Taylor's Scientific Management Principles in Current Organizational Management Practices

Firstly, big companies are often divided into several departments to focus on specialization, since the change in structure “allows them to divide the tasks of the whole organization into manageable sub-tasks and allocates them to organisational units that are responsible for their completion” (Rollinson, 2005: 461). However, when the organization’s structure does not include specialized jobs concerned with analysing the environment, the companies usually fail to adapt to changing circumstances (ibid: 463). So, scientific management works better with small companies which do not usually need to react to change (Caldari, 2007: 74). This lack of flexibility, the main defect attributed to the Fordism model (which adopted Taylorism’s Principles with just a different philosophy during 1960-1970) was the key word for the development of Post-Fordism (Caldari, 2007: 72).
Although it may seem that Post-Fordism, which emerged from the crisis of Fordism (Amin, 2008: 18), surged to challenge Fordism tenets, core principles of scientific management neglected under Fordism were implemented through the search of flexibility, applying rationalist ideas like standardization and efficiency (Crowley et al, 2010: 423). Thus, this movement is “perhaps more aptly termed Neo-Taylorist than Post-Fordist management” (Crowley et al, 2010: 422), which shows Taylorism still influences it a lot.
Secondly, every “standard operating procedure” has its basis in Scientific Management (Kanigel, 1996: 45). Many employees are trained to become machines in certain parts of their jobs to improve efficiency and profitability (Bell, 2012: 106) and standardization of tasks plays a big role in it. Two examples of this can be seen, as Bell and Martin (ibid: 107) indicated, when workers cook a hamburger at McDonald’s or when a technical support representative answers a call under pressure from a 90/10 protocol (which is a set of procedures that demands 90 percent of all calls to be answered within 10

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