Suchergebnisse

This volume comprises three works originally published separately as Shop Management (1903), The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) and Testimony Before the Special House Committee (1912). Taylor aimed at reducing conflict between managers and workers by using scientific thought to develop new principles and mechanisms of management. In contrast to ideas prevalent at the time, Taylor maintained that the workers' output could be increased by standardizing tasks and working conditions, with high pay for success and loss in case of failure. Scientific Management controversially suggested

Drawing upon a wide range of historical sources, Chris Nyland argues that the Taylorist system of work organisation has been too hastily dismissed by Marxist and other commentators from the left. The author thus suggests that socialists should re-evaluate the potentialities of scientific management, and hat the techniques of planning and systematic work scheduling for the benefit of the working class.

In the last few years, the controversy over the economic history of slavery has centered about two positions. On the one hand, Genovese has argued that the slave mode of production was fundamentally antagonistic to the bourgeois mode and that the conflicts between the two systems doomed slavery to a nineteenth-century grave. On the other hand, Conrad and Meyer spawned many studies which, on the whole, denied that any specifically economic difficulties resulted from the fact that the American south was based on slave labor. Against Genovese's original claim that "the material basis of the planters' power was giving way," the statistical evidence indicated that the profits of the slave plantation were as high as those on non-slave business investments, and that the diffusion of technological changes was rapid enough to cause a rate of productivity increase equal to that of all but the most rapidly growing sectors of the free economy. Sheer volume supplemented the elegance of the early discussion and our knowledge of the slave economy expanded considerably.