The Psychology of Management by Lillian Moller Gilbreth

It is here only necessary to enumerate these divisions. Each will be made the subject of a chapter. DERIVATION OF THESE DIVISIONS.--These divisions lay no claim to being anything but underlying ideas of Scientific Management, that embrace varying numbers of established elements that can easily be subjected to the scrutiny of psychological investigation. The discussion will be as little technical as is possible, will take nothing for granted and will cite references at every step. This is a new field of investigation, and the utmost care is necessary to avoid generalizing from insufficient data. DERIVATION OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT.--There has been much speculation as to the age and origin of Scientific Management. The results of this are interesting, but are not of enough practical value to be repeated here. Many ideas of Scientific Management can be traced back, more or less clearly and directly, to thinkers of the past; but the Science of Management, as such, was discovered, and the deduction of its laws, or "principles," made possible when Dr. Frederick W. Taylor discovered and applied Time Study. Having discovered this, he constructed from it and the other fundamental principles a complete whole. Mr. George Iles in that most interesting and instructive of books, "Inventors at Work,"[15] has pointed out the importance, to development in any line of progress or science, of measuring devices and methods. Contemporaneous with, or previous to, the discovery of the device or method, must come the discovery or determination of the most profitable unit of measurement which will, of itself, best show the variations in efficiency from class. When Dr. Taylor discovered units of measurement for determining, _prior to performance_, the amount of any kind of work that a worker could do and the amount of rest he must have during the performance of that work, then, and not until then, did management become a science. On this hangs the science of management.[16] OUTLINE OF METHOD OF INVESTIGATION.--In the discussion of each of the nine divisions of Scientific Management, the following topics must be treated: