The key job design problem is still Taylorism

摘要

I started writing about job design in 1947-in an anonymous teaching case. This early "case" will help mightily in making the point that the big problem with job design is still Taylorism, in a updated form. My 1947 case was published in Glover and Hower (1948). It is reproduced in its entirety below for the first time under my name. In the specified case I am "Jim McFee". Since we started teaching this case in 1948 for the first of probably 10 years in the required course Administrative Practices to all HBS MBA's, our teaching group had to keep its author a secret so I could teach it. Of course, now it does not matter, and it is essential to making my point in this paper. I will comment on this case later, in the light of my discussion below of the work I did with Arthur Turner (Turner & Lawrence, 1965) and with Nitin Nohria (Lawrence & Nohria, 2002).