Dewey and Taylor on Scientific Management in a Democratic Society

Abstract

Scientific management in public administration is usually associated with the Philadelphian, machinist and industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who introduced high-priced efficiency studies into the workplace with a stopwatch and a clever method of analysis. In contrast, scientific management in philosophy finds more resonance with the ideas of the American pragmatist John Dewey, who conceived management as a species of intelligent inquiry, or scientifically-modeled problem solving. While these accounts are not entirely accurate, they do provide depictions of two thinkers with two strikingly different visions of scientific management. In reality, though, this reading of Taylor's work has resulted from recent commentaries, mostly critical, of mainstream management and consulting practices. Likewise, the view that Dewey understood management as a form of inquiry is the result of contemporary interpretations of his work. In the first two sections of this paper, I examine the similarities and differences between Dewey and Taylor's conceptions of scientific management. Dewey's critique of scientific management in his book Democracy and Education receives attention in the second section. In the third section, I consider how approaches to organizational theory and public management have moved away from Taylorism, reflecting several of Dewey's critical insights about scientific management and a more recent alternative: human relations theory. The paper concludes with some final thoughts concerning the usefulness of the Dewey-Taylor comparison and its implications for good governance in a democratic society.

Full text

Dewey and Taylor on Scientific
Management in a Democratic Society
Shane J. Ralston
Pennsylvania State University-Hazleton and World Campus
sjr21@psu.edu
Word count: 6,064
Working Draft: comments welcome.
Please do not cite or quote without permission.
Abstract
Scientific management in public administration is usually associated with the Philadelphian, machinist
and industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who introduced high-priced efficiency studies into
the workplace with a stopwatch and a clever method of analysis. In contrast, scientific management
in philosophy finds more resonance with the ideas of the American pragmatist John Dewey, who
conceived management as a species of intelligent inquiry, or scientifically-modeled problem solving.
While these accounts are not entirely accurate, they do provide depictions of two thinkers with two
strikingly different visions of scientific management. In reality, though, this reading of Taylor’s work
has resulted from recent commentaries, mostly critical, of mainstream management and consulting
practices. Likewise, the view that Dewey understood management as a form of inquiry is the result
of contemporary interpretations of his work. In the first two sections of this paper, I examine the
similarities and differences between Dewey and Taylor’s conceptions of scientific management.
Dewey’s critique of scientific management in his book Democracy and Education receives attention in
the second section. In the third section, I consider how approaches to organizational theory and
public management have moved away from Taylorism, reflecting several of Dewey’s critical insights
about scientific management and a more recent alternative: human relations theory. The paper
concludes with some final thoughts concerning the usefulness of the Dewey-Taylor comparison and
its implications for good governance in a democratic society.
Keywords: John Dewey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, scientific management, public management,
Taylorism, technosciences, democracy.

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Dewey and Taylor on Scientific
Management in a Democratic Society
The first of the great principles of scientific management . . . deliberate gathering
together of the great mass of traditional knowledge which, in the past, has been in the
heads of the workmen, recording it, tabulating it, reducing it in most cases to rules,
laws, and in many cases to mathematical formulae, which, with these new laws, are
applied to the cooperation of the management to the work of the workmen.
--F. W. Taylor (2005 [1916]:65)
Much is said about scientific management of work. It is a narrow view which
restricts the science which secures efficiency of operation to movements of the
muscles.
--J. Dewey (1996, MW 9:91)1
Scientific management in public administration is usually associated with the Philadelphian,
machinist and industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who introduced high-priced efficiency
studies into the workplace with a stopwatch and a clever method of analysis. In contrast, scientific
management in philosophy finds more resonance with the ideas of the American pragmatist John
Dewey, who conceived management as a species of intelligent inquiry, or scientifically-modeled
problem solving. While these accounts are not entirely accurate, they do provide depictions of two
thinkers with two strikingly different visions of scientific management. In reality, though, this
reading of Taylor’s work has resulted from recent commentaries, mostly critical, of mainstream
management and consulting practices. Likewise, the view that Dewey understood management as a
form of inquiry is the result of contemporary interpretations of his work. In the first two sections of
this paper, I examine the similarities and differences between Dewey and Taylor’s conceptions of
scientific management. Dewey’s critique of scientific management in his book Democracy and
Education receives attention in the second section. In the third section, I consider how approaches to
organizational theory and public management have moved away from Taylorism, reflecting several of
Dewey’s critical insights about scientific management and a more recent alternative: human relations

