Bedaux Unit

The Bedaux Unit emerged from the U.S. scientific management movement. It remains in daily use in measuring and comparing manual labor to this day.

F. W. Taylor's time studies

While F. W. Taylor remains famous for conducting time studies on employees,[1][2] these studies' influence on subsequent workplaces have long been harder to determine.[3][4][5][6]

Recent research has revealed that the core purpose of Taylor's time studies was to produce Unit-Times data, as espoused in his Shop Management (1903)[7] and Concrete Costs (1912), which he co-authored with Sanford E. Thompson.[8][9]

Emerson Consulting

The key individual who spotted Taylor's focus on Unit-Times was Harrington Emerson and his firm Emerson Consulting.[10][11] Emerson's circle was the basis for several innovations with Unit-Times by his followers Charles E. Knoeppel, Charles E. Bedaux and Earl K. Wennerlund.[9][12]

The Bedaux B

Building on Taylor's Unit-Times, and his experience at Emerson Consulting, Bedaux introduced the practice of rating assessment. Through rating Bedaux developed the "Bedaux System of Human Power Measurement" which arrived at a universal measure for all manual work, the Bedaux Unit or B.[9][13][14][15][16]

The Bedaux B, and units derived from it such as the Rowntree Mark and the Urwick, Orr & Partners Point, led to improvements in the comparability of employee and departmental efficiency,[12] as well as labor and activist disputes about the purpose and practices of time studies and the B.[9]

Bedaux's claims to originality in making this innovation remain a topic of debate.[9][14][17][18]

British Standard 3138

The Bedaux consultancy, its offshoots, and the Bedaux System were particularly influential in Britain well into the 1950s.[13][19]

In 1959, the British Standards Institution issued British Standard 3138 (Work Study), which was based on the Bedaux B.[9] British Standard 3138 was reissued in 1979 and 1992, and remains in daily use in job evaluations today.[9]

References
  1. Charles D. Wrege and Ronald G. Greenwood, 'Discovering Some of the Roots of Taylor's Shop Management: Taylor's Secret Six-Year Study of the Building Trades' Proceedings of the Midwest Academy of Management (1981)
  2. 'Stopwatch: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the 'Taylorization' of America (1999) on IMDb entry
  3. George Soule, Economic Forces in American History (1952) argues that 'As a separate movement it (Taylorism) virtually disappeared in the great depression of the 1930s, but by that time knowledge of it had become widespread in industry and its methods and philosophy were commonplaces in many schools of engineering and business management'.
  4. Braverman, Harry (January 1998). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. ISBN 978-0-85345-940-8. argues that 'A comprehensive and detailed outline of the principles of Taylorism is essential to our narrative, not because of the things for which it is popularly known - stopwatch, speed-up, etc. - but because behind these commonplaces there lies a theory which is nothing less than the explicit verbalization of the capitalist mode of production ... It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the scientific management movement in the shaping of the modern corporation and indeed all institutions of capitalist society which carry on labor processes ... Taylorism dominates the world of production.'
  5. Michael Rowlinson, 'The early application of scientific management by Cadbury' Business History (1988) Rowlinson, Michael (1988). "Link". Business History. 30 (4): 377–395. doi:10.1080/00076798800000075. concludes that 'It is hard to say whether Cadbury was applying scientific management at Bournville because it is hard to identify exactly what scientific management is. If time-study symbolised scientific management, then Cadbury was implementing it.'
  6. Daniel Nelson, A Mental Revolution: Scientific Management Since Taylor (1992) "Link" (PDF).
  7. See F. W. Taylor, Shop Management (Harper & Brothers, 1911). Online at Archive.org
  8. See F.W. Taylor and Sanford E. Thompson, Concrete Costs (John Wiley & Sons, 1912). Online at Archive.org
  9. Michael R. Weatherburn, 'Scientific Management at Work: the Bedaux System, Management Consulting, and Worker Efficiency in British Industry, 1914-48' (Imperial College PhD thesis, 2014). Weatherburn, Michael (July 2014). "Download PDF from Imperial College, London". doi:10.25560/25296. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. William F. Muhs, 'The Emerson Engineers: A Look at One of the First Management Consulting Firms in the U.S' Academy of Management Proceedings Vol. 1986, No. 1 (1986). Academy of Management Proceedings
  11. James Quigel, 'The Business of Selling Efficiency: Harrington Emerson and the Emerson Efficiency Engineers, 1900-1930 (PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1992). entry on WorldCat
  12. Steven Kreis, 'Charles E. Bedaux' in American National Biography online
  13. Edward Francis Leopold Brech, Productivity in Perspective, 1914-1974 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002).
  14. Craig R. Littler, Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies: a Comparative Study of the Transformation of Work Organization in Britain, Japan and the USA (London: Heinemann, 1982) entry on Google Books
  15. 'The Champagne Safari (1995) on IMDb entry
  16. Kenneth Hopper and William Hopper, The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos (I B Tauris, 2009) IB Tauris link Archived 2016-08-26 at the Wayback Machine
  17. E.F.L. Brech, Andrew Thomson, John F. Wilson, Lyndall Urwick, Management Pioneer: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
  18. 'Christopher D. McKenna, The World's Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). Cambridge University Press
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