Strategy (85 page)

The progressives were particularly interested in Taylor because they were perplexed by the large organizations that were now essential to economic growth but challenged both liberal economic and democratic theory. Thus far they had gone for legal solutions, trying to cut the large corporations down to size. Scientific management suggested a possible administrative solution. “Efficiency” fit in with the progressive conviction that science rather than intuition could provide a neutral and objective basis for evaluating policies and reorganizing society to serve the needs of the majority rather than the self-interest of the few. Brandeis urged the labor unions to embrace it, taking the chance to become actively involved in running the enterprises which employed them. To the dismay, even bewilderment, of the progressives, the unions bitterly resisted Taylorism. They had no interest in blurring the line between capital and labor and understood that at root scientific management was not about partnership but centralized control based on strict hierarchy. Providing management with insights into core tasks undermined workers' control over the shop floor and treated them in a patronizing and dehumanizing manner. They saw Taylor's methods as means by which more could be extracted from workers without commensurate reward.

The hostility to Taylorism in the labor movement makes its adoption by the Soviet Union even more significant. Before the revolution, Lenin studied Taylor and pronounced his methods exploitative—at least so long as they were being applied within capitalism. A fourfold increase in productivity would not lead to a commensurate increase in wages. Yet the ideas continued to intrigue him and once in power, facing a desperate economic situation, he urged their careful study. In May 1918, he advised that this “last word in capitalism” be adapted for socialist purposes. “We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System and its systematic trial and adaptation.” He recognized that this would mean drawing on bourgeois experts in a system that the unions had bitterly opposed. But this would be different, Lenin insisted, for now the “workers' commissars” could watch management's “every step.”
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It was Trotsky, charged as commissar of war, who followed this up with enthusiasm, against the objections of the so-called left-communists who saw this as another example of the new regime's move away from true socialism.

Lenin and Trotsky had little trouble with a system dependent on an enlightened elite and docile followers. For Trotsky, this was about the “wise expenditure of human strength participating in production.” The work of Taylor and his acolytes was published and applied, and a number of theorists were invited to the Soviet Union as advisors. The urgency came because of the struggle to cope with a country whose infrastructure was in a mess and
where a civil war was raging. Discipline and productivity were essential. For the same reasons, the Bolsheviks welcomed returning tsarist administrators, engineers, and officers with vital practical knowledge. Part of this package was piecework for workers and bonuses for specialists. Unions were abolished on the grounds that in a socialist society they were no longer necessary.

In the short term, all this effort did help raise productivity and sort out the infrastructure. In the longer term, it helped set the framework for the Soviet system of industrial organization, based on centralized planning and detailed instructions to workers who had little choice but to obey as well as they could, more out of fear of punishment than expectation of reward. The system as it evolved during the1920s, including the abolition of the unions and the militarization of industry, has been described as “Taylorism with teeth.”
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This is not to hold Taylorism responsible for everything that befell the Soviet Union. In the circumstances of the time, there were many reasons why Lenin and Trotsky—and then Stalin—would have been inclined to regiment the Soviet workforce. It fit in with their ideological predispositions and authoritarian leadership. Nor were they applying Taylor as his followers, who tended to be less bombastic in their claims, intended. But the grotesque version of scientific management that emerged in the Soviet Union, disconnecting planning from doing, relying on instructions from the center to a disciplined workforce, and persistent insistence on “one best way,” in the end illustrated the limits of the approach when followed to its logical conclusion.

In some respects, it became far easier to push Taylorism in the Soviet Union, where resistance was crushed, than in the United States, where resistance remained active and labor unrest high. This led to a search for a business strategy that went beyond extracting greater efficiency out of the workforce but also addressed the broader “labor problem.” The management theorists of this time claimed a way forward to harmony through better management.

Mary Parker Follett was as much a philosopher as a social scientist, with an impressive background in social work and education rather than business. She was following in the same line as Jane Addams, that of a “social feminist.” This built on a traditional woman's role but broadened it to include “city housekeeping,” which suffered—according to Addams—because women, who understood such things, had not been properly consulted. Follett followed Addams into community work and progressive politics. Like Addams she challenged the popular dichotomies of the time, whether elite/mass or
capital/labor, as imposing divisions instead of creating an integrated community. The crude elitist view that some were better than others seemed to her to be a recipe for disharmony and discord. In particular, she objected to the word
masses
and she challenged Le Bon's corrupting “conception of people as a crowd,” susceptible to “the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation.”

Her aim was to find means of bringing the community together as an integrated whole.
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Follett objected to the idea of power (“the ability to make things happen”) when it was a domineering “power over.” Exercising power in this way left the dominated resentful and reluctant to change their prior positions, which would be reasserted as soon as an opportunity arose. Better to have “power with,” because all energies—not just those of elites—would then be mobilized in the same direction toward shared goals. This faith in humanity led her to view democracy in terms of the evolving views of individuals coming together in groups. There was so much going on within any group, with ideas interweaving, modifying, and reinforcing each other; returning in new forms; and focusing on shared problems. Crude assertions of interest would be undermined and prejudices challenged. The outcome would represent integration, her key goal. There would neither be individuals nor society but “only the group and the group-unit—the social individual.” In this context, consent should be positive and not grudging, a result of participation in decisions and a sense of shared responsibility and ownership. She was not after partnerships between previously antagonistic entities, such as negotiated agreements between management and unions, for these were inherently non-creative. The integrated outcomes she sought would be far more valuable. In this way (and following Dewey), democracy was a process as much as an attainment, informed by the interplay of individual interventions. Authority would come not from specific individuals but from “the law of the situation” which required all to accept and address the problem as framed. If anything, therefore, her approach was anti-strategic, creating situations which it would be difficult for individuals to manipulate.