2
theory. The paper concludes with some final thoughts concerning the usefulness of the Dewey-
Taylor comparison and its implications for good governance in a democratic society.
The Dewey-Taylor Comparison
The literature comparing John Dewey’s pragmatism and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
scientific management is surprisingly small. What makes its diminutive size so unsettling is that the
there are multiple grounds for a comparison between Dewey’s philosophy and Taylorism. Generally
speaking, both were committed to experimental inquiry, technological progress, industrial
democracy, worker welfare and the extension of science to all areas of life. However, where we can
find agreement in their general commitments, significant disagreements emerge in the details of their
separate approaches.
There is by no means consensus among the commentators. Patricia Shields (2008) and Keith
Snider (2000a, 2000b) disagree about the historical connection between Dewey and Taylor. For
Shields, the tie that binds them is there, though largely invisible to all but the most careful inquirer.
For Snider, the connection between Dewey and Taylor is non-existent. Other than their shared
historical milieu and the common language of science and management, any direct comparison is
over-stated. At least one commentator, G. Alan Tarr (2001), has exaggerated the similarities between
Taylor’s scientific management and Dewey’s pragmatism. Noting that “Scientific Management
attracted broad support during the Progressive Era,” Tarr argues that jurist Louis Brandeis’
understanding of the American states as “laboratories of democracy” was an outgrowth of his
support for Taylor’s principles, not a proposal for a novel form of federalism. Though he only
mentions “John Dewey’s pragmatism” in passing, the comparison with Taylorism is firmly cemented
in at least two places within the text (44-5). On the basis of their mutual “grounding in empirical
analysis” and “distrust of a priori systems” of thinking, he assumes that Taylor and Dewey agreed
about the need to develop a science of industrial management that emphasized experimentation for

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the sake of increased worker efficiency (ibid). However, as we will see, Dewey’s critique of
Taylorism in Democracy and Education gives us more than adequate reasons to reject such a direct
comparison and, at best, to defend a very loose association or indirect association between Dewey’s
pragmatism and Taylor’s scientific management.
Deweyan Inquiry and Scientific Management
For John Dewey, inquiry manifests in a matrix of knowing and acting events, involving the
framing of a problem, proposing hypotheses, testing them, observing results and treating the
experimental outcomes as fallible and revisable in the light of future testing. “Life,” Dewey writes,
“is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment” (MW 9:4). Likewise, the purpose
of experimental inquiry is for humans to act upon and exert the greatest possible control over their
environment. According to Dewey, “[e]xperiment[al science] developed in the seventeenth and
succeeding centuries and became the authorized way of knowing when men’s interests were centered
in the question of control of nature for human uses” (MW 9:210).
Of course, not all of life consists of knowing or inquiry-driven experience. In what Dewey
refers to as “the intellectualist tradition in philosophy” and the “quest for certainty,” thinkers have
“always identified degrees of logical adequacy with degrees of reality,” certitude and stability (MW
10:336). Whether Hume, Kant, Descartes or Russell, philosophers in this tradition mistake the
tentative and functional status of tools in inquiry for their ontological, fixed and stable, disposition in
reality. Such tools include sense impressions, data, ideas, perceptions, meanings and norms. In turn,
non-experimental techniques for “identifying degrees of logical adequacy with degrees of reality,”
such as correspondence, synthesis and coherence, replace experimental methods for testing the
fitness of tools and resolving problematic situations. In the case of acting events, experimentalism
involves a series of operations that transform the conditions of a problematic situation and hasten its
resolution. Dewey explains how analysis reconstructs a situation for this purpose: “To break up the

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complexity, to resolve it into a number of independent variables each as irreducible as it is possible
to make it, is the only way of getting secure pointers as to what is indicated by the occurrence of the
situation in question” (MW 10:342). Thus, analysis and other experimental operations are part of
this matrix of knowing and acting events that, together, constitute the process of experimental
inquiry.
Dewey reveals a generic pattern to experimental inquiry that widens its application beyond
the domain of experimental science. His five-step method of inquiry was intended to apply to
practical problems, or “problems of men,” not solely to more specialized problems encountered in
the laboratory. In the first edition of How We Think, Dewey spells out the five stages of experimental
inquiry:
Upon examination, each instance [of intelligent inquiry] reveals more or less clearly, five
logically distinct steps: (i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its location and definition; (iii) suggestion of
possible solution; (iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion; (v) further
observation and experimentation leading to its acceptance or rejection; that is, the conclusion
of belief or disbelief (MW 6:236).
Dewey’s examples of experimental inquiry include figuring out how to get to an appointment on
time, identifying the function of a pole on the front of a tugboat and determining why bubbles go
outside and inside of a cup once washed with hot water and placed upside-down on a kitchen
counter (MW 6:234-5). Conspicuously absent from these examples are many touchstone elements of
experimental inquiry in the social and hard sciences: (i) a research design, (ii) a measurement
instrument, (iii) a data collection process, (iv) a data analysis technique, and (v) a method of
generalizing data to a larger population. So, while encompassing experimental science, inquiry is
experimental in a more general sense, that is, it involves experimental operations that can be applied
to both common-sense and scientific problems: (i) observation, (ii) analysis, (iii) manipulation and (iv)
reflection upon the conditions and consequences of a problematic situation.

