LESSONS FROM HISTORY: ATTEMPTS AT MANAGING OUR WORLD

From the beginning of the 1900s, the beliefs of Age of Enlightenment were reborn under new labels like Organization and Management. These were now the keys to solving Mankind's problems. The various previous failures of basing society on reason alone were ignored and these new forms of Age of Enlightenment belief went from strength to strength. The industrialisation of Henry Ford through to the success of massive production during the Second World War, pressurised societies into believing that organization and management were 'What we have to do to get there'. Here are some examples:

Taylor's scientific management (1911)

 This consisted of four principles:

•  Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific (sic) study of the tasks.
•  Scientifically (sic) select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
•  Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task".
•  Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific (that word again!) management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

    F W Taylor

Henry Ford's mass marketing and production

In terms of the simple needs of wartime defence production, good organization and management worked well. It was mainly a question of numbers, quantities and output. But the problem came when those with power began to believe that these organizational assumptions and management methods could be applied to the wider problems of society. Society's muddled mix of human behaviour, politics, unpredictable events and other uncertainties, made managing society a much more complex business than producing a single design motor car.

Henry Ford

Total Management

A typical example of this thinking in the 1940s was C H Waddington's book The Scientific Attitude. With a title like this and chapter headings that include: On Whose Side is History, Science is not Neutral and Believing in Science; then even before we read the book, we know that we are in the presence of a set of beliefs and values.

C H Waddington

These are three different attempts at managing, but they share the same Beliefs and Values–––>