HMGT 320 LESSON LEARNED

Labor at the Taylor Society Scientific management and a proactive

approach to increase diversity for effective problem solving Hindy Lauer Schachter

New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add information on which voices contributed to the scientific management narrative from Frederick Taylor’s 1915 death to the early 1930s with a focus on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to analyze the role of labor representatives as participants in Taylor Society meetings and publications. The research contributes to the management history literature by bolstering the picture of the Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. The research also shows that the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the idea that assembling diverse groups for dialogue improves organizational problem-solving. Design/methodology/approach – The research analyzes historical sources including all issues of the Society’s bulletin from 1914 to 1933 and unpublished material from the Morris Cooke papers and the papers in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of Technology. Findings – Taylor Society leaders took a proactive view of encouraging labor voices to join managers and academics in society meetings. At the beginning, few labor leaders spoke at the society, and often, at least some of their comments were critical of scientific management. By 1925, labor participation increased with William Green, American Federation of Labor (AFL) president appearing several times. In addition, labor leaders became positively inclined toward having scientific management experts working in industrial settings. The labor leaders who participated at Taylor Society meetings in the late 1920s and early 1930s considered scientific management insights as useful for labor and wanted to cooperate with the researchers. Originality/value – The paper augments a revisionist view of interwar scientific management as progressive and pro-labor, a contested point in the management history literature. The research also shows how the Taylor Society was an early proponent of the importance of diversity, at least in the areas of gender and socioeconomic status, for effective problem-solving.

Keywords Labour, Scientific management, Taylorism, Frederick Taylor, Taylor society

Paper type Research paper

Introduction This article is an attempt to add information on which voices constructed the scientific management narrative from the time of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s death to the early 1930s with a focus on the role of labor union representatives. The strategy is to analyze the role of labor representatives as participants in the Taylor Society. Formed as the Society to Promote the Science of Management in 1911 by a group of managers and engineers who wanted to preserve Frederick Taylor’s approach to solving management problems (Brown, 1925), the Society was renamed in his honor after Taylor’s death in 1915. In exploring the activities of the Taylor Society, the article contributes to the management history literature by bolstering a revisionist view of the Taylor Society as a liberal, pro-labor organization. It also shows that the Society was an early proponent of the idea that including diverse groups of people in dialogue can give an organization better problem-solving skills owing to the different life experiences of its participants. At least one contemporary diversity

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Received 20 June 2017 Revised 23 July 2017

Accepted 31 July 2017

Journal of Management History Vol. 24 No. 1, 2018

pp. 7-19 © EmeraldPublishingLimited

1751-1348 DOI 10.1108/JMH-06-2017-0031

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1751-1348.htm

management textbook says that this approach to diversity largely emerged in the 1990s, but the Taylor Society had accepted its basic premise about 75 years before that decade (Canas and Sondak, 2014).

As Clark and Rowlinson (2004) have noted, history is both a set of actions and the disparate stories various interpreters construct to explain those actions. For that reason, interpretation is at the core of any management history narrative influencing which historical documents and which facts in those documents scholars consider in constructing a sense of the past (Stivers, 1999). Interpretation has been particularly important in constructing the various narratives scholars used to explain the consequences of Frederick Taylor’s ideas for twentieth- and early twenty-first-century management. Few, if any, social theories have been the subject of greater interpretive divergence than scientific management. During Taylor’s lifetime, his ideas attracted both strong opponents and adherents (Sub-committee on Administration, 1912). During much of the second half of the twentieth century, opposition to Taylorism dominated the social sciences; scholars portrayed his attempt to improve efficiency as a plot to rob workers of their skills (Braverman, 1974) – a view that gained prominence based on its espousal in various management textbooks. In this view, Taylor’s disciples “became stern taskmasters, stop- watch in hand, pushing workers [. . .] to do more with less” (Dent and Bozeman, 2014, p. 148). However, as early as the 1950s, some labor history scholars argued that, on the contrary, after the First World War, a period of greater cooperation arose between scientific management and organized labor (McKelvey, 1952; Nadworney, 1955). By the 1990s, revisionist scholars concluded that scientific management actually constituted an honest attempt to share mutual gains (Nyland, 1998; Simha and Lemak, 2010).

