The author discusses the influence of Taylor in transforming the philosophy of American industry from the "factory system" to "scientific management." Nelson believes that though Taylor is best remembered for techniques such as time study, he was a reformer whose ideas were more readily adopted after his death, following World War I.
In this carefully researched look at Taylor, the much-misunderstood father of scientific management, the authors present a biography/history of both the man and his ideas. They show that Taylor's ideas have a place in the Information Age and that most of the negative ideas we have about scientific management are not grounded in what Taylor actually did. ISBN 1-55623-501-1: $24.95.
The dream of scientific management was a rationalized machine world where life would approach the perfection of an assembly line. But since its early twentieth-century peak this dream has come to seem a dehumanizing nightmare. Henry Ford's assembly lines turned out a quarter of a million cars in 1914, but all of them were black. Forgotten has been the unparalleled new aesthetic beauty once seen in the ideas of Ford and scientific management pioneer Frederick Winslow Taylor. In The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical, Mauro Guillén recovers this history and retells the story of the emergence of modernist architecture as a romance with the ideas of scientific management--one that permanently reshaped the profession of architecture. Modernist architecture's pioneers, Guillén shows, found in scientific management the promise of a new, functional, machine-like--and beautiful--architecture, and the prospect of a new role for the architect as technical professional and social reformer. Taylor and Ford had a signal influence on Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and on Le Corbusier and his Towards a New Architecture, the most important manifesto of modernist architecture. Architects were so enamored with the ideas of scientific management that they adopted them even when there was no functional advantage to do so. Not a traditional architectural history but rather a sociological study of the profession of architecture during its early modernist period, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical provides a new understanding of the degree to which modernist architecture emerged from a tradition of engineering and industrial management.
The key developments and advancements in organizational change over the last century are the result of the research, theories, and practices of seminal scholars in the field. While most books simply outline a theorist’s model, this handbook provides invaluable insight into the contexts and motivations behind their contributions. Organized alphabetically, this handbook presents inspiring and thought-provoking profiles of prominent organizational change thinkers, capturing the professional background of each and highlighting their key insights, contributions, and legacy within the field of organizational change. By bringing these scholars’ experiences to life, we can begin to understand the process of organizational change and analyze what remains to be done for organizations today. This book is the first of its kind—the go-to source for learning about the research and practice of organizational change from those who invented, built, and advanced the field. This comprehensive handbook will help researchers and students to develop their organizational change research agendas, and provide practitioners with concepts, theories, and models that can easily be applied to the workplace to lead change more effectively.
The first book of its kind to offer a unique functions approach to managerial communication, Managerial Communication explores what the communication managers actually do in business across the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling functions. Focusing on theory and application that will help managers and future managers understand the practices of management communication, this book combines ideas from industry experts, popular culture, news events, and academic articles and books written by leading scholars. All of the levels of communication (intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, and intercultural) play a role in managerial communication and are discussed thoroughly. The top, middle, and frontline communications in which managers engage are also addressed. Expounding on theories of communication, the authors relate them to the theories of management—such as crisis management, impression management, equity theory, and effective presentation skills. These are the skills that are invaluable to management.
