SBUS10040 Foundations of Management Thought

Bachelor of Commerce International, University College Dublin

Tutorial CRN: 74866

Tutor Name: Carolin Grampp

Student Name: Brian Allen

Student Number: 12459812

Submission Deadline: 7th November 2013

Essay Title: critique scientific management-as promoted by Frederick Taylor- and rational legal bureaucracy-as described and analysed by Max Weber- highlighting how they are both outcomes of enlightenment thinking. Your essay should draw on the assigned readings, as appropriate, from week two to week seven.

Word count: 1000

“By submitting your work via this SafeAssign link you declare that all materials included in this submission are product of your own work and that due acknowledgement have been given in the text and in the bibliography to ALL sources, be they printed, electronic or personal. You also declare that you will not facilitate plagiarism by making your work available to others through hard copy distribution or other means. Furthermore, you declare that the submitted material has not been submitted for grading purposes in the past, be it for this module or other modules that you have undertaken as part of your studies.”

Date: 6/11/13

Signature:Brian Allen

Reflection:

In general I found myself more capable of doing this assignment based on my results of my last assignment. In my last assignment I found that my result was very poor. This was as a result of numerous poor mistakes. These mistakes included formatting issues such as not adding a cover note or page numbers. This time around I was more aware of ensuring my formatting was correct.

Another mistake I found that I made was a timing issue. For the last assignment I did not time it as I would have wished to and lead to me having to submit it late. This experience made me ensure that this time around I would not make the same mistake

Finally my referencing for the last essay was unacceptable. The quality of my referencing was poor and I did not reference from assigned readings but random pages on the internet instead. This lead to a poor result. In an attempt to avoid another poor result I focused on the assigned readings for referencing this essay.

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I have been asked to critique scientific management as promoted by Frederick Taylor and also Legal bureaucracy, described by Max Weber. I will then describe how both of these men’s intellectual works on their respective subjects are examples of enlightenment thinking. To do this I must first introduce what enlightenment thinking is.

According to Immanuel Kant in his article entitled “What is Enlightenment?” enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage” (Kant 1784). Kant’s definition of this “nonage” is “ones inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance.” This definition is very accurate one. It describes enlightenment as being a state where a person has the ability to think by themselves as well as not being lazy or cowardly. It describes a way of thinking where a person dares to know and as Kant describes it having “the courage to use your own understanding.”(Kant 1784). Enlightenment also suggests that one has such belief in their ideas that they are not afraid to express their ideas and go against the norm. This is illustrated by Kant in using the expression “do not argue” (Kant 1784).

To describe how Taylor’s scientific management is an outcome of enlightenment thinking I must first introduce and critique it.

Scientific management was first promoted by the American Frederick Taylor (1856-1917). Taylor was a mechanical engineer in the iron and steel making industries. These industries at the time were mainly made up of immigrant employees. Taylor was a protestant, who were renowned for their “thrift, hard work and individualism”. There were grave differences between Protestants and the workers and it is suggested by Chris grey in his book “A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations”, part of the context of scientific management “emerged as an artefact to the relationships between Protestants and Catholics”(Grey2013).

There were serious problems in the steel and iron industries at the time before scientific management. At the time workers organised their own work and decided who was hired. Along with this workers decided the pace that they would work at and also knew far more about their work than their employers who had very little physical interaction with them. Also according to Daniel Wren in his book “The Centennial of Frederick W. Taylor's the Principles of Scientific Management: A Retrospective Commentary”, Taylor believed the workers to be lazy or as he described it “soldiering” (Wren 2011).

Taylor felt a solution needed to be found i.e. scientific management. There were four principles of scientific management proposed by Taylor. Grey explains that the intention of scientific management was that the “organisation would become akin to a machine and workers akin to machine parts” (Grey 2013).This suggests that the idea of scientific management was to maximise efficiency.

The first of these was “science of each element of work.” This meant that according to Taylor every part of the production process was to be analysed. The idea “rate fixing” (Wren 2011) was established resulting in every part of production timed and expected to be matched consistently. This increased production.

The second of these principles was “scientific selection and training of workers.” Scientific selection resulted in the managers hiring skilled workers and reducing nepotism.

The third principle “division of labour between workers and management” meant that there was to be a separation between conception and execution of production to improve efficiency.

Finally the last principle “co-operation between staff and workers” was to improve the relationship and communications between those in the workplace.

However, according to Chris Grey there were problems with scientific management such as a high labour turnover and absenteeism.

Taylor’s proposal of scientific management is a clear example of management thinking. Taylor was brave enough to be confident in his own beliefs and introduce something completely knew to the production process. He was brave enough and had the ability to come out of his “self-imposed nonage” as talked about earlier by Kant. He had the courage to use his own understanding of the iron and steelmaking industry to improve efficiency in the workplace. This shows how Taylor’s scientific management is an example of enlightenment thinking.

The second purpose of this essay is to explain how Max Weber’s description of rational legal bureaucracy is also an example of enlightenment thinking.

Chris Grey states that an organisation that comes from the complete application of the rational-legal principle is “one which is entirely defined by rules and a series of hierarchical relationships- a bureaucracy.”(Grey 2013) . This gives a clear understanding of rational legal bureaucracy as it states how within an organisation it is made up of a set of rules which governs an organisation.

Grey goes on to talk about leadership and how we can be leaded by those with charisma (i.e. Hitler and Jesus) as well as tradition (i.e. medieval church). However, Weber believed that there are cases when we obey when someone “holds that job not because of charisma.”(Grey2013). Weber also believed that both charisma and tradition were both less important than rational legal authority in terms of leadership. In this case people obeyed due to a set of formal, logical and reasoned guidelines. Grey states that within organisations “this authority takes the form of rules, procedures and duties” all of which are logically thought of and applied.

Rational legal bureaucracy, described by Weber, has its advantages in business for reasons such as maintaining standards of high quality. However, it also has its disadvantages. Grey states that bureaucracies “don’t care about ethics” or substantive rationality (Grey 2013).They only care about getting things done on time with the most efficiency. In business this isn’t a problem but the fact that it does not care about ethics or people would leave workers and the public feeling used. Another disadvantage is that bureaucracy isn’t as efficient as weber thought.. This is as a result of unintended actions. This means that for every rule made by a bureaucracy, there are other problems that arise.

Weber’s view on rational legal bureaucracy is an example of enlightenment thinking. This is ignored previsous methods of authority and generated his a new rational and logical method. Weber believed in another method of leadership than the previously used charismatic and traditional approaches. Weber had the self-belief to introduce a leadership method that was secular and in no way influenced by religion. Weber’s ideas are a clear example of having the courage to “use one's own mind without another's guidance” (Kant 1784) .This courage and an ability to move away from his “self-imposed nonage”(Kant 1784), shows how Weber’s views on rational legal bureaucracy is an example of enlightenment thinking.

Bibliography:

Kant, I. (1784). “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” p. 1.

Grey, C. (2013). “A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organisations.” ed.3, p.33,35,21,24.

Wren, D.A. (2011). “The Centennial of Frederick W. Taylor's the Principles of Scientific Management: A Retrospective Commentary” p. 13, 14.