While historical research depends on using archival sources or texts as a methodology to reconstruct the past (Rowlinson et al., 2014; Decker, 2013), researchers cannot assume that archives tell the story of their times. Scholars must approach historical documents in a spirit of methodological reflexivity which acknowledges that archives always contain partial information. They are evidentiary fragments which reflect the socio-politics of knowledge production in the era of their composition (Durepos and Mills, 2012; Lipartito, 2014). At any time, only few historical actors were able to speak up about transactions which concerned them in a forum that someone preserved; other voices had to remain silent for lack of forums to express their views. Archives that allow contemporary researchers to fully understand the rules that gatekeepers set for gaining access to forums such as journals and conferences are rare (Decker, 2013). While researchers can only use documents that survive (they cannot create new ones for people silenced in their own time), scholars want an understanding of how interested parties constructed forums that support a given historical narrative (Yates, 2014). Pertinent questions include: How did gatekeepers involved in preparing documents such as journal articles award access? Who did they invite into the dialogue and hence allow to leave traces of their views? (Whittle and Wilson, 2015). This approach to document analysis means exploring content and authorship to ascertain which perspectives the documents omit as well as which they contain. A broad-based approach allows us to understand which populations were allowed to participate in document creation and which voices were absent (Rowlinson et al., 2014). Scholars need to ascertain the network of actors that contributed to producing knowledge (Hartt et al., 2012) and the negotiations that worked to construct that network and make it seem as if all relevant actors agreed on what happened at a given time (Durepos and Mills, 2012). If these networks are restricted by gender or class, the result may be a document that discounts how traditionally underrepresented voices viewed a given phenomenon.

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Contemporary scholars are not the only people to understand that when dialogue includes participants from diverse backgrounds, this heterogeneity yields a more rounded perspective on social issues. While the Taylor Society’s original members were all men who held managerial/professional positions, its leaders understood from the start that they needed to expand demographics to fully understand and solve management problems. In 1916, the Society’s bulletin noted that participation of women would be useful; particularly, for discussing management in female dominated areas such as nursing (Coming Meetings, 1916). Research has shown that the Society reached out to female professionals especially after 1919 and that women played a role in Society deliberations and governance in the 1920s and 1930s. The Society’s bulletin published female authored articles each year both on topics relating to women-dominated professions and on generic managerial issues. Other bulletin authors cited female-authored work. Women served on the Society’s board of directors and in key groups such as the nominating committee, although they never constituted a majority of the membership or of any committee on which they served (Schachter, 2002). Indeed in 1921, when the Society had 654 members, not more than 30 were female.

Early in the Society’s history, members also raised the need to include the voice of labor. Louis Brandeis raised the issue as early as October 1915 when he noted with regret the absence of labor representatives at the Society’s meetings and urged that Society leaders pay attention to getting greater diversity (October Meeting, 1915). Two years later, Person (1917a), who became the Taylor Society’s managing director in 1919, articulated a need to include managers, workers and social scientists in the discussion, with workers defined as employees of any firm and as representatives of organized labor. He argued that no one of these groups could understand “the whole truth”, and each group’s voice would be “complimentary (sic) to and essential to the other” (p. 2). At a subsequent discussion, Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, agreed that the Society needed the voice of labor. He argued that managers and executives could not represent workers no matter how conscientious a given manager might be (Person, 1917b). This proposal received more contentious debate than the suggestion to include women with some discussants expressing reservations based on whether workers had enough knowledge and education to participate.

Several recent research streams have shown that the Taylor Society in the interwar years supported pro-labor policies. Case studies show that particular business executives who were active in the Taylor Society fostered pro-labor policies in their enterprises (Bruce, 2015; Goldberg, 1992). Other scholars have analyzed similarities between policies espoused by the Society and union leaders (Nyland and Heenan, 2005; Nyland et al., 2014). Schachter (1989) showed how Taylor acolytes brought pro-labor perspectives to the public sector. Field (1995) argued that social democrats within the Taylor Society allied with unionists to institutionalize state-sanctioned collective bargaining. Nyland (1995) examined Taylor Society members’ role in justifying an 8-h work day. These research streams undergird a picture of the Society’s business executives and management professionals as a progressive force in interwar industrial relations. However, they do not focus on any role labor representatives had as participants in Society endeavors. Indeed, some aspects of Society membership policy – such as the use of blackballs to eliminate prospective members – could have suggested a desire by the leadership to limit labor participation. Research on gender has shown that women did play a role in Taylor Society endeavors.

A need exists for similar research to examine what role, if any, labor, played in complementing perspectives of managers and scholars. This need is particularly compelling because at the core of the controversies over the legacy of scientific management are its

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consequences for labor. To ascertain how labor perceived these consequences, it is insufficient to show that professionals affiliated with the Society held Progressive views of industrial relations in the interwar period. One also wants to learn whether members of the labor community participated in Taylor Society forums.

This article explores the role of labor representatives at the Taylor Society through examining their role in activities and ideas that were reported in the Society’s journal. From 1914 to 1933, the Society published a bulletin, generally with five or six issues each year. Each issue included articles (many of which authors had already presented as papers at Society conferences), excerpts from meeting discussions, comments from the editor and book reviews. This Bulletin of the Taylor Society is a key document management historians can use to understand which voices contributed to the scientific management narrative from Taylor’s death to the early 1930s. By examining all of the bulletins, researchers can answer similar questions to those asked in earlier analysis on the role of women at the Society. Such questions include: Did Taylor Society bulletins include articles written by labor representatives? Did labor representatives participate in meeting discussions? If they did participate as authors and discussants, what did they say? Did their point of view agree with that espoused by managers and scholars or did they have a particular viewpoint on key industrial issues? Did labor representatives attain positions on committees and the Society’s board of directors? The study ends examination of the bulletins in the early 1930s because at that time their format changed with, for example, elimination of reports on meeting discussions an important part of earlier bulletins. In 1936, the Taylor Society merged with the Society of Industrial Engineers to form the Society for the Advancement of Management (SAM) which published its own journal.

Ideally, researchers should be able to supplement the bulletin analysis by access to Taylor Society archives to learn how the group’s leaders granted access to the meetings and journal publication. Such analysis might help to validate the representativeness of any labor officials claiming to speak for workers at the Society. Unfortunately, the president of the SAM, the Taylor Society’s successor organization, informed me that his group has no such archive. As a substitute, the author analyzed unpublished documents from the archive holding the papers of Morris Cooke, a Taylor Society founder and president, and letters from Taylor Society members in the Frederick Taylor archive at Stevens Institute of Technology. These archives include a number of letters that deal with interactions between society officials and labor representatives. Authors include a wide range of people including Harlow Person, the society’s managing director and William Green, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) president. As Simha and Lemak (2010) have noted, it is important to consult original source documents in trying to reconstruct the tenor of early twentieth century management history; research based on reading textbook accounts or modern synopses is not likely to provide a balanced in-depth picture.

The article is divided into three sections. The first section uses the Taylor Society’s bulletin to examine labor participation in Society endeavors; it reports growing participation after 1925 along with greater cordiality of labor participants to scientific management. The second section analyzes these findings in relation to the representativeness of labor participation at the society and other issues raised by contemporary diversity management theory. The final section offers conclusions.

