schooling,' in John E. Martin and Kerry Taylor (eds) Culture and the Labour Movement (The Dunmore Press, New Zealand, 1991) pp.275-276.

100 P. Board, Presidential Address to Section J. (Education): 'Mental Science and Education,' Proc., A.A.A.S. vol. 12, 1909, pp.703-705, p.711.

101 Clarence H. Northcott, Australian Social Development (Columbia University, New York, 1918) p.293; Turner, Apprenticeship in Industries... p.21 and generally pp.8-14.

28

the growing perception of an affinity between the two countries led the Australian literary

media to give extensive coverage to American reforms particularly where they related to

industrial efficiency, scientific innovation and education.102 By 1918, C.H. Northcott

recommended that Australian schools be reorganised and curricula be readjusted

according to the model of the Gary Schools in the U.S.A.103 And two years later, G.V.M.

Turner, member of the N.S.W. Board of Trade, paid particular attention to the Cincinnati

Plan, in his Report on 'Work Schools and their Methods.'104

The pattern by which scientific management spread in N.S.W. owed much to the form

which it had assumed in the U.S.A. Its association with progressivism and educational

reform made it particularly appealing to middle class engineers, such as S.H.

Barraclough, as well as professional educators, such as Peter Board and James

Nangle, all of who were concerned about the need to reform the training methods

offered by the Sydney Technical College.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, in N.S.W. as in the U.S.A., progressive

university-based engineers became prominent in education reform circles. Their growing

links with other professionals, fostered by their common membership of the Royal

Society of N.S.W., encouraged their participation in the New Education Movement and

enabled them to influence the reform agenda. As a result, such engineers were able to

differentiate themselves from the older generation of entrepreneurial engineers and to

establish themselves as the rightful group to influence the practices of the engineering

artisan.

To reinforce this distinction, university-trained engineers emphasised the connection

between engineering and science. They argued that the 'great rule of thumb' that had

'reigned supreme and undisputed' during the nineteenth century, when engineers were

trained under a pupillage system, had been overthrown. The view of these theoretical

102 White, Inventing Australia..., pp.141-143; Churchward, Australia & America..., pp.79-

80, pp.84-90, p.101, pp.110-111, pp.115-116; Megaw, 'Some Aspects of the United States' Impact...,' Chapters Six and Seven.

103 Northcott, Australian Social Development..., p.293.

104 Turner, Apprenticeship in Industries..., p.21 and generally pp.8-14.

29

engineers that scientific laws, principles and methods were necessary to elevate

Australia's international position vis-a-vis Germany and the U.S.A. aligned them with

other middle class reformers. Gradually, university-trained professionals agreed that the

improvement of technical education was critical to national efficiency and industrial

development.105 The progressive engineer and University of Sydney lecturer, S.H.

Barraclough, who studied at Cornell University in the mid-1890s, was instrumental in

spreading American ideas and practices. In his 1905 Address to the Royal Society's

Engineering Section, Barraclough extolled a range of American educational reforms. In

comparing Australia with the U.S.A., Barraclough argued that the fulfilment of Australia's

cherished ideal of shorter hours, higher wages, restricted numbers of workers and

limited output from them, made it even more imperative for Australia to amend its

system of training.106

He complained that despite their tacit agreement with other nations that apprenticeship

was dead, Australians had substituted nothing in its place. Barraclough's proposals to

overcome this state of affairs echoed those of American reformers both in form and

content. Since industrial capacity no longer depended on tradition and manual skill but

instead on scientific and rational knowledge and machinery, he argued that it was now

essential to ensure oversight and direction which would produce the largest possible

output. In his view, new scientific discoveries called for changes in methods and greater

amounts of technical knowledge which could no longer be learned 'at the bench or in the

shops.' And although Barraclough admitted that no scheme of education could be

'imported ready made... from even the best educated country in the world,' he

nevertheless thought that American models should be emulated. Barraclough stressed:

it is a sorry argument that because natural opportunities are less, a people therefore is to be excused from making an equal effort.... if, as is evident, the resources of the country are not quite so readily to hand as in the

105 C.O. Burge, Presidential Address, Proc., R.S. of N.S.W. vol.38, 1904, p.7, pp.9-10.

For a discussion of the part played by professional engineers in the reform of technical education in N.S.W. refer to Taksa, 'All a Matter of Timing...,' Chapters Five to Seven.

