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History of Production Management

Satisfactory Essays

Industrial Revolution: Why Great Britain?
The period roughly beginning in 1750 and ending in 1870 is the Industrial Revolution: machine power replaces man and animal power, industrial organization becomes large scale, and productive work becomes highly specialized. Technological innovations that characterize the Industrial Revolution began earlier in other places, but only in Great Britain in this period is there such an early great leap in national economic productivity accompanied by widespread social transformation of an agrarian society into an industrialized one. The Industrial Revolution's dramatic impact on Great Britain lay possibly in the social, political, and legal conditions which were particularly favorable to change there. …show more content…

One of the consequences of the introduction of steam power was that now mills and manufacturing that had run successfully with water power, could be located anywhere, not just close to water.
Frederick Winslow Taylor: Father of Modern Management
Modern management is the collaboration of people and machines to create value. In the early days of industrialization the innovators of machines and the innovators of organization and management were engineers. Engineers, after all, were the ones closest to the machines, and this fact placed them at the interaction of workers and machines. This certainly helps explain Frederick Taylor and his invention of "Scientific Management".
Taylor began his career as the first management theorist, consultant, and "guru" as an apprentice foreman and common laborer, positions from which he quickly advanced to chief engineer. Taylor's early resume, however, belies the fact that he was born into an affluent Philadelphia family. His direct observations of men at work led him to develop what we would call "motivation" theory, although this is a psychology term that would not be imported into the management vocabulary until later. Taylor's own point of view, although benign towards workers, saw human labor very much analogous to machine work--- something to be "engineered" to achieve efficiency. His theories on management would

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