ABSTRACT
Scientific management rests on the fundamental economic principle that harmony of interests exists between employers and workers.
(Robert Hoxie)
Efficiency, like hygiene, is a state, an ideal, not a method. (Harrington Emerson)
In 1886, Henry Robinson Towne, co-owner of the lock-makers Yale & Towne, stood before his colleagues of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and delivered a paper entitled ‘The Engineer as an Economist’. He stated his position bluntly. American industry was in a mess. There was no professional management, poor organization and control, a great deal of waste and often incendiary labour relations. ‘The management of works’, he said, ‘is almost unorganized, is almost without literature, has no organ or medium for the interchange of experience, and is without association or organization of any kind’.1
