ABSTRACT
Frederick Winslow Taylor is best known as the founding father of scientific management. In his own time, and for several decades after his death, he was the world’s most famous management guru, his ideas discussed and implemented not only in the USA and Western Europe but also in many other countries. At the same time, his approach to management has been violently criticised as dehumanising and deskilling, and political economists from the 1950s onwards virtually demonised Taylor for this. More recently a reappraisal of Taylor has begun which emphasises the human elements of scientific management and shifts part of the blame for the faults of his system onto those who implemented it. Though it has been discredited as a total system, many elements of scientific management remain visible in practice to this day.