Although her views developed as she addressed the larger issues of democratic theory, her stress on the importance of group processes, and her determination to turn conflict into a creative rather than a destructive factor, led her naturally into the study of organizations. From 1926, she began to challenge business groups about the need to view their enterprises within the wider social context. She urged them to reassess their reliance on delegation and take advantage of the social bonds forged within groups,
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arguing the need for more bottom-up approaches to management and innovation. Follett now appears ahead of her time with her strictures against micromanagement
(“bossiness”), in favor of flatter management structures and participatory approaches. She argued the importance of the more informal aspects of business organization, noting how social interactions contributed to overall performance. At the same time she did not challenge Taylorism directly, accepting the expanded role for management and the advantages of authority being vested in those with technical expertise and access to knowledge. This did not remove hierarchy, but at least it was not based on social position nor exercised arbitrarily. The problem went back to consent, and was reflected in her definition of management as “the art of getting things done through people.”
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Follett was influential in her time more as a social philosopher than as a management theorist, although she did have practical experience in Boston on management-union relations and the development of personnel policies. Her mission can be discerned from the title of her 1918 book:
The New State: Group Organization—The Solution of Popular Government
. Here she observed, “Our political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at war, the nations of Europe are at one another's throats because we have not yet learned how to live together.”
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Her remedy, however, only worked when the conditions were already in place, when there was a prior willingness to work together on shared problems. Beyond that, there was little more than an injunction to put differences aside and think about power relations differently. The method required that people did not think strategically for themselves but only on behalf of the group. This did not of course mean that the integrated outcome would be wise or appropriate, noted much later in reference to “groupthink” when individuals reinforced each others' wrong assumptions.
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Furthermore, as representatives of groups met with each other in a higher group, were they supposed to disregard the views of the lower group in pursuit of a higher integration? If each group was responding to the laws of its own situation, then at some point the variations in group situations would matter, and there would still be conflict to be resolved by hard bargaining or else a tough fight. Follett's shrewd observations on group dynamics illustrated the organizational benefits of enlightened self-interest, but they provided no answer to the problems of conflict, the point at which strategy would be most needed.

Follett overlapped with another group of management theorists, with whom she is often associated and almost certainly influenced, the so-called human
relations school. These other theorists had a harder edge to their philosophy and were more clearly part of the elitist school, although they also stressed the importance of social networks in making organizations work. A key figure here was Elton Mayo, an Australian who managed to get himself attached to Harvard Business School in 1926 and whose name has come to be linked to the first sociological studies of industrial practice at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant near Chicago. Before considering how he got to Harvard and the Hawthorne studies, it is worth noting his general views.

Mayo did not present himself as a fan of Western civilization, individualism, or democracy. In his view, democracy took advantage of voter emotions and irrationality, left little room for reason, encouraged class war, and favored “collective mediocrity” rather than the sovereignty of the “highest skill.” The idea of workplace democracy, which appealed to Follett, was anathema to Mayo, for it would hand over control to people who had no real understanding of business issues. His knowledge of psychological theory encouraged him in his belief that economics could not grasp the human factor because it ignored the extent to which feeling and irrationality shaped motives. It also suggested how to deal with conflict without addressing what were claimed to be the underlying issues. Radical movements and industrial unrest were not responses to genuine grievances but more the expression of the “hidden fires of mental uncontrol.” If agitators were essentially neurotic, “prone to conspiratorial delusions, with minds obsessed with rage and the savage lust of destruction,” then democratic processes could do little to help. In fact they made matters worse, dividing society into two hostile camps and leading workers, unaware of the real sources of their discontent, to pursue “will-o-the-wisp phantasies with all the energy of his starving intellect and will.” Mayo's remedy was to treat not the material conditions of the working class but the psychopathological tendencies of democracy, reflected in disoriented lives, disintegrated personalities, and disordered values.
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Mayo's views were well known when the dean of the Harvard Business School, Wallace Donham, approached him about joining the faculty. Donham was a banker who had trained at Harvard Law School. After being appointed in 1919, he stayed until the early 1940s. He saw his task as raising the academic standards of the school while also improving links with business. This was essential for fundraising, but Donham also had to contend with the university's reputation for harboring radicals and socialists. Funding for Mayo eventually came directly from industry rather than the university. The attraction of Mayo lay in his underlying views, which Donham shared, and in his claimed expertise in psychology. The gap to be filled was explained in a letter to the university's president in 1927: “I see no really promising
hope of lessening the critical nature of the Labor Problem in Industry except through a scientific study of Industrial Physiology including Psychology.” As O'Connor observed, “Mayo's research spoke directly to the core of executive concerns: it revolved around how to calm the worker's irrational, agitation-prone mind and how to develop a curriculum to train managers and executives to do so.” In 1933, Mayo reinforced the point. The problem was not the lack of an “able administrative elite,” but the elite's lack of understanding of the “biological and social facts involved in social organization and control.” Donham saw training this elite as an essential task for the business school.
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