1908. With the help of this model, Ford became America’s largest automobile producer and vendor. Nevertheless throughout the 1930s Ford began losing business to his competitors, mainly because they were slow introducing new models of automobiles every year. (Encarta, 1998)Scientific Management and Fordism created a new type of ‘revolution’. The promise of massive increases in productivity led to the following of Fords and Taylor’s models of management all over the world. Britain never had a scientific management movement like that in America, and the leading British engineering journals in the early 20th century revealed Taylorism receiving attention, much of it positive. Engineering became an unqualified supporter of scientific management, only The Engineer, a journal of engineering at the time, maintained sustained hostility to Taylorism declaring it was unfair and inhuman and not "sportsmanlike." The Engineer criticised the separation of workers thinking in their jobs from doing their jobs and described Taylorism as "scientific management gone mad. “ (Whitson, 1997)Another organisation that followed both the American models of Taylor and Ford, was The Reichskuratorium fur Wirtschaftkichkeit (RKW) founded in 1921. This huge Berlin-based electro-technical and machine-constructing conglomerate strove to implement measures of industrial and organisational efficiency in Germany in the inter-war era. RKW’s aim was to “implement technical and organisational measures of industrial, and economic efficiency, an organization devoted to industry; efficiency, and production standardization.” (Shearer, 1997, p. 569)In modern times, firms have attempted to reconfigure work places and production systems using flat hierarchies and lean production systems in contrast to Scientific and Fordist management. Managers presume that these sorts of changes will enable firms to achieve flexibility, seen by m...
