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Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators by Helen Marot
page 29 of 106 (27%)
how to secure labor's maximum productivity without waste of time or
energy. It is scientific as the manager's state of mind towards the
physical and psychological reactions of the workers is one of inquiry
and a readiness to accept, as facts of mechanical science are
accepted, the reaction of the workers. A scientific manager, or
engineer as he is often called, bears the same relation to the labor
force in a factory that an electrical engineer bears to the electrical
equipment. If his attention to the emotional reaction of the workers
is less detached than scientific standards require, it must be
remembered that he is trying to make adjustments which must first of
all meet definite business conditions. Where the reactions of the
workers interfere with the whole scheme of business administration,
(and interfere they ceaselessly do), he has to substitute measures
which are not strictly speaking scientific. On these occasions he
adopts humanitarian schemes, which are generally spoken of as welfare
work. It is the introduction of these schemes which look like a "slop
over" from science to charity, that makes it difficult for outsiders
to tell just what scientific management is and what it is not.

Mr. Frederick W. Taylor, the founder of scientific management, was
capable of scientific detachment in studying working men in relation
to the specific job. He was able more notably than others had been
before him, and more than many who have followed him, to extend the
impersonal state of mind, which he enjoyed in the study of inorganic
energy, to his study of human energy. Mr. Taylor's interest did not
emanate from sympathy with labor in its hardships; his interest was
centered in an effort to conserve and apply labor energy with maximum
economy for wealth production. Mr. Taylor awakened the consciousness
of industrial managers to the fact that the energy of workers like the
power of machinery is subject to laws. He demonstrated that it was
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