The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

Robert Kanigel sees the antecedents of today’s regimented world in the influence of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Taylorism, and scientific management. The subject of The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency is, of course, no new topic to historians of technology. But Kanigel, a Baltimore science writer, does not aim primarily for the scholarly audience. The One Best Way speaks to the general reader, although Kanigel intends to contribute to scholarly discourse as well.

At a session on popular biography at the 1997 SHOT conference, Kanigel expressed his hope that professional historians of technology will find the book valuable. It does stand the scholar’s test of comprehensiveness: Kanigel has read widely about Taylor and incorporated insights from numerous scholarly accounts. The book covers the familiar highlights of the Taylor story: Taylor’s work at Midvale Steel; the development of high-speed tool steel; the emergence of time studies; the evangelism of Taylor and his famous disciples (Barth, Gantt, the Gilbreths, etc.); the Eastern Rate Case, which brought Taylor to national attention; the strike at the Watertown arsenal; and the U.S. House hearings, which occasioned Congressman Wilson’s devastating questions of Taylor. Not a few less-familiar aspects appear as well: insight into Taylor’s youth, his privileged mind-set, the details of the pattern maker’s craft at which Taylor apprenticed, his obsession with golf. A final section of the book seeks Taylorism’s far-flung influence in the disciplinary institutions of prisons, schools, and hospitals. Kanigel even speculates on the contribution of scientific management to the Holocaust, although the speculation is contrary, as he admits, to the recent work of scholars such as Michael Allen. The book, engaging and accessible, should offer general readers a broad understanding of Taylor the man, Taylorism the movement, and their combined effects on the industrial life of the twentieth century.

The book’s subtitle, however, also alludes to its shortcomings. Efficient this book is not. Kanigel’s excited, adjective-laden prose flows freely. The book’s length (570 pages, not including notes) may well close the work to all but the dedicated. It is not clear that the message warrants this girth. Kanigel’s manner of relying on documentary evidence, for example, comes at the expense of brevity, as he frequently quotes routine correspondence in full. Furthermore, the luxurious length allows the author to wander, repeating key points so frequently as to diminish their impact and blur the focus of conclusions.

Despite these imperfections, The One Best Way will likely bring the history of Taylor to a wider audience than other recent work. It has already been reviewed in major newspapers and magazines. But what kind of history does it present?

This rendition of Taylor ultimately re-creates a heroic inventor myth, albeit in a tragic mode. Kanigel is certainly insightfully critical of Taylor, pointing out his sense of showmanship, his questionable claims to science, his hypocritical pursuit of leisure while preaching efficiency. Still, Kanigel never really interrogates Taylor’s own characterization of craft work as “guesswork, habit, and hunch” (p. 465). Similarly, the book’s narrative overzealously paints Taylor as the originator of the regimentation of modern industrial life. The One Best Way elides distinctions between Taylorism and other aspects of industrialization, such as the “American system” of manufacturing. Kanigel variously attributes the division of labor, standardization, the use of jigs and fixtures, and detailed specification of tasks to scientific management and not to the century of industrialization that preceded it. In that century, human labor repeatedly clashed with management over piece rates, over time and discipline, over worker autonomy. The One Best Way lacks a sense of the numerous, varied attempts at rationalization that had preceded Taylor, a sense that Taylor himself always retained. Only in light of such precursors does Taylor’s biography transcend local importance. This is more than a...