s doing manual labour. It is not likely to be applied in its purest form, although, it does make a template for a good number of job design work throughout the twentieth century. In a typical manufacturing firm one will see scientific management techniques on the shop floor while bureaucratic management would be applied in the office areas. Fredrick Winslow Taylor originally developed this theory during the early years of this century. Taylor was an American engineer who established the foundations of the process of work management. The reason why his ideas were considered a science was his use of time and motion study techniques. He based his work upon the accurate and scientific study of unit times. His aim was to increase productivity by increasing the performance of workers by selecting manual tasks and fragmenting them into their simplest and smallest components. Taylor is best known for his book, The Principles of Scientific Management, which was published in 1911. This book explained that in order to increase the productivity of labour, it was necessary to highlight the national loss being incurred through inefficiency. Systematic management could remedy this inefficiency and that the best management was a true science and rested upon a foundation of clearly defined laws, rules, and principles. Taylor was appalled by the inefficiency of industrial practices and set out to demonstrate how managers and workers could both benefit by adopting his scientific approach. At the turn of the century in North America, managers expected their employees either to posses the appropriate skills for the work they were doing or to learn them from those who were around them. Notions of systematic job specifications, clearly established responsibilities, and training needs analysis were all unknown. It was Taylor’s plan to change this. He argued that mental and manual work should be separated. Management should specialize in planning and orga...