106 Barraclough, Annual Address to Engineering Section, Proc., R.S. of N.S.W., vol.39, 1905, p.xxxii.

30

United States, it is surely all the stronger argument for a resolute and determined exploitation of those resources.107

Barraclough's position was informed by his own American experiences and

associations. While reading for his Masters Degree at Cornell University's Sibley College

of Engineering, between 1892 and 1894, Barraclough had been influenced by Robert

Henry Thurstan, who Barraclough described as his 'sincere friend' and the 'father of the

modern engineering school.'108 This connection provided an important channel through

which the American pattern of engineering professionalisation spread to Australia.

As the first engineer ever to be appointed Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the

Stevens Institute of Technology, Thurston taught the subject between 1870 and 1885 to

upwardly mobile engineers like F.W. Taylor who obtained his Masters of Engineering

from this institution. In 1880, Thurston became the first President of the A.S.M.E. and

five years later he became the first Director of Sibley College. Significantly for

Barraclough, during his time at Sibley Thurston presented an extremely influential paper

before the A.S.M.E. in which he set out a complete and integrated training system for

mechanical engineering. Many years later, one of Taylor's supporters argued that

Thurston's vision had expanded the Society's province to include the field of social

economy; it laid down a 'germ of thought' which 'always remained in the Society' and

which 'found its most widely known expression in Frederick W. Taylor's classic paper on

Shop Management.'109

Thurston's ideas, as well as those of other American engineers, influenced Barraclough.

He joined S.P.E.E., which was formed during his final year at Sibley. This was the very

same organisation through which Taylor developed links with progressives and

corporate leaders. S.P.E.E., in fact, provided Taylor with an important arena in which to

107 Barraclough, ibid., p.xiii, pp.xxv-xxvi, pp.xx-xxi, pp.xxiv-xxv.

108 Correspondence, S.H. Barraclough to Professor Robert Henry Thurston, Series 3, Folder 3, Sir S.H.E. Barraclough, Personal Papers, Group P.10, University of Sydney Archives.

109 Dexter S. Kimball, 'The Relation of Engineering to Industrial Management,' Trans., A.S.M.E. vol.39, 1917, pp.560-561.

31

promote his model for the reform of industrial and professional engineering education.110

Barraclough's continuing membership of this organisation, long after his return to

Australia, would have exposed him to these ideas.111

Like F.W. Taylor, Barraclough's vision for a reformed system of technical training

promoted a greater sub-division of labour which would reinforce the university-trained

engineer's managerial role. In his view there were three 'clearly recognisable, although

not sharply defined types' of labour in the community: the skilled and unskilled artisan;

the foreman type; and the professional scientific type. And he proposed that a

systematic scheme of instruction which co-ordinated primary and secondary education

on the one hand, and the University on the other, with the industrial life of the community

would specifically cater for the needs of all three types.112

Barraclough's progressive ideas on the stream-lining of education in N.S.W. had much

in common with those of other middle class reformers, such as Peter Board.113 Like the

latter, Barraclough acclaimed the use of scientific methods in the university training

given to engineers. In 1908, he promoted the adoption of continuous rolls of students,

professional records of graduates and recording systems for technical stores by the P.N.

