Editorial

Abstract

In this, the first issue of 2018, our six articles add to debates both new and old. In the first article – “Labor at the Taylor Society: Scientific Management and a Proactive Approach to Increase Diversity for Effective Problem Solving” – Hindy Schachter, Professor of Management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, contributes to the “revisionist” school of thought regarding the work and influence of Frederick Taylor, the “father” of scientific management. This revisionist school, whose prominent members include Kyle Bruce and Chris Nyland, have taken umbrage at those who – to cite Bruce – “have demonized Taylor and Taylorism” (Bruce, 2016, p. 171). In the “traditional” view, perhaps most famously articulated by Harry Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital, Taylorism is depicted as an agent of work intensification, hostile to the interests of both individual workers and the organised labour movement as a whole. In Braverman’s (1974, pp. 120-21) opinion, “Modern management came into being” with Taylor, reducing workers “to the level of general and undifferentiated labor power”. The revisionist contestation of this view has largely occurred within the pages of this journal. It is a contestation that has, moreover, been well received, at least in certain quarters. In September 2017, for example, a previous article by Schachter (2016) in JMH – “Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Hallowell Faquhar, and the dilemma of relating management education to organizational practice” – won the Bright Idea Award from the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University, an award that signifies that this article was judged one of the top ten published by New Jersey business faculty members in 2016. The reviewers for this article – which traces the involvement of trade union officials in the Taylor Society – clearly felt similarly, one observing that, “The paper is a significant and original contribution to the revisionist history of the relationship between Taylor Society and the trade union movement”. Among those who made formal presentations at the Taylor Society were representatives from the Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers Union, the United Textile Workers of America, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Great Britain’s National Federation of Women Workers, the Boot and Shoe Workers Union, the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers and the American Federation of Labor. While Schachter does not contend that the Taylor Society was a “pro-labor” organisation, what Schachter does do is demonstrate that by the 1920s the Society was “explicitly reaching out to labor”. In the process, Schachter reveals as myth many of the previous views of the Taylor Society and Taylorism, articulated by Braverman and Co.