ABSTRACT
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who developed methods to improve industrial efficiency. His contributions combined the ideas of homogeneous tasks, specialised workforce training, the planning, and instruction of tasks based upon the explicit division of labour and management, thus encouraging assembly line processes for large scale-production. In an editorial of 1915 titled ‘Modern Industry and Craft Skill’, the International Molders Journal offered a refutation of ‘scientific management’ and explained the value of crafts. The one great asset of the wage worker has been his craftsmanship. Scientific management possibly encouraged links between art, architecture, and design, based on the concepts of engineering, rationality, and order, but at what expense? The impact of scientific management on design was to bear considerable fruit in the early decades of the twentieth century. The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employe.
