Management Pioneers in the Early Factory

The growth of factories, as a result of industrial revolution, posed new problems for the owners, managers and society at large. People’s needs were becoming more complex.

Organizations were being reshaped by the demand of heavy infusions of capital. Conflicts occurred between agricultural workers and industrial society. Workers were unskilled, children and women work at night shift. These early management pioneers proposed solutions for coping with the growing factory system

Robert Owen (1771-1858)

Robert Owen was a paradox in the turbulent era of the Industrial Revolution. He had a vision of a new industrial society that was to be a combination of agricultural and industrial commune and hardened back to the lost days of more primitive people.

Philosophically, he viewed people as powerless, held in the grips of revolutionary forces of the new age of machinery, which destroyed moral purpose and social solidarity. His struggle was a long and frustrating one and he appears in history as a King Canute ordering the waves of progress to recede.

Owen at the age of eighteen founded his first factory in Manchester, England. In 1794 or 1795, he established a new partnership, the New Lanark, Scotland, venture. At New Lanark, he encountered the ubiquitous problem of scarcity of labor. The children worked thirteen hours per day.

Owen continued to employ children but tried to improve their living conditions. Owen began to form new ideas about the welfare of society. The economic and social problem was to develop agriculture to use intensive methods of cultivation to feed more people. He therefore prepared a plan:

1. To cultivate soil with spade instead of plough.
2. To make such changes as the spade cultivation requires, to render it easy and profitable to individuals and beneficial to the country.
3. To adopt a standard of value, by means of which, the exchange of the products of labor may proceed without check or limit, until wealth shall become abundant, that any further increase to it will be useless, and will not be desired.

Owen’s spade husbandry plan of 1821 would create jobs, enabling more people to be employed, thereby increasing their ability to consume products of industry. To create new factory ethos, he tried to use moral suasion rather than corporal punishment. He developed or particular unique device, the silent monitor to aid discipline.

Owen chided his fellow manufacturers for not understanding human element. He charged that they would spend thousands on the best machines, yet buy the cheapest labor. He held that human were creatures of their environment, relatively incapable of escaping it without a moral rearmament through education. Owen felt that character developed solely if the material and moral environment was proper.

In 1813, he proposed a factory bill to prohibit the employment of children under the age of ten, and oppose night work for children. This bill became a law in 1819.

A biographer suggested that Owen frustrated in his attempt to reform the society. Failing to achieve his goal in England, he bought thirty thousands acres in Posey County, Indiana, United States of America. He renamed it New Harmony, and set out to achieve his social reforms.

Among the settlers in New Harmony, there were those who had heard that New Harmony was a place where you could work a little, and the society would still feed, clothe, and house you. Owen try to reorganize this society but gave up and leaving in 1827.

After New Harmony, Owen found himself both financially and emotionally broken. In 1834, Owen led the British Trade Union movement, a working class movement based on the idea of collective action to control the means of production. He failed. Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, sowed the first seeds of concern for the human element in industry.

Andrew Ure (18 May 1778 – 2 January 1857)

Andrew Ure was a Scottish professor of chemistry and natural philosophy. Ure gained fame by his speeches and writings that advocated the great benefits of industrial capitalism.

He deeply concerned with industrial education. The principle of the factory system was the substitution of mechanical science for hand skill, and to provide for the graduation of labor among artisans. Ure sought an automatic plan to prevent individual intractable workers from stopping work as they pleased and thereby throwing a whole factory into disorder.

According to Ure, workers had to recognize the benefits of mechanization and not resist its introduction. To establish this automatic plan, management had to arrange and connect manufactures to achieve harmony of the whole. In every establishment there were three principles of action: the mechanical; the moral and the commercial.

Mechanical referred to the techniques and processes of production; moral referred to the condition of personnel and commercial referred to sustaining the organization through selling and financing.

His book “The Philosophy of Manufactures” was published in 1835, played an important role in molding a public opinion on the factory system amid critical debates on factory reform and new poor laws. This set out the basis of the factory system of production. It also defended the working conditions of factories during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Charles Babbage (26 December 1791-18 October 1871)

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who originated the idea of a programmable computer. He theorized and applied a scientific approach to management long before the scientific management era began in the United States. He demonstrated the world’s first practical mechanical calculator, his difference engine, in 1822.

As early as 1933, he conceived his analytical engine that could in effect, scan stream of instruction and put them into operation. Babbage’s computer had all basic elements of modern computer such as memory (store), arithmetic unit (mill), a punch card input system, external memory storage and conditional transfer. Babbage also created an apparatus for printing on paper.

He limited his research to developing a computer program to play tick-tack toe and chess, but he saw that the machine, that he called automaton, could be programmed to make the best possible combination of position and moves, including anticipation as far as three moves in advance.

Inevitably, Babbage’s inquisitive mind led him to write of management. His most successful book was “On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures”, Published in 1832. As a management scientist, Babbage was interested in machinery, tools, the efficient use of power, developing counting machines to check quantity of work, and economy in the use of raw materials; these he called the mechanical principles of manufacturing.

On the human side, Babbage attempts to show the mutuality of interest between the worker and the factory owner. Babbage’s profit sharing scheme had two facets: that a portion of wages would depend on factory profits and that the worker should derive more advantage from applying any improvement he might discover.

Babbage saw a number of advantages in his proposal: each worker would have direct interest in the firm’s prosperity; each would stimulated to prevent the waste and mismanagement; every department would be improved; and it would be the common interest of all to hire only the most skillful workers.

Pierre Charles François Dupin (1784-1873)

Pierre Charles François Dupin was a French Catholic mathematician. Dupin was the second individual who pioneered in industrial education. For twelve year, he taught geometry and mechanic to the workers in order to develop prosperity across the country.

Hoaglund reported that by 1826, Dupin’s material on management had been presented in ninety-eight French cities to five thousand or more workers and supervisors. Dupin also demonstrated a rudimentary grasp of the concept of time study and the need to balance work loads after labor was divided: When the division of work is put into operation the most scrupulous attention must be exercised to calculate the duration of each type of operation, in order to proportion the work to the particular number of workers that are assigned.

Dupin also recognize worker uneasiness over the introduction of mechanization into French industry. He encouraged workers and managers to recognize the benefits of mechanization to them and to society.

For Dupin, Mechanization created job rather than destroyed them. He called for widespread industrial training to permit the agrarian and unskilled worker to share the prosperity of industrialization.