Industrial management, in its most comprehensive meaning, refers to the systematic management of all aspects of the factory, and more specifically, to early studies of production efficiency known as scientific management. The term came into use in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, when the Industrial Revolution dramatically shifted methods of generating output from craftsmanship to mass production and automation. Massive centralized production facilities, like those of the Ford Motor Company, Bethlehem Steel, and Western Electric, brought with them the unprecedented need to understand work that had become increasingly complex. To bring some measure of control and discipline to the industrial behemoths, such luminaries as Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth developed "scientific" methods of observation in factories. The term "scientific" brought a patina of respectability to a field of study, which by its very nature contained some measure of dehumanization with regards to work methods. Frederick Taylor sought the "one best way to manage" by systematically recording the time to perform work elements that comprised a laborer's repetitive movements, while the Gilbreths developed "time and motion" studies. Henry Ford is credited with institutionalizing division of labor in factories with his development of the assembly line, an innovation that dramatically reduced the time it took to produce an automobile.
Little attention was paid to the motivational content of work until the accidental discovery of the importance of human relations by the Hawthorne studies from 1927 to 1932, research supervised by Elton Mayo. While conducting productivity studies at Western Electric, Mayo demonstrated that workers' efficiency depended on a wide range of relations within groups as well as on compensation. This finding led to an eventual split in the study of industrial management, with one branch emphasizing an understanding of organization theory and behavior and the other emphasizing the mechanics of production, also known as operations. While science continued to provide the basis for academic studies of both branches, the practice of management was increasingly recognized as a complex set of knowledge and skills. Later, increased specialization of management talents led to the dissipation of comprehensive studies in industrial management, with more attention paid to specialties like financial management, human resources management, and operations management.
Following World War II, many of the dehumanizing aspects of factory life were a leading concern of both union movements and studies to improve quality of work life. Work design and sociotechnical approaches to work became the focus of industrial management. By the 1960s, however, the U.S. economy had shifted to a service economy, with more than half of the labor in the country employed in services. This shift was to be followed by the information revolution and extraordinarily high rates of global competitiveness, changes that had dramatic impacts on work content. The term "industrial management" became increasingly irrelevant as the nature and content of work shifted to computerization and other spheres of the economy.
In the early twenty-first century, the segment of management that seeks improvements in efficiency and productivity is known as service and operations management. Its most recent developments include integrated methods of management that contain elements of programmable technology, quality improvement, just-in-time delivery, lean production, and supply chain management.
Bibliography
Boone, Louis E., and Donald D. Bowen, eds. The Great Writings in Management and Organizational Behavior. Tulsa, Okla.: PPC, 1980.
Dertouzos, Michael L., et al. Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.
Lacey, Robert. Ford: The Men and the Machine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1986.
Russell, Roberta S., and Bernard W. Taylor III. Operations Management. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000.
Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