Labor representatives at Taylor Society forums The earliest appearance of a labor representative in the Taylor Society’s bulletin occurred in 1917 when Abraham J. Portenar spoke in a discussion on instructions and individualism in industry (Control and Consent, 1917). Portenar had an active union background; he had

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chaired a strike committee for New York Typographical Union No. 6 and served on its pension committee although at the time he spoke to the Taylor Society he was no longer a printer but rather superintendent of New York State’s Bureau of Employment. He had a longstanding interest and relation to the use of scientific management in industry. While preparing for federal Industrial Relations Commission hearings two years before, Frederick Taylor had asked Portenar to visit plants rationalized under shop management (Nyland, 1998). In his remarks at the Taylor Society, Portenar acknowledged that labor and the supporters of scientific management saw some issues from the same angle but, he argued against the use of scientific management, saying “I am an enemy of the Taylor system [. . .]. You have too much system and too little humanizing” (p. 14).

At a 1919 meeting, a worker spoke during a discussion on industrial relations although the bulletin editors did not record his statements (Felix Frankfurter et al., 1919). In the same year, Rolland Cornick, an arsenal employee, became the first bylined co-author from labor ranks (Cornick and Otterson, 1919). In a short article, he noted that the most significant aspect of his publishing in the bulletin was that he gave labor’s point of view. He then argued against company unions and for more democracy at work even going so far as to say that America might go the way of Russia if labor’s prospects did not change. He argued that workers wanted greater efficiency but they needed to benefit from the enhanced production.

Labor representatives continued to make rare appearances in the next few years as discussants at meetings. In 1920, Margaret Bonfield of Great Britain’s National Federation of Women Workers said she had come to the meeting to learn if the Taylor Society’s research could do anything to lighten the worker’s load. She acknowledged that workers were critical of scientific management – sometimes even finding its introduction into factories dangerous – although they favored greater efficiency. She argued that labor wanted a scientific management that would provide a partnership for workers and thought good for labor might come out of Taylor Society research on job insecurity and unemployment (Distinguished Guests Speak, 1920). Aldo Cursi, a union organizer, spoke out against company unions (Gilson, 1920). Portenar contributed to a discussion on waste in 1922 where he disputed the contention that workers deliberately restricted output and argued that the way for companies to get worker enthusiasm was to give them a share in management (Discussion, 1922).

By the mid-1920s, however, a change in emphasis at the Taylor Society coincided with increased labor participation. Although the original members had formed the organization to promote better management techniques, Society leaders now realized that “promoting technique requires looking at industrial conditions and social values” (Comment, 1926). To advance the field the technical engineer had to give attention to human relations including problems created by low wages and unemployment (Brown, 1925). Focus on such social problems turned the Society into “an imaginative forum” for macroeconomic coordination and stimulated labor participation (Alchon, 1992, p. 120). In 1924, a member of the Boot and Shoe Workers Union led a discussion on scientific management and workers at the annual Society meeting in Cambridge, MA (Spring meeting, 1924). In 1925, two of five discussants for a paper on factory reorganization came from union ranks, the first time the union movement produced multiple cited participants in a single discussion. Even more noteworthy William Green, AFL president, spoke at the December 1925 meeting. This was a historic occasion noted by major newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and New York World. Green (1925) began his remarks by accentuating that both labor and management consultants had to erase years of prejudice against the other. He then argued that management had to learn to deal with independent rather than company created unions, a contested issue at the time.

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In 1926, the Society published three papers on union–management cooperation in railroads. One article came from the head of the AFL’s railway employees department who had cooperated with consulting engineer, Otto Beyer – a Taylor Society member – to negotiate an agreement at the Baltimore & Ohio railroad where the company recognized collective bargaining and the union collaborated in developing and implementing shop floor efficiency measures (Jewell, 1926; Field, 1995). The bulletin noted that Hugh Frayne, an Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers’ member and AFL organizer who had chaired the labor division of the War Industries Board during the First World War, was in the audience (Comment, 1926).

