ABSTRACT

The Industrial Revolution turned people from handicraftsmen and unscientific subsistence farmers into machine tenders, product assemblers, and paper shufflers. Besides serving as a sampling of the kind of developments, they are specific sparks which have helped touch off the beginning of what some have termed the "third work revolution", in a series which began with the Industrial Revolution and continued with the revolution of scientific management. New enterprises were generally the quickest to adopt the new philosophy, one of the first and most illustrious being the Ford Motor Company, which embraced Frederick Winslow Taylor's thinking as it built itself around the scientific practices as standardized operations, time-and-motion studies, fragmented work, and continuous assembly. Taylor's goal became efficiency, and to achieve it, he reorganized things at the plant so that each man's work was simplified, fragmented, and highly supervised. He invented the time-and-motion study still so popular in the industrial world.