5
Though there is a generic pattern to inquiry, the five stages do not make experimental inquiry
a form of simple proceduralism or cognitive reductivism. Instead, inquiry is what Dewey calls an
“artful” process of reunifying a previously disrupted situation through the activity of creative
problem-solving. Though cognitively intense, the process of inquiry and experimentation can impart
valuable insights about the content of our felt, had or enjoyed (aesthetic) experiences. Dewey
observed that “the more delicate and complicated the work which it has to do, the more art
intervenes” (LW 10:354). Since the boundaries of a situation are vague, there will always be areas of
uncertain or unexplained experience left untouched by experimental inquiry. Still, experimental
science gives us reason for hope, reason to think that through technological innovations human
civilization will experience continual progress, even evolution. Larry Hickman (1998:167) concurs:
“In the short run, these instruments enable us to improve conditions that we deem unsatisfactory.
In the long run, they enable us to influence the course of our own evolution.” Instruments should
also be employed to improve the conditions of our democratic society, to, for instance, engage
citizens in the practice self-government, improve their education and enrich the aesthetic dimension
of their experience—that is, in order to advance the non-terminal end (what Dewey called an “end-
in-view”) of melioristic growth. In Dewey’s words, “[d]emocracy is a way of life controlled by a
working faith in the possibilities of human nature” (LW 14:226).
But then how does management relate to Dewey’s accounts of experimental inquiry and
democratic growth? Dewey identifies what most people have called ‘management’ with an ad-hoc
procedure or a best practices approach to problem solving: “So far as ability of control, of
management, was concerned, it amounted to rule-of-thumb procedure, to routine. If circumstances
resembled the past, it might work well enough; in the degree in which they deviated, failure was
likely” (MW 9:273, my emphasis). Dewey conceived instrumentalism, or the way in which we match
means to ends (or ends-in-view), taking into consideration both their functional fitness and social

6
value, as critical to managing our environment. Indeed, management involves pairing appropriate
tools or instruments with the problems before us. Nevertheless, identifying Deweyan inquiry with
management is a relatively recent phenomenon. “Dewey’s Pragmatic Instrumentalism is an
encouragement to ‘management,’” Larry Hickman (2007:143) declares, “an intelligent reworking of
what is unsatisfactory in order to render it more satisfactory.” On this interpretation, Dewey saw
little need to append the adjective scientific to the noun management, since the objective of science is
just to exert greater control over, to manage, our environment. In the professions, the need for
intelligent inquiry and management is especially pressing: “Farmer, mechanic, painter, musician,
writer, doctor, lawyer, merchant, captain of industry, administrator or manager, has constantly to
inquire what it is better to do next. Unless the decision reached is arrived at blindly and arbitrarily it
is obtained by gathering and surveying evidence appraised as to its weight and relevancy; and by
framing and testing plans of action in their capacity as hypotheses: that is, as ideas” (LW 12:162-3).
However, there is also a looming disanalogy between management and inquiry: while management
can connote excellence, it rarely implies the degree of rigor that inquiry, especially scientific inquiry,
does. Though not part of Dewey’s lexicon, scientific management might approximate some of the
virtues of scientific inquiry, yet still it suffers from the arbitrariness of what Dewey called a “rule-of-
thumb procedure.”
Nevertheless, since science enters into almost every area of our lives, whether with the hope
of something better (think of a cure for AIDs) or with the danger of much worse (think of human
cloning), intelligently managing how science is applied to our individual and collective existences
becomes incumbent, especially in one area above all others: education. According to Dewey, “even
the occupations of the household, agriculture, and manufacturing as well as transportation and
intercourse are instinct[ively tied] with applied science . . . [which is] why schooling should use these
pursuits so as to . . . enable persons to carry on their pursuits intelligently instead of blindly” (MW

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9:284). Likewise, Taylor and many of his followers thought that scientific management could be
extended into every sphere of life and every context where productivity matters, including the
kitchen, the farm, the factory and the classroom.
Taylor and the “One Best Way”
More recently, Taylor has come to represent the entire corporate system with all its
purported evils, not the least of which is the widely reviled practice of management consulting.
According to Kanigel (1997:19), “[w]hen young people during the 1960s sniped at the System, it was
in part the Taylor system itself, institutionalized in corporate America, that they opposed.” Historian
Jill Lepore’s (2009) recent article in The New Yorker, “Not So Fast,” could be viewed as a similar
indictment of Taylorism. She reviews Matthew Stewart’s (2009) book “The Management Myth,” in
which he compares Taylor’s manipulation of evidence to support his theories (Lepore summarizes,
“Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success”) to what
management consultants do today in advising Fortune 500 companies on how to reduce costs.
While many of Taylor’s contemporaries (for instance, Louis Brandeis and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth)
thought scientific management held the secret to perpetual social progress, comparisons of Taylor’s
methods with those of modern management consultants have cast Taylorism in a negative light (for
instance, time-motion studies are compared to consultants’ “two-handed regression” where data
points are hidden on a scatter plot so that it appears as if there is a clear correlation between two
variables).2 Indeed, Stewart’s critique echoes the findings of an earlier inquiry by Robert Hoxie
(1918:40), who found that in far too many cases consultants claiming to apply the principles of
scientific management were actually basing their recommendations on pseudoscientific hunches, not
scientific data. Still, in all fairness to the “father of scientific management,” we should suspend
judgment on its contemporary legacy, at least until we can more fully appreciate Taylorism as it was
originally conceived.

