Taylor dealt with the fundamentals of the organization of the labor process
and of control over it. The later schools of Hug Munsterberg, Elton
Mayo, and others of this type dealt primarily with the adjustment of the
worker to the ongoing production process as that process was designed by
the industrial engineer. The successors to Taylor are to be found
in engineering and work design, and in top management; the successor to
Munsterberg and Mayo are to be found in personnel departments and school
of industrial psychology and sociology. Work itself is organized
according to Taylorian principles, while personnel departments and academics
have busied themselves with the selection, training, manipulation, pacification,
and adjustment of “manpower” to suit the work processes so organized.
Taylorism dominates the world of production; the practitioners of “human
relations” and “industrial psychology” are the maintenance crew for the
human machinery. If Taylorism does not exist as a separate school
today, that is because, apart from the bad odor of the name. It is no longer
the property of a faction, since its fundamental teachings have become
the bedrock of all work design (60).