Editing Scientific management (section)

== Pursuit of economic efficiency ==
Flourishing in the late 19th and early 20th century, scientific management built on earlier pursuits of [[economic efficiency]]. While it was prefigured in the folk wisdom of [[wikt:thrift#Noun|thrift]], it favored [[Empiricism|empirical methods]] to determine efficient procedures rather than perpetuating established traditions. Thus it was followed by a profusion of successors in applied science, including [[time and motion study]], the [[Efficiency Movement]] (which was a broader cultural echo of scientific management's impact on business managers specifically), [[Fordism]], [[operations management]], [[operations research]], [[industrial engineering]], [[management science]], [[manufacturing engineering]], [[logistics]], [[business process management]], [[business process reengineering]], [[lean manufacturing]], and [[Six Sigma]]. There is a fluid continuum linking scientific management with the later fields, and the different approaches often display a high degree of compatibility.

Taylor rejected the notion, which was universal in his day and still held today, that the trades, including manufacturing, were resistant to analysis and could only be performed by [[craft production]] methods. In the course of his empirical studies, Taylor examined various kinds of [[manual labor]]. For example, most bulk materials handling was manual at the time; [[material handling equipment]] as we know it today was mostly not developed yet. He looked at [[shovel]]ing in the unloading of [[railroad car]]s full of [[ore]]; lifting and carrying in the moving of [[pig iron|iron pigs]] at steel mills; the manual inspection of [[ball (bearing)|bearing balls]]; and others. He discovered many concepts that were not widely accepted at the time. For example, by observing workers, he decided that labor should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue, either physical (as in shoveling or lifting) or mental (as in the ball inspection case). Workers were allowed to take more rests during work, and productivity increased as a result.{{sfn|Taylor|1911|p={{page needed|date=January 2022}}}}

Subsequent forms of scientific management were articulated by Taylor's disciples, such as [[Henry Gantt]]; other engineers and managers, such as [[Benjamin S. Graham]]; and other theorists, such as [[Max Weber]]. Taylor's work also contrasts with other efforts, including those of [[Henri Fayol]] and those of [[Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.|Frank Gilbreth, Sr.]] and [[Lillian Moller Gilbreth]] (whose views originally shared much with Taylor's but later diverged in response to Taylorism's inadequate handling of human relations).