Taylorism Reconsidered: The Impact of Scientific Management within the Australian Workplace

Abstract

The dominance of Taylorism or scientific management in capitalist work has become an article of faith within academic literature. Despite significant debate amongst labour process writers over this issue, the new wave of post-Fordist thinking has once again reasserted the traditional primacy of Taylorism as a counter to new forms of organisation which are claimed to be developing. Subsumed under a broader rubric entitled 'Fordism', the principles of scientific management are said to have informed all types of modern work organisation. The overthrow of Taylorism has become a principal aim of post-Fordist advocates who foresee an alternative future of increased employee discretion, high skill and career paths for all.1 However, how accurate is such a view? This paper argues that much of the post Fordist literature relies upon an idealised reading of the past. Hence like Braverman before them, post-Fordists view Taylorism as a universal strategy of deskilling in which craft control of the labour process was subsumed by managerial control.2 From an Australian perspective this argument appears based upon an uncritical adoption of some overseas analyses of the history of scientific management and mass production. In Australia it is far from clear that scientific management ever assumed dominance as a general form of work organisation. This paper seeks to rectify some of the neglect in the study of the historical organisation of work in Australian industry. In particular it highlights the limited impact of scientific management practice as a dominant or general management strategy within the workplace. The paper begins by outlining some of the definitional problems of Taylorism and briefly reassesses its relationship to broader changes in the organisation of capitalist production. The paper then goes on to outline the historical development of this concept as practice in Australian industry. Rather than becoming a universal strategy of management control, scientific management techniques enj oyed