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INTRODUCTION 19

began to actively explore how to manage knowledge in work settings. Frederick
Winslow Taylor developed the principles of Scientific Management in 1911.
This new (at the time) approach to the organization of work – in particular,
manual work – had a very profound effect on management, many features of
which have endured to the present day.
Scientific Management emerged in the United States during the industrial
revolution at a time where there were major advances in technology and mass
production was on the increase. Managers of ever larger organizations were grap-
pling, then, with the problems of controlling ever increasing volumes of work.
Moreover, this was being carried out by a largely untrained workforce made up
of immigrants from Europe or native American workers who had come from the
agricultural regions of the United States. These workers were generally unskilled
in factory work, many had little understanding of the English language and the
majority had little or no experience of working in a factory environment.
Frederick Taylor began to develop the principles of Scientific Management
based on his experiences at the Midvale Steel Company, where his career took
him from machine shop labourer, through foreman to chief engineer. Having
been involved with several wrangles with shop floor workers during his time as a
foreman, Taylor believed that the prevalent system of production at that time –
craft production – was highly inefficient. This was because it was largely left to the
groups of ‘craft workers’ themselves to plan and carry out work tasks as they saw
fit using loosely defined ‘rules of thumb’ acquired through years of experience.
Hence, the knowledge concerning the way work was to be carried out resided, in
effect, within ‘the head and the hands’ of the workers. This, Taylor believed, left
organizations vulnerable to a lack of discipline and ‘systematic soldiering’ – the
deliberate slow pacing of work and restriction of output – because it was not in
workers’ interests to produce any more than they absolutely had to.
To overcome these problems, Taylor believed that work processes should be
organized differently, being divided up into a series of simple sub-tasks which
could be standardized and tightly prescribed. Workers could then be selected
‘scientifically’ (Taylor, 1911) according to the task(s) they were to perform.
Workers would no longer be responsible for planning the organization of work;
instead they would only be required to carry out these simple, standardized sub-
tasks in an efficient manner.
Taylor also argued that it should be the task of managers to observe work
processes and determine the most efficient way to organize and schedule them –
effectively acting as engineers. The Business Process Reengineering efforts of
today are to some extent reminiscent of this approach. Hence, whilst with the
craft system the knowledge required to carry out work had resided in the ‘head
and the hands’ of the workers, with the new system of Scientific Management
engineer-managers would extract and capture this knowledge by systematic
observation. They would then use these observations to redesign the work pro-
cess that workers would then follow. In short, managers would be the heads,
and workers the hands, of the organization. To use today’s terms, we can see,
then, that these managers were in fact attempting to manage knowledge.

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