Russell School of Engineering. To improve workshop training for students he proposed

a systematically planned syllabus and the creation of distinct lines of authority for those

who ran the engineering workshops and laboratories. He also recommended that 'a

definite and detailed scheme be issued in writing defining the duties' of each of the

Engineering School's attendants. Moreover, like Board, Barraclough sought the

introduction of time management. He remarked:

I think it very much to be regretted that the system of keeping Time Sheets in the Workshop has fallen through as it was an excellent object

110 Arther Hardie Corbett, The Institution of Engineers, Australia: A History of the First

Fifty Years, 1919-1969 (Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1973) p.45; Copley, F.W. Taylor..., vol. 1: p.116, p.12 and vol. 2: p.277.

111 Correspondence, S.H. Barraclough to Professor Robert Henry Thurston.

112 Barraclough, Annual Address to Engineering Section..., pp.xxxii-xxxvi, p.xix, p.xxxvi.

113 Board, 'Mental Science and Education...,' pp.703-705, p.711.

32

lesson for the students in the Shop, and a good check on the work that was being done and the cost of it. I think that some system of 'costing' should be introduced.114

These ideas complemented those of Board's. Students, Board argued in 1909, had to

be taught to appreciate the lessons of scientific inquiry because the increasing sub-

division of labour accompanying the development of industry required 'from the few the

ability to direct, and from the many the power to do some small thing.' Board concluded

that the evolution of industry would ensure that the school would 'become the adjunct of

the workshop, and the workshop a class-room of the school.'115

In the pursuit of distinctly progressive goals intellectuals, such as Board and

Barraclough, introduced far-reaching changes to education. But it was specifically in the

area of industry-related training that F.W. Taylor's principles and methods were diffused

in N.S.W. by the fervent supporter of motion study, James Nangle, who was appointed

Superintendent of Technical Education in 1913.116

VII

The new technical education scheme developed by Board and Nangle was approved by

the Minister of Public Instruction on 28th November 1913, and it came into operation in

February 1914.117 By rationalising courses the scheme promoted closer relations

between the Sydney Technical College and 'the various employers who subsequently

engaged the services of the students trained' there, and it also integrated technical

education with the other branches of the Department of Public Instruction. Trade

114 Memorandum to Professor Warren on the General Organisation of the Engineering

School from S.H. Barraclough, 24/9/1908, Barraclough Papers, Sydney University Archives.

115 Peter Board, 'Mental Science and Education...,' p.703-705, pp.711-712. Also see, Board, Report Following Upon Observations..., generally.

116 P.R. Proudfoot, 'The Development of Architectural Education in Sydney,' Historical Studies vol.21, no.83, October 1984, pp.201-202; Joan Cobb, 'James Nangle,' in B. Nairn & G. Serle (eds) Australian Dictionary of Biography vol. 10 (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1986) p.661.

117 James Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction For the Year 1914, N.S.W.P.P. Vol.1, 1915-1916, p.100.

33

Schools were established for those who were already employed in a trade and who had

'a certain degree of preparatory knowledge.' Those who were not so endowed were first

required to obtain certificates from either a Commercial Superior Junior Technical

School or an evening Continuation Junior Technical School. Henceforth the main object

of the Technical College would be 'the training, first of competent tradesmen, and

secondly, of a more limited number of students who would fill the positions of

foremen.'118

The integration of such functional divisions between training institutions in a centrally-

controlled but hierarchically-differentiated education system reinforced occupational

divisions between the new middle and working classes. Trade courses were linked to

apprenticeships in ways that limited workers' theoretical knowledge, while at the same

time restricting the more advanced courses that encompassed the 'technology of the

various trades and technical professions' to those who were deemed to be 'capable of

reaching positions such as that of foreman, works manager, or clerk of works.' Limited

opportunities for working class mobility, for those who entered the field of engineering

through traditional avenues, were also created through exemptions from first year

university examinations for any 'special' students who performed well in the newly

established 'sub-professional' diploma courses.119 (Figures I and II, Appendix A)

Industrial management methods were central to the scheme's administration and

courses. Registration forms (effectively entrance tests) were introduced in the Trade

Schools to select students on the basis of their literacy. Simultaneously, Sydney

Technical College also adopted new record-keeping procedures for courses in order to

chronicle students' results, as well as 'their experience during their daily occupations.'

