History of management
Theory of scientific management
Scientific management was proposed by Frederick Taylor. He said that “Modern management is the collaboration of people and machines to create value.” In the early days of industrialization the innovators of machines and the innovators of organization and management were engineers. Engineers, after all, were the ones closest to the machines, and this fact placed them at the interaction of workers and machines. He was an engineer at Midvale Steel Company. His direct observations of men at work led him to develop what we would call "motivation" theory. He saw human labor very much analogous to machine work--- something to be "engineered" to achieve efficiency. His theories on management would be promoted worldwide (and maybe took stronger root in Japan than in the U.S. or Europe) and would be controversial at home. If greater economic development through efficient and productive work was Taylor's own view of his work, the growing Labor Movement would see "Taylorism" as exploitive. Organized labor's antagonism to the American popularity of Taylor's work would eventually lead to Congressional hearings and, pretty much, the demise of "Scientific Management".

Taylor developed his management theories in his book Shop Management published in 1903, making it arguably the first scholarly work on management. The problem, as Taylor saw it, was that workers were inefficient because: (1) Workers tended to work less than they could, because working faster and harder would mean that there would be less or no work to do in the future. (2) Management failed to structure work effectively and to provide appropriate incentives. It should be pointed out that Taylor is writing before the establishment of a "minimum wage" (the minimum wage became federal law in 1938), so the notion of what is "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay"