In the beginning: the light, scientific management and Quaker Philadelphia

What is it about?

The paper offers a new history of management through tracing a religious dimension of Taylor’s scientific management. The main thesis is that the good was foundational for bringing scientific management to success at birth, in the late 1870s and during the 1880s. Then, at Midvale Steel in Quaker Philadelphia, for more than a decade scientific management thrived. Conversely, when by the 1900s and 1910s scientific management spread across the USA, it lost its traditional contexts of Quaker Philadelphia, and implementation failures mounted. Managerial opportunism no longer was controlled by Quaker morality. The main contribution of the paper ties in with the question how and why religious morality practically and conceptually grounded scientific management, with all the institutional implications this has for our understanding of how management and management studies constituted, and what Taylor’s contributions to the emerging discipline are.

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