Scientific management's lost aesthetic: architecture, organization, and the taylorized beauty of the mechanical

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Dec, 1997  by Mauro F. Guillen

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Recent years have witnessed a flourishing interest in the social, political, and cultural origins of organizational studies as an area of inquiry (Yates, 1989; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Guillen, 1994; Shenhav, 1995; Abrahamson, 1997). Little attention, though, has been paid to the aesthetic message and impact of organizational theories, i.e., to notions of the beautiful that may be associated with specific ways of organizing. This paper explores the relationship between organization and aesthetics in one empirical instance of tremendous significance that has implications for our discipline and for society: the formulation by modernist artists of an aesthetic based on the beauty of the machine and on the new scientific management methods of the turn of the century.

Numerous studies have identified scientific management -- Taylorism and Fordism in particular -- with a highly constraining, overtly exploitative, and ideologically conservative model of organization. Scientific management has been portrayed as a paradigm of reckless deskilling, impersonal production, and mediocre quality (Braverman, 1974; Edwards, 1979; Piore and Sabel, 1984; Perrow, 1986; MacDuffie, 1991; Scott, 1995b). This conception of scientific management appears to be at odds with artistic creation and recreation. Besides, aesthetics have to do with emotions and sensations, however rationalized, while this organizational theory seems to underscore practical and utilitarian aspects alone.

Scientific management made an enormous impact on American industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. While a group of notorious engineers active at the turn of the century provided a set of methods and metaphors to make organizational practices more "systematic" and " scientific," an equally prominent group of social and political reformers known as the Progressives extended the same set of principles to education, the government, and culture (Callahan, 1962; Haber, 1964; DiMaggio, 1991). Organizational studies has come to accept that our main theories -- including scientific management -- contain ideological as well as technical considerations (Bendix, 1974; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Kilduff, 1993; Guillen, 1994; Shenhav, 1995), but the aesthetic message of scientific management has received virtually no attention from organizational researchers, largely because its theoretical elaboration did not take place in the United States but in Europe. The ideology and methods associated with Taylorism and Fordism captured the imagination of architects and other artists in France, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, who were eager to create houses, public buildings, factories, artifacts, and durable consumer goods combining beauty with technical, economic, and social efficiency.

Among the various arts, architecture proved most receptive to the new methods and ideas emerging from industry at the turn of the century. Architecture and its associated activities -- design of interiors, furniture, household objects -- produced an aesthetic companion to the influential technical and ideological messages of scientific management. Like organizational theory, architecture has frequently entailed consequences for people's lives at home and at work (Smith, 1993: 399). As Larson (1993: 16) noted, architecture is a peculiar "social art" because it contributes to the culture not only "discourse and codified practices ... but also, and crucially, ... artifacts that are useful and can be beautiful." Architecture is "a public and useful art ... that must convince a client, mobilize the complex enterprise of building, inspire the public (and not offend it), and work with the culture, visual skills, and symbolic vocabulary not of the client but of its time."

This paper challenges familiar images of scientific management in two respects. First, by examining scientific management's "lost" aesthetic, I expose a forgotten cultural implication of this organizational theory: European modernist architects found an aesthesis message in scientific management, producing an unlikely synthesis between art and the mechanical world. In America, engineering and architecture evolved separately (Smith, 1993; Brain, 1994), but the European architects succeed at combining technology with style, science with history, management with creativity, and functionality with aesthetic. Thus, the view held by many social scientists and organizational researchers that scientific management intrinsically leads to seamy, unpleasant, or stultifying outcomes needs to be reconsidered or at least qualified.

This paper also suggests that the impact of scientific management has been much more pervasive and enduring than previously assumed. The European architects' sweeping reinterpretation of scientific management took place in the midst of the reconstruction of architecture as an organizational field along a new set of professional ideals and techniques. This new institutional blueprint facilitated the diffusion of modernist architectural practice throughout Europe, the Americas, and the developing countries after World War II. The result of this most consequential and lasting change was a drastic reconfiguration of the modem metropolis, a development that continues to affect the lives of millions.