8
Taylor described scientific management as a “philosophy in industrial management.”3 He
saw its widespread adoption as a route to an improved democracy and social betterment. Taylor
(2005:64) declared that “[e]fficiency is the hope of democracy,” since it would give workers more
leisure time to participate in civic life, and “without any question, the large good . . . from scientific
management . . . come[s] to the worker.” This philosophical program can be distilled into four
straightforward principles: (i) there is just “one best way” to complete a job task, (ii) workers must be
selected scientifically to match the task they are to perform, (iii) workers must be paid as a function
of how efficiently they accomplish the job task, and (iv) congenial worker-management relations
result when managers ensure that workers understand the job task, are properly trained and agree to
submit to the experimentation required to determine the one best way (Spender and Kijne 1996:18-9,
Clair et al. 2008:136-7).4 Taylor (1998:9) insisted that “there is always one method and one
implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest. And this one best method and best
implement can only be discovered or developed through a scientific study and analysis of all of the
methods and implements in use, together with accurate, minute, motion and time study.”
In order to discover this one best way, Taylor conducted time-motion studies in three steps:
(i) the basic movements in a job were catalogued, (ii) baseline data for how much time each
movement takes was recorded, and (iii) a “standard time” or “quickest time” was experimentally
determined by recording the time it took someone one of the fastest workers, who Taylor called a
“first-rate” or “first class man,” to complete the task under optimal conditions (e.g. best tools, style
of movement, number of movements).5 While conducting in the time studies, Taylor would pay this
experimental subject higher wages to meet and exceed the standard. Andrea Gabor (2000:4)
comments a worker named “Schmidt” (probably a pseudonym) at the Bethlehem Steel Mill who
became the model for Taylor’s “first-rate” man: “Schmidt, according to Taylor, had just the ‘ox-like’
mentality needed to do the brutish physical labor [in this case, hauling bars of pig iron] that Taylor

9
demanded of his workers. Uncomplaining and apparently indefatigable, Schmidt met Taylor’s quota,
happy to collect a few cents extra pay at the end of each day.”6 In what resembles a kind of social
Darwinism, the standard set by Schmitt or any other first-rate man in Taylor’s time-motion studies
would then fix the quota for all other workers. According to Jonathan Tompkins (2005:74), “[u]nder
the Taylor system, only the strongest, quickest, or most dexterous tended to survive.”
For it to be effective, scientific management had to employ scientific method, not guesswork,
and be guided by experiment, not tradition.7 According to Taylor (1998: iv), “the best management
is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation.” One of
these rules was that if workers are not willing to adapt their behavior to Taylor’s method of “task
management,” then they would be subject to “enforced cooperation,” typically in the form of fines,
or if they still failed to conform, dismissal. The underlying normative theory was that by demanding
that workers achieve their best, scientific management would cultivate moral character. However,
Taylor did not want the theory of scientific management to take priority over the practice of good
management. So, he insisted that “at every step [it] has been an evolution, not a theory. In all cases
the practice has preceded the theory not succeeded it” (Taylor 2005:63). As more experiments were
conducted, Taylor and his disciples’ recommendations evolved.8 For instance, Taylor opposed the
dominant scheme for rewarding and punishing workers during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century: viz. the traditional piece-work system. As worker productivity increases,
management inevitably reduces the pay per piece; so workers respond accordingly, decreasing their
output or soldiering.9 So, according to Taylor’s (1985:5) critique, the traditional piece-work system
was inefficient because “it is against their [the workers’] best interests . . . to turn out each day as
much works as possible.” Consequently, Taylor argued that pay-based incentives for workers whose
quantity and quality of output exceeds the quota established through the time-motion studies
motivates and maximizes productivity.10 The problem with this alternative—often referred to as a

10
“differential piece-rate system”—is that most workers and managers perceived it as being too harsh,
especially in the case where the worker missed the quota by a small margin. Due to this
shortcoming, Taylor’s follower, Henry Gantt, developed a task and bonus system in which bonuses
started at the average worker’s quantity and quality of output and increased accordingly (Haber
1964:44, Thompson 2005:75).
Even Taylor confessed that the ultimate test of scientific management’s value would be its
results and how these results compared with those produced by alternative systems of industrial
management. Similar to William James’ thesis that the truth of an idea is its cash-value, Taylor
(2005:70) warned that “if scientific management does not pay in dollar and cents, it is the rankest
kind of nonsense.” While confidently declaring that “the old style of management has not a ghost of
a chance in competition with the principles of scientific management,” toward the end of his
lifetime, it appeared that scientific management would not win the competition (Taylor 2005:65).
With an onslaught of strikes at several plants employing Taylor’s system and criticisms from the
American Federation of Labor, Congress held a series of hearings investigating whether Taylorism
was responsible for greater worker unrest. By 1915, the year of Taylor’s death, the time and motion
studies that had become the trademark of Taylor’s system were banned by Federal law from
government facilities (Clair et al. 2008:137). Nevertheless, some of scientific management’s
principles persist in modern business and industrial practices, such as the standardized employee
selection techniques employed by Pic ‘n Pay Stores, Toyota Corporation and General Motors, as well
as a version of the Gantt-Taylor task-bonus system still in use at Lincoln Electric Company (Clair et
al. 2008:141-2).

