Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. Influence on America During the Gilded Age

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2.0, University of Tubingen (Neophilologische Fakultaet), course: American Studies (Seminar), language: English, abstract: America at the turn-of-the century was a rising nation. It was the time of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. It was in those years when Frederick Jackson Turner stated his Frontier Thesis and in which names like Rockefeller, the industrialist, Upton Sinclair, the writer or the W.E.B. Du Bois, the black leader, became well-known. A few decades after the end of Civil War the country was still in search of an identity, what it wanted and what it stood for. The unrelenting conflict on the meaning of the term America was visible in various fields such as immigration, consumerism and the development of America’s economic system. The struggle for the shaping of America’s economic system can be more narrowly defined as the fight between the two production factors capital and labor. The intention of this paper is to clarify what Scientific Management was, how it affected managers and workers, in others terms capital and labor. The following pages are going to show criticism of Scientific Management and qualify that. Furthermore, an assessment of Scientific Management and its results are given. The primary question of this paper is what impact did Scientific Management as one invention of America at the turn-of-the-century have on the country at that time, and whether there are remainders of Scientific Management either in America or in other parts of the world that are persistent today.