Standards

Standardization and Management

By Rom Antony Day

Friday, December 14, 2007

Taylor, in his writing of Shop Management, made it clear that the key concept which he believed in and defended was not any particular wage system; instead it was the principle of standardization based on scientific investigation of real, tangible and measurable results. (Frank Barkley Copley; Frederick W. Taylor Father of Scientific Management; Volume II, 1923 and reprinted 1969; library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 68-55515 Vol. 2; page 173).

According to Frank Barkley Copley Shop Management, written by Frederick W. Taylor, is where for the first time in the history of management reference can be found to a semi-complete management system. While he worked at the Bethelham Company, he in addition to having in mind and using certain new and improved mechanisms and methods of management (e.g. time card, sliding rule, documentation for individual responsibility / accountability, matching task difficulty with best qualified equipment and / or individual or in some cases animal such as the horses example in the executive summary Definition of The Term- First-Class Men by Rom Antony Day; 2007), had moved beyond the independent existence of such methods and mechanisms. Taylor was able to link them together, see and coordinate their uses as to make their interplay a relationship of multiple methods, used to evaluate and measure different variables associated with a job. These methods and systems, he worked out and developed to improved stages, resulted in the formation of an improved system of professional scientific management of a higher caliber than its independent new parts (methods and mechanisms) he developed. That is where the more advanced, complex, well thought out professional scientific management system we tap into today appears to have been born.

We now refer to it or use more fancy terms such as Industrial and Organizational Psychology, organizational behavior, organizational development, applied Psychology at work, the psychology of work, motivation at work, personnel management; and to some of its sub-parts or applications we often refer to as human resources and lately as human capital management.