The record-keeping system introduced by the College involved the use of 'job-cards'

which included each student's name, roll-book number, the total hours of attendance per

week, the number of the job exercise and the time allotted for completion. Spaces were

118 Report of the Minister of Public Instruction for the Year 1913, N.S.W.P.P. Vol.1, Part 1,

1914, p.19.

119 Ibid., p.19; Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education..., 1914, p.100, p.102.

34

also left on cards for students to enter dates and times when exercises were started and

finished.

The Sydney Technical College job-cards were filled in after every exercise was

completed. They not only enabled marks to be allocated for accuracy and general

knowledge but, perhaps more importantly, for the time taken by each individual student

to complete their own personal tasks. In situations where cards were inappropriate, such

as for lectures or practical work in laboratories, progress was measured by a time test or

'Quiz' which required students to answer questions in an allotted time. Marks were then

recorded in a roll-book in which information from the job-cards was also collated. Finally,

all such information was recorded on a summary card for each student which was kept

in the Record Office until the end of the year when examiners checked students'

progress. Also, in order to bridge the gap between the classroom and the workshop, the

information on these cards was forwarded to employers. In turn, employers were invited

to fill in a form 'giving a brief account of the work and progress of each apprentice during

each half year.' 120 These job-cards inaugurated a new literary culture in technical

education.121 (Figures III-VI, Appendix B)

These changes to technical education complemented a range of reforms then being

implemented by the University of Sydney. Under the terms of the University Amendment

Act of 1912 tertiary education was infused with a utilitarian ethos designed to cater to

the concerns of the new professional middle class. Like the technical college, the

University was pushed into closer association with the world of industry and

commerce.122 These connections were then formalised when Nangle created course

120 Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education For 1914..., pp.104-108.

In his Report for the year 1914, Nangle commented that employers had generally responded well to the invitation, although a certain portion were 'careless enough not to supply the information.' He therefore suggested that an officer be appointed 'to call on this type of employer and get the information.' See further: James Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education For 1916, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction For The Year 1916, N.S.W.P.P. 1917-1918, Vol.2, p.96.

121 Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education... 1914, pp.104-106.

122 Barcan, Two Centuries of Education..., p.192; Nangle, ibid., p.100. See also S. Murray-Smith, 'Technical Education: The Lines of Development,' in C. Sanders (ed)

35

advisory committees, involving trade union, industry and professional representatives

together with Technical College staff, to advise him on appointments, content of

instruction, equipment and examiners.123 These committees directly aided the formation

of closer ties between intellectuals and engineers, particularly those who occupied

management positions in government departments. The engineering trades committee,

for instance, included S.H. Barraclough, as well as E.E. Lucy and James Scoular as

representatives of the N.S.W. Railways and Tramways Department.124

The closer links between the Departments of Public Instruction and Railways and

Tramways resulting from these reforms also extended the locus of these innovations. In

an effort to prevent `overlapping' and `wasted effort' and to ensure the conservation of

public resources and uniform teaching practices throughout N.S.W., the Railway and

Tramway Institute ran Trade Courses in tandem with those offered by the Department of

Public Instruction's Trade Schools and a formal compact was also established between

the Institute and the Sydney Technical College.125 Accordingly, the Institute also made

arrangements to have promising Trade Course students, those who showed the

capacity to become foremen and managers, submit to entrance examinations for the

Diploma Courses offered at the College. Such foremen would be among those that

railway workers would later equate with Taylor's 'functional foremen.'126

The alliance between these public educational bodies enabled the standardisation of

courses, exercises, workshop practices and administrative procedures. The Institute

adopted the job cards, roll books, time quizzes, and exams used by the College to

Technical Education For Development (University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1966) p.22.

123 McGuffie, Working in Metal..., p.79. Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education For 1916..., p.99.

