Special Book Review Section on the Classics of Management

Introduction Allen C. Bluedom, Guest Editor University of Missouri, Columbia

When you receive this issue of the Review, it will be 100 years almost to the day since management began as a discipline. On May 26, 1886, Henry Towne presented the paper, "The Engineer as an Economist" to a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (Bedeian, 1985). While it is always arbitrary to identify so precisely anything as nebulous as the specific event that gave birth to an entire discipline, in this case the management historians have done their job well; Towne's paper made a resounding call for both management research and education. He followed up this appeal by using his office (President of A.S.M.E.) and his influence to promote the study of management. Of particular note is Towne's support of fellow A.S.M.E. member, Frederick Taylor, and his work on scientific management (Urwick, 1956, pp. 25-26). One hundred years have now passed, but how far has the field advanced? Without debating whether management can ever truly be a science (this is a separate issue), the centennial of the management discipline should give us pause to ask: Do we genuinely know more about management today than was known 100 years ago? And if we do know more, how much more? These questions cannot be answered without understanding what knowledge existed when investigators, deliberately and systematically, began to study and write about management. For this reason, we present these reviews of the works of eight pioneers: Frederick W. Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Mary Parker Follett, Henri Fayol, Chester I. Barnard, F.J. Roethlisberger, and William J. Dickson. Collectively, their
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principal writings span the first forty years of this century, the formative years of the management discipline. By no means does their work constitute everything of value, or even the bulk of what was produced during this period. However, their work is considered to be a major part of the fovindation from which modern management has grown. To gauge how far we have come, several issues were kept in mind as we read the books and wrote the reviews: 1. What of the book's content is valid and valuable within the context of current management knowledge? 2. What of the book's content is not valuable or valid given current management knowledge? 3. What has been lost or forgotten that is contained in the book? Do we misattribute these ideas to later writers? 4. What has been misinterpreted through generations of secondary citations concerning the book's contents? The specific answers to these questions are found in the following reviews, but some general answers apply to these works collectively. Most of the content that was examined is surprisingly valid; very little can be considered "disproved" by work that has followed it. Despite the quality of these writers' ideas, a disappointing amount has been forgotten, ignored, and misinterpreted over the generations. It is fair to conclude that management has experienced genuine growth since the pioneers established a foundation, but it has not grown nearly as much as they had hoped it would or we would like to believe it has. Far too often we have forgotten, ignored, and misunderstood the discipline's founders. By doing so, we have wasted their efforts as well as our own. The efforts of the reviewers for this project have definitely not been wasted, and I want to recognize both the quality of their work and the enthusiasm they brought to it. Daniel Brass reviewed the works of the Gilbreths and Diane Ferry wrote about the collected works of Mary

Parker FoUett. Nancy Carter reviewed Henri Fayol's major book and Tom Keon reviewed the book that made Chester Barnard famous. The final review, written by Dennis Organ, discusses Roethlisberger and Dickson's account of the Hawthorne studies, and it is followed by a comprehensive list of the references cited from the introduction of this section through all of the reviews. We begin with Frederick Taylor's major works on scientific management.

Scientific Management (comprising Shop Management, The Principles of Scientific Management, and Testimony Before the Special House Committee), by Frederick Winslow Taylor. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947, xvi -f 638 pp.
Reviewed by Allen C. Bluedom, Department of Management, University of Missouri, Columbia, Columbia, MO. Scientific Management is a collection of Frederick Taylor's three most extensive published explanations of scientific management. The first. Shop Management, was originally presented to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1903 and was published in that Society's Transactions and later (1911) was reproduced in book form; the second. The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911; and the third was Taylor's testimony in 1912 before a special committee of the House of Representatives formed "to investigate the Taylor and other systems of shop management." Thus, this collection provides the most convenient and thorough explanation of "the Taylor System" extant in Taylor's own words. Because the pagination in this collection repeats that of the original selections, the following labels will be used to cite material in the collection: SM (1903) for Shop Management, PSM (1911) for The Principles of Scientific Management, and Testimony (1912) for Taylor's testimony before the House Committee.

A great deal of redundancy exists among the three selections. Of the three. Shop Management provides the most thorough and detailed description of scientific management as Taylor advocated it. The Principles of Scientific Management is little more than a condensed version of Shop Management, although it does contain the controversial conversation between Taylor and Schmidt concerning the pig-iron loading experiments at Bethlehem Steel (see Bluedorn, Keon, & Carter, 1985; Locke, 1982 and Wrege&Perroni, 1974 for material on the dispute over Taylor's account of this "experiment'). Taylor's Testimony Before the Special House Committee is a major supplement to Taylor's earlier descriptions of scientific management. Since Taylor did little more in his opening statement than repeat his earlier writing, it offers little new to readers familiar with either SM or PSM. Of value is Taylor's cross-examination (January 27, 30, 1912) by the committee after he concluded his opening statement. The members of the committee asked Taylor many of the same questions we would ask Taylor today. That the members of a congressional committee would ask the same questions 74 years ago suggests some fundamental similarities, even continuities, between Taylor's era and our own. In the foreword Henry Towne wrote for SM, we see a statement of both the dominant problem facing American business (particularly manufacturing) at the time and its solution; a statement as familiar to the contemporary reader as if it had appeared on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
We are justly proud of the high wage rates which prevail throughout our country, and jealous of any interference with them by the products of the cheaper labor of other countries. To maintain this condition, to strengthen our control of home markets, and, above all, to broaden our opportunities in foreign markets where we must compete with the products of other industrial nations, we shoiild welcome and encourage every influence tending to increase the efficiency of our productive processes (Taylor, 1903, p. 10).

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