Although Taylor wanted all employees to be controlled by the organization, he accorded managers much more leeway than manual workers. It was the task of management to study the knowledge and skills of workers and to record and tabulate them and ultimately to reduce them to laws, rules, and even mathematical formulas. In other words, managers were to take a body of human skills, abilities, and knowledge and transform them into a set of nonhuman rules, regulations and formulas. Once human skills were codified, the organization no longer needed skilled workers. Management would hire, train, and employ unskilled workers in accord with a set of strict guidelines.
In effect, then, Taylor separated "head" work from the "hand" work. Prior to Taylor's day, the skilled worker had performed both. Taylor and his followers studied what was in the heads of those skilled workers, then translated that knowledge into simple, mindless routines that virtually anyone could learn and follow. Workers were thus left with little more than repetitive "hand" work. The principle remains the same at the base of the movement throughout our McDonaldizing society to replace human with nonhuman technology.
Behind Taylor's scientific management, and all other efforts at replacing human with nonhuman technology, lies the goal of being able to employ human beings with minimal intelligence and ability. In fact, Taylor sought to hire people who resembled animals:
Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.Not coincidentally, Henry Ford had a similar view of the kinds of people who were to work on his assembly lines:
Repetitive labour--the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling. To them the ideal job is one where creative instinct need not be expressed. The jobs where it is necessary to put in mind as well as muscle have very few takers--we always need men who like a job because it is difficult. The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to think. Those who have what might be called the creative type of mind and who thoroughly abhor monotony are apt to imagine that all other minds are similarly restless and therefore to extend quite unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs almost exactly the same operation.The kind of person sought out by Taylor was the same kind of person Ford thought would work well on the assembly line. In their view, such people would more likely submit to external technological control over their work and perhaps even crave such control.
From George Ritzer's The McDonalidization of Society: New Century Edition, pp. 116-117