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Dewey’s Critique of Taylorism
Not surprisingly, union organizers, many members of the U.S. Congress and a large section
of the American public demonized Taylor and Taylorism during the Progressive era. Andrea Gabor
(2000:7) characterizes the general tenor of the complaints made by “Taylor’s detractors":
. . . Taylorism was the essence of the mechanistic, alienating character of modern
industrialism. Under Taylor, standardization and managerial control, professionalism
and scientific method were championed as never before. A new cadre of slide rule-
and stop-watch-wielding experts commandeered the factory floor.
Dewey’s critique of scientific management did not just echo the widespread sentiments of his times.
Similar to Taylor, Dewey regarded science as a superior method for addressing social problems and
recommended its application in many tradition-bound areas of life. In Democracy and Education, he
conceded that divisions of labor and standardized work procedures are inevitable features of modern
life insofar as these innovations make industrial production more efficient. What he sought in
addition was a labor force that derived intrinsic rewards from its work: “Efficiency in production
often demands division of labor. But it reduces to a mechanical routine unless workers see the
technical, intellectual, and social relationships involved in what they do, and engage in their work
because of the motivation furnished by such perceptions” (MW 9:91). In other words, the worker
should be motivated to labor efficiently not by some extrinsic rewards or punishments, such as a
quota system, piece-work incentive or performance-based work contracts, but because he takes
satisfaction in the work itself. Dewey added: “The tendency to reduce such things as efficiency of
activity and scientific management to purely technical externals is evidence of the one-sided
stimulation of thought given to those in control of industry—who supply its aims.” The captains of
industry overemphasize “purely technical externals”—time-study analyses, dissection of jobs into
more manageable phases, standardization of work processes and the creation of the perfect pay-for-
performance formula—and underemphasize the integration of workers into the workplace. Here,

12
Dewey identifies the culprit of worker malaise and alienation: scientific management, particularly in
its tendency to displace the worker’s objectives with its own objective of increasing physical
efficiency.
Unfortunately, Dewey did not single out Taylor as the target of his critique. One reason
might have been that while he disputed the specifics, he felt sympathetic to the generally reformist
spirit of Taylor’s project. Dewey did disagree that external rewards and punishments were necessary
to motivate employees to perform the job task more efficiently. Since physical efficiency is not the
sole aim of industrial management, monetary incentives should not be the only instrument for
motivating workers. Besides physical efficiency, the other aim is what Dewey called ‘social
efficiency’: workers comprehend the significance of their vocation and derive intrinsic rewards from
laboring to achieve a shared objective.11 In a socially efficient workplace, employees feel that their
participation is not just a matter of subordinating their own personal desires to the desires of
management in exchange for a wage. Rather, work offers them opportunities for growth and release
of their potentialities, and as such it is more than just the sum total of their individual movements.
Moreover, unlike physical efficiency, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make interpersonal
comparisons of social efficiency. In the words of Taylor’s protégé, Sanford Thompson, “the
personal equations of different men vary greatly” (cited in Gabor 2000:17). When social efficiency is
achieved, those who labor come to understand and appreciate the relationship between their own
work, the work of their fellow laborers and management, as well as the value of their work to the
greater society.
Dewey also criticized Taylor’s thesis that there is “one best way” for making a work process
more efficient. To recall, for Taylor, the optimal method involves surveying the current practices
and standards, conducting a time-motion study, determining the optimum practice and standard time
and then testing the new method or procedure to verify that it is the best. Dewey disputed this

