Conclusion

Abstract

Throughout this book, I’ve traced a range of responses to the soft management techniques that evolved in response to Taylorism. As Braverman has argued (and the era of restructuring demonstrated), the intense drive for efficiency that Frederick Winslow Taylor inaugurated is still part of America’s work processes and work culture. Yet the focus on workers’ feelings that human relations introduced, and the waves of self-actualization and corporate culture mysticism that followed, have created understandings of work that Taylor could not have anticipated. While he paid lip service to “friendly cooperation,” his perspective on the feelings of workers was generally limited to his conviction that they would be happier if they were paid more—an eventuality that he promised in exchange for an intensification of effort and obedience on their part. The larger range of human emotions that were bound up in the activity of paid labor were lost on Taylor. Yet management thinkers who came after him, including Lemuel Boulware, Elton Mayo, Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, William Ouchi, Thomas Peters, Robert Waterman, Peter Senge, and Stephen Covey, have mined the terrain of human emotion again and again, seeking the means of fully integrating workers’ selves into their work.