Page 344 - Cultures and Organizations

Pyramids, Machines, Markets, and Families: Organizing Across Nations 309

In Weber’s conception the real authority is in the rules. The power of the

“officials” is strictly delimited by these rules. We recognize the model
of the organization as a well-oiled machine that runs according to the
rules.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1857–1915) was an American engineer
who, contrary to Fayol, had started his career in industry as a worker. He

attained his academic qualifications through evening studies. From chief
engineer in a steel company, he became one of the first management con-

sultants. Taylor was not really concerned with the issue of authority at all;

his focus was on efficiency. He proposed splitting the task of the fi rst-line
boss into eight specialisms, each exercised by a different person. Thus, each
worker would have eight bosses, each with a different responsibility. This
part of Taylor’s ideas was never completely implemented, although we fi nd
elements of it in the modern matrix organization, in which an employee has
two (or even three) bosses, usually one concerned with productivity and
one with technical expertise.
Taylor’s book Shop Management (1903) appeared in a French trans-
lation in 1913, and Fayol read it and devoted six full pages of his own
1916 book to Taylor’s ideas. Fayol shows himself generally impressed but
shocked by Taylor’s “denial of the principle of the Unity of Command” in
the case of the eight-boss system. “For my part,” Fayol writes, “I do not
believe that a department could operate in fl agrant violation of the Unity
of Command principle. Still, Taylor has been a successful manager of large
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organizations. How can we explain this contradiction?” Fayol’s rhetori-
cal question had been answered by his compatriot Blaise Pascal two and a
half centuries before: there are truths in one country that are falsehoods
in another.
In a 1981 article André Laurent, another of Fayol’s compatriots, dem-
onstrated that French managers in a survey reacted very strongly against

a suggestion that one employee could report to two different bosses, while
Swedish and U.S. managers, among others, in the same survey showed
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fewer misgivings in this respect. Matrix organization has never become
as popular in France as it has in the United States. It is amusing to read
Laurent’s suggestion that in order to make matrix organizations accept-
able in France, they should be translated into hierarchical terms—that is,
one real boss plus one or more staff experts. Exactly the same solution was
put forward by Fayol in his 1916 discussion of the Taylor system; in fact,
Fayol writes that he supposes this is how the Taylor system really worked
in Taylor’s companies.