13
monistic account. He warned against any theory in which “it is assumed that there is one fixed
method . . . [resulting in] [m]echanical woodenness . . . which separates mind from activity motivated
by a purpose” (MW 9:177). A plurality of methods, not Taylor’s “one best way,” better achieves the
needed flexibility for industrial growth and progress. Similar to Marx’s critique of industrial
production, Dewey complains that the worker becomes increasingly distanced from his work when
managers and planners focus exclusively on efficiency of movement. The physical motions of the
workers can be made more efficient, but the result is that workers never develop an appreciation of
their place or function in the entire industrial process. The physical activity of laboring becomes
cognitively fixed and dead—in Marx’s terminology, alienated. Instead, Dewey claims that multiple
methods for increasing productivity should be flexibly tailored to workers’ needs; feedback from the
labor force should be elicited; workers should be encouraged to understand their role in the
industrial process; and, thus, the result is that they will feel a greater sense of ownership, a
harmonious union between their own bodies and minds, as well as between themselves and
managers.
While Dewey never named Taylor, the object of his critique in Democracy and Education was
undoubtedly Taylor’s brand of scientific management. Indirectly arguing against Taylorism, Dewey
alleged that its definition of intelligence is too narrow: “Intelligence is narrowed to the factors
concerned with technical production and marketing of goods. No doubt, a very acute and intense
intelligence in these narrow lines can be developed, but the failure to take into account the significant
social factors means none the less an absence of mind, and a corresponding distortion of emotional
life” (MW 9:91). Intelligence, in other words, becomes narrowly commodified, an instrumentally
rational method for refining technology, increasing productivity and making goods with increased
margins of profit. In addition, Dewey deploys an indirect argument against Taylor’s concept of the
“first-rate man” in what he calls the “dogma of social predestination”: “[It] assume[s] that some are

14
to continue to be wage earners under economic conditions like the present [ . . . ] and [the social
efficiency of the laboring class of wage earners] is surely desirable on all counts—not merely for the
sake of the production of better goods at less cost, but for the greater happiness found in work”
(MW 9:327). If management can motivate—or better yet, empower—workers to derive intrinsic
rewards from their work, the outcome will be “greater happiness found in the work,” not just “the
production of better goods at less cost.” In short, Dewey sees the “labor problem” and its solution
in starkly different terms than Taylor does. For Taylor, it is a matter of finding the right fit between
the type of worker and the kind of work (for instance, between the Schmidts of the world and the
jobs that require brute-like physical labor), and forcing the worker to adopt the correct method, the
one that optimizes his overall productive output. For Dewey, the labor problem and its resolution
demand mind/body integration and social efficiency, not the mind/body dualism and physical
efficiency that Taylor endorsed.
Scientific Management in the Public Sector—From Taylor to Dewey
Although time and motion studies were legally banned from government industries between
1915 and 1949, Taylor (1998: iv) claimed in The Principles of Scientific Management that “the same
principles [of scientific management] can be applied with equal force to all social activities . . .
[including] our governmental departments.” Indeed, prior to the ban, Taylor’s followers had applied
the principles to weapons manufacturers that contracted with the Army and shipyards that supplied
the Navy (Nelson 1980:154-5). Also, in 1911, when Philadelphia’s mayor requested that Taylor
manage the city’s public works, he referred Morris Cooke (1915), a Taylorite who saw the need to
transform scientific management as the context shifts from the factory to the public agency. Instead
of focusing on optimal production and physical efficiency, the emphasis of scientific management in
the public sector shifted to agency responsiveness and rigorous inquiry to determine the most cost-
effective way to deliver public services. According Jonathan Tompkins (2005:85), “Cooke viewed

15
scientific management as a vehicle for fulfilling the promises of democracy.” Still, scientific
management suffers from an inability to treat employees humanely, with respect and dignity, and in
this respect Dewey’s scientific approach to managing a healthy democratic workplace proves
superior to Taylor’s scientific management, and even Cooke’s version of it.
Indeed, Dewey’s approach aligns more closely with what in organizational theory is called
human relations theory. Like Dewey, human relations theory recommends a motivational strategy
linked to extrinsic rewards, but distinctly different from the monetary incentives Taylor
recommended, viz. “attention, praise, and approval given by the [supervisor and] . . . from forming
social bonds and enjoying the approval of their peers” (Tompkins 2005:177). Dewey explains why
extrinsic rewards and punishments are ineffective motivational tools: “The course of action is not
intrinsically satisfying; it is a mere means for avoiding some penalty, or for gaining some reward at its
conclusion. What is inherently repulsive is endured for the sake of averting something still more
repulsive or of securing a gain hitched on by others” (MW 9:212). Human relations theory’s
commitment to the idea of creating a positive work environment can be traced back to Elton Mayo’s
(1923) trenchant critique of industrial society. Due to the breakdown of societal norms, growing
anomie, and disintegrating social ties in modern society, otherwise normal individuals develop small
irrationalities that, taken together, cause deep divisions in their relations with each other—a process
that Mayo terms “social disorganization” (421). With increased division of labor and less control
over their work environment (as well as the products of their labor), workers are lulled into a reverie
of boredom, restlessness, and discontent that expresses itself in constant outbursts of violence, often
directed towards management (e.g. strikes and workplace conflicts). In contrast, human relations
theory requires the accommodation of working conditions (e.g. policy, technology, and modes of
supervisor-employee interaction) to employee needs and desires. The result is a positive work