124 Nangle, ibid., p.99; S.H. Barraclough, Presidential Address: The War - Australia and the Engineer,' Proc., Engineering Association of N.S.W. vol.30, 1914-1915, pp.225-227.

125 Railway and Tramway (R. & T.) Budget 1/3/1916, p.212.

126 Curlewis, Royal Commission..., pp.36-37, p.40.

36

award marks and tabulate student assessment. It also installed `up-to-date methods' to

record membership which involved a `complete card system.'127

Literary artefacts of this sort complemented the job and time cards that were then being

experimented with by the N.S.W. Railways and Tramways Department in its workshops.

(Refer to Exhibits B. to F, Appendix C and compare with Figures III to VI, Appendix

B).128 The new occupational culture that was being diffused throughout the technical

education system was thus effectively reinforced in one of the largest state enterprises

in Australia. In 1916 this culture was further generalised in the public sector when this

Department, together with the Commonwealth Naval Department and the Sydney

Municipal Council, began to send apprentices to the College to attend supplementary

day-time trade classes.129 When the Railways and Tramways Department extended

educational facilities to its employees throughout N.S.W. by opening Branch Institutes in

other centres such as North Sydney, Bathurst, Dubbo, Goulburn, Junee, Orange,

Parkes, Newcastle and Nyngan, such innovations were spread even further afield.130

In this way, the state played an instrumental role in translating Barraclough's vision of a

functional division of labour into practice. Both the Trade Schools and the Railway and

Tramway Institute restricted access to Diploma courses offered by the Sydney Technical

College. As the Institute's ideologues put it, the purpose of the Diploma Course was not

`to train and educate men of professional standing,' but to provide a means of

improvement for those who stood `midway between the tradesman and the man of

professional rank.' 131

VIII

127 R. & T. Budget 1/3/1917, pp.211-212; 1/2/1917, p.193, p.195.

128 Curlewis, Royal Commission..., pp.71-73.

129 Nangle, Report of the Superintendent of Technical Education For 1916..., p.97.

130 R. & T. Budget 1/12/1916, p.100, pp.109-110; 1/2/1917, p.192, p.194.

131 The few who excelled in Diploma courses would, it was thought, be able to take advantage of the change in regulations introduced by the University of Sydney Senate which exempted such students from the first year exam in engineering. Report of the Minister of Public Instruction For...1913..., p.19; R. & T. Budget 1/3/1917, pp.209-212.

37

Professional engineers and government administrators were not the only ones to

support the streamlining of the education system with its implicit functional and social

demarcations. From 1910 manufacturers showed an increasing concern for technical

education as a means of overcoming the shortage of skilled labour. They therefore

consciously extended their contact with educators and educational institutions, such as

the Sydney Technical College.132

In 1910, they participated in a Printers Conference at the College that was convened by

the Superintendent of Technical Education, J.W. Turner. Here, Turner referred to

educational developments in the U.S.A. where the tendency to combine college tuition

with workshop practice had come to be recognised as being `the very best method of

ensuring competency'; the very same method then being extolled by F.W. Taylor.

Turner informed those present that: 'It is with the above [American] spirit of

advancement in mind that this movement in the cause of high technology in New South

Wales is formulated.' The Chamber of Manufactures' President reiterated these views in

his Annual Address for 1910. `We are,' the Hon. J.G. Farleigh M.L.C. stressed, `aiming

at greater industrial efficiency, and this opens up the question of higher technical

training'. He then agreed with Turner that the tradition of limiting training to the workshop

would not produce commercially useful artisans.133

Like Australian intellectuals, manufacturers increasingly referred to the educational

models advanced by their American counterparts.134 Such ideas provided a strong

incentive for Australian manufacturers to strengthen their ties with local educational

reformers. Manufacturers praised the Minister for Education, George Beeby, when he

announced that educational facilities were to be improved and extended. In addition,

they supported the N.S.W. Government's proposal to inaugurate a scheme of

continuation schools which would make attendance compulsory for boys over fourteen.

