Their efforts it
is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise
progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was
still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort
inspired by an interest in the work.
When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of
scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage:
educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are
fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them.
They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own
initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all
things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it. The
responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a
better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific
management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from
the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of
learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the
opportunity is provided.
Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy
and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet
little opposition. They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature
of welfare work would allay opposition. But I am not inclined
to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific
management; they have little light to throw on what educational
significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific
management has introduced in industry.
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