16
environment that promotes employee morale, collaboration, and motivation, and reduces isolation,
absenteeism and turnover.
Another tenet of human relations theory is that supervisors should form close personal
relationships with their subordinates as a means of reducing management-worker friction. When
difficulties do arise (e.g. over working conditions) and workers lodge complaints, management can
effectively address these concerns in advance of a full-scale conflict because of their intimate
understanding of the workers’ psychological needs and dispositions (e.g. wants and beliefs).
Moreover, sympathetic supervision can motivate employees to achieve higher levels of performance.
In Mayo’s interpretation of the Hawthorne studies, a series of experiments on working conditions
and worker productivity at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works, he found evidence
that the personal attention supervisors paid to the needs of workers resulted in increased morale and
productivity. In Fritz Roethlisberger’s (2005:166) parallel analysis of the Hawthorne studies, he
concluded that “the worker is a social animal and should be treated as such.” Treating workers as
separable mechanisms, replaceable parts in an industrial machine, as Taylor did, only perpetuates the
old pattern of social disorganization. Treating employees as “social animals,” in contrast, breaks the
pattern. Supervisors employ regular interviewing, counseling, attentive listening and supportive
communication techniques to allay the fears and worries of employees, thereby defusing the tensions
that foment worker unrest and union strikes. Therefore, the softer managerial style associated with
human relations theory tends to produce a more content and peaceful workforce.
A third commitment of human relations theory is to the development of informal and
collaborative work groups as well as to workplace democracy. Building on Mary Parker Follet’s
work, human relations scholars, such as Mayo and Roethlisberger, argued that social disorganization
and worker malcontent could be overcome if the worker were better integrated with the entirety of
her work environment. One way to accomplish this integration is to be more aware of the

17
distinction, introduced by Roethlisberger and Dickson, between formal and informal organization.
Formal organization, on the one hand, refers to all the official structures created by managers and
organizational designers, from the organization’s policies and regulations to its departments and sub-
units. Informal organization, on the other hand, signifies “the personal relationships and patterns of
interaction that develop among individuals at work that are not intended products of the formal
organization” (Tompkins 2005:166). In the domain of informal organization, employees will form
social groups and develop group norms in order to regulate their social relations and satisfy their
collective needs. While Taylor and his followers understood these informal groups as sources of
inefficiency, human relations theorists identified them as fonts of worker cooperation and solidarity.
As such, they could potentially be harnessed by management to achieve the formal organization’s
goals. One byproduct of this faith in informal organization was the emergence of participatory
workplace decision making and industrial democracy, in which managers involve employees in a
collaborative process of directing the organization towards its objectives. As a result of their
participation, employees feel that they have a genuine stake in the formal organization and are thus
less likely to view management as an adversary, and more likely to view it as a partner.
The fourth and final tenet of human relations theory states that employees are motivated by
the approval of their co-workers and the support of their supervisors. When management considers
the needs and wants of employees and solicits their input in making organizational decisions, it
effectively empowers them. Likewise, when workers develop a sense of solidarity and teamwork,
they seek to become more productive as a collective unit. This phenomenon in which workers seek
twin instrumental goods—one, group approbation and, two, sympathetic leadership—was
demonstrated in the assembly test room experiments of the Hawthorne studies. In these
experiments, “assemblers appeared to respond positively both to the attention, praise, and approval
given by the assembly room observer and to the extrinsic rewards they received from forming social

18
bonds and enjoying the approval of peers” (Tompkins 2005:177). Affirming the value of employee
empowerment and intrinsic rewards, Dewey states that “the end should be intrinsic to the action; it
should be its end—a part of its own course. Then it affords a stimulus to effort very different from
that arising from the thought of results which have nothing to do with the intervening action” (MW
9:212). So, the focus on intrinsic rewards and non-monetary instrumental goods differentiates
human relations theory from scientific management. Nevertheless, some of Taylor’s contemporary
critics doubt that the emergence of human relations theory has accomplished more than to install a
thin veneer over “the human machinery” of Taylorism.12
Conclusion
So far, I have treated Taylorism and scientific management as if they were virtually
synonymous. Of course, they were (and are) not. Progressive reformers in the early twentieth-
century, including John Dewey and members of the Taylor Society (especially in the 1920s after
Taylor’s death), wished to see both greater efficiency and industrial democracy realized together in
the workplace. While they did not share Taylor’s obsession to control every aspect of the shop floor
or his predilection for treating workers as “cogs” in an industrial machine, they nevertheless desired
to see workplace conditions improved. Such progress requires that they be managed on the basis of
what results from rigorous scientific inquiry, not from a’priori reasoning, force, tradition or
guesswork. One key difference between Dewey and Taylor is that Taylor had an aversion to theory,
which often impelled him to, as previously mentioned, prioritize practice over theory and, at times,
to oversimplify the theoretical foundations of scientific management (Tompkins 2005:77). The
outcome was a theory that Taylor’s opponents could easily criticize, channel public outrage against
and even lampoon to the detriment of Taylor and his brand of scientific management. If Taylor’s
mind had been more inclined to theorize (as Dewey’s was), then perhaps he would have also
developed the principles of scientific management in a direction more consonant with a Deweyan

19
commitment to democratic growth. While this is highly speculative, Karen Evans’ view of public
management might capture what a joint Taylor-Dewey view of public management would look like.
She writes: “Public management in a democratic society presents conditions wherein both kinds of
tools [theoretical and practical] have important and reinforcing tasks. The context of the community
of inquirers as well as the contributions of both theoretical and practical application can enhance the
ability of public managers to find and serve the public good” (2000:320).

