[LABOR HISTORY - SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT] TAYLOR, Frederick Winslow

The Principles of Scientific Management

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911. First Edition. First commercial edition, following a small number printed for private circulation earlier the same year. Octavo (23cm). Red cloth boards, stamped in gilt on front cover and spine; 144pp. A bright, Near Fine copy, with just trivial faint soiling to boards; engraved bookplate of physician/bibliophile William H. Spohn to front pastedown. Text tight and unmarked.

The foundational work of 20th-century Scientific Management. Of Taylor's influence on 20th-century business and manufacturing practices, Carter (PMM) writes: "...Taylor...besides studying factory conditions and methods in great detail...was responsible for fundamental changes in machinery and machine tools...[and] standardizing processes and machines, time and motion study, and payment by results, all of which have been welcomed in the U.S.S.R., where 'Stakhanovism' is virtuallly 'Taylorism' renamed, and in Germany where the Principles was translated and achieved a wide circulation...the adoption of his methods there contributed notably to the speedy recovery of German production after the First World War." Carter also notes that Taylor's methods, which essentially reduced human workers to impersonal units of production, "...were anathema to trade unionists almost everywhere else." Taylor's theories were directly influential in Henry Ford's development of the assembly line, and by the 1920s, "Taylorism" had been adopted in nearly every corner of American industry, even penetrating into the women's sphere with such works as Mary Pattison's Domestic Engineering (1913, see below), which offered to "Standardize and Professionalize Housework [and] Re-Organize the Home Along Scientific Management Principles." The term "efficiency expert" entered common parlance, generating much the same combination of suspicion, derision and awe as the term "tech geek" does today. A particularly fresh copy of an important book. PMM 403.

Price: $750.00

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