132 See for example: Australian Manufactures' Journal (A.M.J.) 15/4/1910, p.28.

133 A.M.J. 15/12/1910, p.367.

134 A.M.J. 24/11/1910, pp.321-322.

38

By taking this stance, manufacturers gave their blessing to Board's educational

reforms.135

Compared to the activities of their American counterparts during this period, the

mobilisation of manufacturers in N.S.W. was restrained. They simply did not have the

resources offered by trusts, nor were they engaged in a major political struggle reflected

in anti-trust campaigns that were then occurring in the U.S.A.136 But the close ties that

had developed between manufacturers and progressive educators in the U.S.A. were

parallelled in N.S.W. Manufacturers and reform-oriented intellectuals were increasingly

brought together by their shared view that Australia's future industrial expansion

depended on improved technical education. At the same time, influential members of

the professional middle class considered manufacturers' support as crucial for the

success of any technical education reforms. To a certain extent, manufacturers

reciprocated such interest by promoting greater contact between them.137

At the N.S.W. Chamber of Manufactures' Council Meeting in November 1913, James

Nangle was formally congratulated on his appointment as Director for Technical

Education. And after Nangle explained his new scheme at one of the Chamber's

Quarterly Meetings, manufacturers publicly praised it.138 Subsequently, the Australian

Manufactures' Journal (A.M.J.) published a comprehensive account of the scheme

which depicted it as part of a wider effort to guard against `a serious waste of time both

by teachers and students.' One of its chief reforms was to 'be the conservation of

energy.' Since Australian employers had to pay the same minimum wage to `indifferent'

as to `efficient' workers, Nangle pointed out that it was in everyone's interests to do

everything they could to ensure that the minimum efficiency was of a high standard. `It is

quite comprehensible,' Nangle informed manufacturers:

135 A.M.J. 15/12/1910, p.346. See Board, Report Following Upon Observations of

American Education..., pp.12-16; Peter Board, Report on Continuation Schools (N.S.W. Department of Public Instruction, Government Printer, Sydney, 1912).

136 See Edwards, Contested Terrain..., pp.37-38, pp.65-67.

137 A.M.J. 25/4/1912, p.9.

138 A.M.J. 25/8/1916, p.5, p.36.

39

that a technically well-educated tradesman, trained to do the maximum amount of work with the minimum amount of effort, employed in a healthy workshop and under the most skilful direction, can from the business point of view, be given shorter hours and paid more money.

The A.M.J. reported further that `economy of motion' figured prominently among

Nangle's goals because Australia's industrial conditions, especially the shortage of

skilled workers, required 'the greatest amount of labour with the least possible

expenditure of energy.' To this end, students had to be taught the best and shortest way

of doing a job.139

Nangle's promotion of motion study, scientific training and time management in the

name of conservation indicates support for the basic tenets of scientific management

and the cult of efficiency. Nangle was not alone. Manufacturers sympathised with him

and, increasingly, they too helped to spread the gospel by reporting on various

applications of scientific management. As World War One progressed both the

Australian Manufactures' Journal and the Australian Manufacturer (launched in 1916)

published extensively on this subject using the rhetoric popularised by American

progressives. Scientific management was represented in terms of the elimination of

waste and inefficiency and also of vocational training.140 In this regard, the writings of

Gantt and Gilbreth were prominent.141

CONCLUSION

The educational reforms implemented by Board and Nangle allowed Australian

educators to use scientific management principles and methods to divide the planning of

work and its execution; it was a process which selected, individualised and 'normalised'

139 A.M.J. 25/11/1913, pp.4-5,, p.8, pp.12-13.

140 A.M.J. 25/7/1914, pp.28-29; 26/12/1912, pp.21-22; 1/5/1919, pp.17-18; 1/10/1919, p.38; 1/12/1919, p.30; 1/1/1920, p.12; 1/4/1920, p.31; A.M. 1/7/1916, pp.15-17; 21/10/1916, pp.10-12; 28/4/1917, pp.7-8, p.11, pp.19-20; 19/5/1917, pp.14-15; 2/6/1917, pp.12-13, pp.18-19; 16/6/1917, pp.20-21. See further: Taksa, 'All A Matter of Timing...,' Chapters Seven and Eight.