20
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Notes
1 Citations are to Dewey (1996), The Collected Works of John Dewey: Electronic Edition, edited by L.A. Hickman, following the
conventional method, LW (Later Works) or MW (Middle Works) or EW (Early Works), volume: page number. For
example, MW 10:354 refers to the Middle Works, volume 10, page 354.
2 In Taylor’s defense, Jonathan Tompkins (2005:76) has argued that the difficulty of implementing Taylor’s system, which
took three to five years and extensive resources, unintentionally generated opportunities for management/efficiency
consultants who promised fast and easy results.
3 Cited in Clair et al. (2008:140). Taylor had other names for scientific management, including ‘functional management’,
‘scientific time study’, and ‘task management.’ However, the grand hope that scientific management would resolve many
social problems has led some recent commentators to invoke Taylor’s description of it as a philosophy, in Jonathan
Tompkins’ (2005:70) case, calling it a “social philosophy.”
4 Taylor (1998:10) stated that “close, intimate, personal cooperation between the management and the men is of the
essence of modern scientific or task management.” Sudhir Kakar (1970:20) comments that “[t]hroughout his adult life,
Taylor insisted that scientific management was the only system which would make for peace and harmony between the
management and the workers and that this was its only raison d’être.”

22
5 According to Samuel Haber (1964:40), “[t]he ‘scientific’ nub of Taylor’s program was the reduction of work to
component elements or ‘elementary operations’ which were to be fixed, timed with stop watch, and reassembled when
needed to provide the method and measurements of any new task.” After his break with Taylorism, Frank Gilbreth
would criticize Taylor and his followers for “accepting perfunctory and inexact stop-watch methods” (41).
6 Andrea Gabor and Daniel Nelson disagree about the significance of the Schmidt story. Gabor (2000:4) thinks that it
shows the irascible quality of Taylor’s personality and how out of touch he was with human nature. Nelson (1980:172)
downplays the significance of the story, claiming that it misrepresents “the character of scientific management.”
However, it was Taylor’s model of the “first-rate man,” which is so closely associated with the story of Schmidt, which
became a major point of controversy in the 1912 Congressional House Committee to Investigate the Taylor and Other
Systems of Shop Management hearings. Taylor endured hours of incessant questioning and berating by labor leaders and
Congress members concerned that Taylor’s concept of a “first-class man” was another vicious form of social Darwinism.
For an account of these hearings, see Kanigel (1997:1-6).
7 Taylor (1998:4) declared that the principles of scientific management are meant to “show the enormous gains which
would result from the substitution by our workmen of scientific for rule-of-thumb methods.”
8 Similar to scientific method itself, Taylor’s (2005:63) approach was both fallible and flexible: “All men . . . who are in
any way connected with scientific management are ready to abandon any scheme, and theory in favor of anything else
that could be found that is better. There is nothing in scientific management that is fixed.” Taylor’s three main disciples
were (i) Carl G. Barth, (ii) Frank B. Gilbreth and (iii) Henry Gatt. See Haber’s (196431-50) account of each. Daniel
Nelson (1980:142) notes that “[t]he actual impact of his [Taylor’s] methods . . . depended on his disciples’ activities rather
than his. As a result there were variations and differences in emphasis growing out of the disciples’ personal styles and
perspective.”
9 Gabor (2000:13) explains: “[W]orkers developed their own system for averting rate cuts and the need to work harder to
earn the same amount of pay. [ . . .] [T]hey scaled back their output, in effect creating their own unofficial quota.”
10 Haber (1964:27) describes the advantages of Taylor’s alternative to the traditional piece-rate system: “The differential
piece rate was to give the worker a high daily wage and the employer a low labor cost per piece. For society as a whole,
the increased production would lower prices and raise the general standard of living.”
11 Though Dewey’s discussion of social efficiency in Democracy and Education is mainly in the context of education, it can
be extended to an industrial context. Dewey contrasts social efficiency and social control. He writes: “The error [in
identifying social efficiency with social control] is in implying that we must adopt measures of subordination rather than
of utilization to secure efficiency [or harmony]. The doctrine is rendered adequate when we recognize that social
efficiency is attained not by negative constraint but by positive use of native individual capacities in occupations having a
social meaning” (MW 9:125).
12 Harry Braverman notes that with the rise of Taylorism, “practitioners of ‘human relations’ and ‘industrial technology’
are [merely] the maintenance crew for the human machinery. Cited in Kanigel (1997:17).