Taylorism, the International Labour Organization, and the Genesis and Diffusion of Codetermination

Abstract

The conventional negative understanding of the scientific management movement has been challenged in recent decades by heterodox scholars who hold that the movement supported the democratization of the management process and in so doing worked closely with unions and with progressives within and around Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. This paper seeks to strengthen this challenge to orthodoxy by documenting how the leadership of the Taylor Society, a body established by Frederick Taylor’s inner circle as a vehicle to develop and promote their mentor’s ideas, strove to internationalize the diffusion of participatory management in tandem with the International Labour Organization, a body whose core purpose was and is to promote codetermination both in workplaces and in wider society.