The Conveyor Belt of Life, Franz Kafka and F W Taylor

On this blog I wrote on January 26 2010: "Good I didn't take Frederick Taylor seriously".

I said there:
 "I still have "Motion and Time Study: Improving Productivity" by Marvin E. Mundel, fifth edition, first published in May 1973. It was part of my Industrial Management curriculum from 1981-83.

As I thumb through it, I don't find many signs of it being read by me!

Did I miss much?

Frederick Winslow Taylor is considered the father of time and motion studies..."

I read in year 2017 Franz Kafka's views on Taylorism:

“...I was saying goodbye to my friend Leo Lederer on the Square of the Republic when Franz Kafka unexpectedly approached me.

‘I followed you all the way from Teschnov,’ he said after the usual words of greeting. ‘You were quite lost in your conversation.’

‘Leo was explaining Taylorism to me, and the division of labour in industry.’

‘It is a terrible subject.’

‘You are thinking of the enslavement of mankind?’

‘It is much worse than that. Such a violent outrage can only end in enslavement to evil. It is inevitable. Time, the noblest and most essential element in all creative work, is conscripted into the net of corrupt business interests. Thereby not only creative work, but man himself, who is its essential part, is polluted and humiliated. A Taylorized life is a terrible curse which will give rise only to hunger and misery instead of the intended wealth and profit. It is an advance . . .’

‘Towards the end of the world,’ I completed his sentence.

Franz Kafka shook his head.

‘If one could only say that with certainty. But it is by no means certain. So one can say nothing. One can only scream, stammer, choke. The conveyor belt of life carries one somewhere — but one doesn’t know where. One is a thing, an object – rather than a living organism.’...”

('Conversations with Kafka' by Gustav Janouch)

Kafka would have been glad and relieved to know that F W Taylor was fudging both his research and its results and stands today thoroughly discredited! 

Matthew Stewart  takes apart Mr. Taylor's methods in 'The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy', 2009:

"...Frederick Winslow Taylor told the pig-iron story so often and so well that for more than half a century after his death, critics and sympathizers alike simply assumed it was true. But it was not...

...It was not just Taylor’s method of calculation but his very approach to the problem that was deeply unscientific. A crucial feature of any activity that aspires to the name of science is verifiability: independent observers must be able to reproduce experiments and thereby confirm results. This is why journals are such an integral feature of scientific disciplines. In his pig-iron escapades, however, Taylor never supplied the data or the methods that would have allowed others to reproduce and verify his results. Instead of science, Taylor offered a kind of parody of science. He confused the paraphernalia of research—stopwatches and long division—with actual research...

...The stunning lack of accountability evident in the finale of the pig-iron tale, too, seems to have characterized Taylor’s work as a whole. Although a number of factories adopted or claimed to have adopted the “Taylor system,” the advocates of the program failed to provide convincing or comprehensive evidence that it did any real good. Indeed, it was difficult even to get agreement on exactly what the system was in the first place. In a 1914 study of 35 plants said to have adopted the Taylor system, Robert Hoxie concluded that “no single shop was found which could be said to represent fully and faithfully the Taylor system as presented in the treatise on ‘Shop Management’…and no two shops were found in which identically or even approximately the same policies and methods were established and adhered to throughout.”38 Just as the science wasn’t a science, it seems, the system wasn’t really a system....

...Taylor’s utopian vision of a new managerial order, triumphant over both capital and labor, follows a long-established pattern in rationalist thought. Plato, like Taylor, maintained that the advance of knowledge would eliminate social conflict. He, too, envisioned a utopia in which those who possess knowledge would guide society to its irenic end. He also believed that natural-born rulers were made of different stuff than the common sort. To ease the transition to his utopia, Plato supplied a myth, to be related to the people, according to which the philosopher-rulers were said to have evolved from a superior kind of mineral deposit. Taylor, on the other hand, grounded the legitimacy of his managerial ruling class on a purported physiological distinction between people with brains and those with muscle. The main difference between the ancient philosopher and the father of scientific management, it seems, is that while Plato acknowledged that his utopia was founded on a “noble lie,” Taylor insisted to the end that his was based on scientific fact.

Taylor’s ultimate aim was to advance the interests not just of the managerial elite, but of an elite within the elite—the special cadre of management experts, or consultants. Self-interest was never very far from the center of his work, and therein lay the most obdurate source of its errors. Scientific management isn’t a science; it’s a business..."

Artist: Richard Decker, The New Yorker, April 3 1943