Administrative Thought I: the Oriental Approach of Kautilya and the Classical School — Taylor, Fayol, Weber, Gulick and Urwick

Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer at the Midvale and Bethlehem steel works, is the "father of scientific management". In Shop Management (1903) and The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) he argued that "soldiering" — deliberate slow working — and rule-of-thumb methods wasted effort, and that management could find the one best way of doing every task by time and motion study. His principles were: develop a science for each element of work to replace rule of thumb; scientifically select, train and develop workers; cooperate with workers to ensure work is done by the science; and divide work and responsibility equally between management and workers, management taking over the planning. He paid by a differential piece-rate — a higher rate for meeting the standard — and proposed functional foremanship, with eight foremen (four for planning, four for execution) instead of one. The famous illustration is the pig-iron handler "Schmidt" at Bethlehem.

Taylor called for a "mental revolution" on both sides — from quarrelling over the division of the surplus to cooperating to increase it. The criticism is that scientific management treated workers as extensions of machines, motivated only by money (the "economic man"), took away their judgement, ignored the social life of the workplace and invited speed-up; organised labour opposed it and a US House committee investigated it in 1911–12. Yet its legacy — work study, standard costing, planning departments, and the idea that management itself can be studied — runs through every later efficiency drive in government, including the Taft Commission on Economy and Efficiency (1910–13).

Where Taylor looked up from the shop floor, Henri Fayol, a French mining engineer and managing director of the Commentry-Fourchambault company, looked down from the top. His Administration industrielle et générale (1916; English translation, General and Industrial Management, 1949) divided the activities of any undertaking into six groups — technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting and managerial — and defined management by five elements: planning (prévoyance, forecasting and planning), organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. He held that managerial ability can be taught and that the principles apply to every kind of organisation, including government.

Max Weber's analysis, published posthumously in Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1922), starts from legitimate domination — why people obey. He found three pure types of authority: traditional (resting on the sanctity of immemorial custom — a patriarch, a hereditary king), charismatic (resting on devotion to the exceptional qualities of a leader — a prophet or revolutionary), and legal-rational (resting on belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those appointed under them to command). Charisma is unstable and, when a movement outlives its leader, undergoes routinisation into traditional or legal forms. Bureaucracy is the administrative staff of legal-rational authority, and Weber held it to be technically the most efficient form of organisation.

• Fixed official jurisdictions governed by rules, with a clear division of labour.
• Hierarchy of offices, each lower office under the control and supervision of a higher one, with a right of appeal.
• Written documents ("the files") and a separation of the office from the official's private household and property.
• Expert training and appointment on the basis of technical qualifications, not election or birth.
• Office as a full-time vocation and career, with a fixed salary, pension and promotion by seniority or achievement.
• Impersonality — rules applied without hatred or passion, "sine ira et studio".

Weber's ideal type is an analytical model — an accentuation of features for comparison — not a description of any real office or a statement that bureaucracy is good. He himself feared the "iron cage" of rationalisation. Later critics documented its dysfunctions: Robert Merton's "Bureaucratic Structure and Personality" (1940) described the displacement of goals, in which conformity to rules becomes an end in itself, and adopted Veblen's term "trained incapacity"; Philip Selznick showed how delegation creates sub-goals; Alvin Gouldner distinguished mock, representative and punishment-centred bureaucracy; and the human relations school objected that the model ignores informal organisation.

Luther Gulick, an American, and Lyndall Urwick, a British management consultant, edited Papers on the Science of Administration (1937), the high point of the principles approach. Gulick's essay "Notes on the Theory of Organization" contributed POSDCORB and the four bases of departmentalisation (purpose, process, persons, place), and argued that administration could become a science built on efficiency as "axiom number one". Gulick was also a member of the Brownlow Committee (President's Committee on Administrative Management, 1937), with Louis Brownlow and Charles Merriam. Urwick, in The Elements of Administration (1943), synthesised Taylor, Fayol, Mooney and Follett into a set of principles — among them the principle of the objective, specialisation, coordination, authority, responsibility, definition, correspondence (authority matching responsibility), span of control (no more than five or six interlocking subordinates) and balance.