141 See for examples: A.M. 18/10/1919, p.14; 25/10/1919, pp.26-27.

40

workers in the classrooms of technical colleges, as a complement to the divisions that

were gradually being implemented in industrial workshops.142

The stopwatch has loomed large in the historiographical imagination. Scientific

management has generally been reduced to this symbol with time and motion studies

and bonus incentive schemes being represented as this system's core features. The

effects of scientific management have also been portrayed in a similarly reductionist

way. Most scholars have concluded that the adoption of these technical features

resulted in the deskilling of workers.143 This paper has argued that such a reductionist

view tells only part of the story. The educational reforms of the first two decades of the

twentieth century were sufficiently infused with scientific management to ensure its

continued, albeit more oblique, influence in Australia. This laid the foundation for an

acceptance of American ideas and methods for producing cultural change for future

generations of workers.

In the U.S.A. the cult of the expert was institutionalised by the systematic integration of

America's public education system with the corporations' internal chain of command,

and by the restriction of professional training.144 These developments were parallelled

by the technical education reforms implemented in N.S.W. after 1913; reforms that were

ensconced in the educational practices of the N.S.W. Railways and Tramways

Department.145 Scientific management was adopted in this context to rationalise the

public education system's efforts to produce a compliant labour force. Its value related to

its capacity to promote a 'training in being trained' not just in the class room but also in

142 Foucault, Discipline and Punish... pp.183-184.

143 Raelene Frances, `No More Amazons: Gender and Work Process in the Victorian Clothing Trades, 1890-1939,' Labour History no.50, May 1986, pp.95-112; Chilla Bulbeck, `Manning the Machines: Women in the Furniture Industry 1920-1960,' Labour History no.51, November 1986, pp.24-32; Kerreen Reiger, `Mothering De-skilled? Australian Childrearing and the Experts in the Twentieth Century,' Paper presented to A.N.Z.A.A.S. Congress, 1984, pp.12-21; and see generally: Stephen Wood (ed) The Degradation of Work? Skill, De-skilling and the Labour Process (Hutchinson, London, 1982).

144 Montgomery, Workers' Control..., p.157.

145 Refer to Taksa, 'All A Matter of Timing...,' Chapters 8 and 9.

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the workshop, while simultaneously defining which social groups should provide such

training.

The structural differences between the U.S.A. and Australia were primarily responsible

for the uneven spread of scientific management. In the interwar period, its integration

into the public education system in N.S.W. diminished. Australia did not have a

sufficiently developed industrial base on which industrial professionals could legitimate

their expertism during the 1920s, as was the case in the U.S.A. While this period has

been depicted as the latter nation's epoch of 'educational efficiency,' in Australia the

1920s witnessed a growing neglect of technical education as a result of the political and

economic exigencies of conservative governments.146 Nevertheless, the comparative

approach taken here has shown that because of broadly similar social developments in

these two countries scientific management was diffused by reformed educational

practices in both at roughly the same time. The early decades of the twentieth century

thus reflect the first phase of gestation for the birth of a modern industrial society in

Australia; a birth that did not eventuate until the Second World War. Yet this time lag

should not devalue the earlier impact of scientific management. It played an important

role in shaping the administrative arrangements and expectations underpinning later

progress.

146 Callahan, Education and the Cult..., p.221; Murray-Smith, 'Technical Education: The

Lines of Development...,' p.24. See further: Taksa, 'All A Matter of Timing...,' pp.382-403, pp.464-465.

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