In 1927, the journal published a four-paper symposium on eliminating waste in industry. Out of four papers, two pieces were by union leaders – one of whom was AFL president, William Green who stressed a need for management–labor cooperation (Green, 1927; Geiges, 1927). Green also served as a discussant for a 1928 paper on raising wages (Williams, 1928). A 1929 letter from him appeared in the bulletin urging those people planning the Fourth International Management Conference in Paris to invite workers to give managers the benefit of their advice – exactly what the Taylor Society was allowing him to do. In 1930, the bulletin published three articles on experiments to reduce unit costs at the Naumkeag textile mill in Massachusetts; one paper expressed the view of the secretary of the United Textile Workers of America (O’Connell, 1930). Cohen (1933) from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union contributed one of three papers for a symposium on economic security.

At least as interesting as the increase in participation from labor leaders was a shift in the tone of union leaders who spoke at Taylor Society meetings in the mid 1920s. While many of the earliest labor participants were critical of aspects of scientific management, the speakers of the mid- 1920s and early 1930s are much more positive and in favor of cooperating with the Society. AFL organizer Frayne thought the Taylor Society papers offered a genuine solution to labor problems and used the word “safe” to characterize social thought among contemporary engineers (Comment, 1925). Gustave Geiges (Discussion, 1929, p. 21), branch president of the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers, exemplified the new trend when he said that the hosiery workers’ union wanted Taylor Society experts to solve problems in the industry. In his opinion, their knowledge would help capital and labor reach a better path of co-existence. Cohen (1933) acknowledged that the Taylor Society had contributed to increasing productivity and hoped that it could now devise a way to distribute the wealth more equitably.

This new found harmony does not mean that labor participants did not have their own point of view on certain issues that set them apart from other discussants. All labor participants who spoke at Taylor Society meetings opposed the use of company unions in strong terms. They insisted that labor had to choose its own representatives and organizations. Other participants varied in their viewpoint with few as strongly opposed as the labor leaders. Sometimes this divergence led to strong back and forth argument among discussants. At one point, a personnel manager at one of the meetings reminded a labor speaker that company sponsored organizations were not the only labor groups that could become corrupt and dictatorial (Gilson, 1920). But, in general, the labor leaders saw cooperation with Taylor Society managers and academics as a good path for workers. Gone are any of the earlier comments bemoaning that a lack of humanization characterizes scientific management. In 1927, an International Labor Organization study acknowledged that “workers have become warm adherents of the doctrine of rationalization” (Thomas, 1927, p. 11).

Taylor Society executives seem to have recognized the shift to greater harmony when they appointed Geiges, a labor representative, to a 19-member committee charged with

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developing a code for employer–employee relations. When the code appeared, it gained union plaudits for endorsing an 8-h day and employment continuity, two outcomes which workers then saw as important progressive benefits. In discussion at Taylor Society meetings, John O’Connell from the United Textile Workers called it a good beginning for a human relations code. John Edelman of the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers declared that the code exceeded actual practice – to an extent that might make it difficult to implement. In her review, Rose Schneiderman of the Women’s Trade Union League concluded, “It is a pleasant experience, therefore, to read this code”. Her summation was that “The Taylor Society is doing an admirable job” (Industrial Employment Code, 1931, p. 30). AFL president Green (1931) considered the code to be “a real contribution to standards of personnel relations”.

Discussion Recent-day diversity management textbooks and courses generally consider that aspects of difference relevant to human resource planning include gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age and socioeconomic status. From its earliest days, the Taylor Society espoused the benefit for disseminating scientific management in increasing the diversity of those who participated in its meetings by gender and socioeconomic status. In the mid-1920s, the Society also attempted to increase age diversity by consciously placing both younger and older members on committees and on the Society’s board of directors (Comment, 1924). In these areas, Society executives understood the need to gain multiple perspectives to make the best decisions. No evidence exists, however, that the Society tried in any way to increase other types of diversity including race although integrating immigrant ethnic and religious groups was a major issue for the progressive reform movement with which many Taylor Society leaders had ties. Thus, a contemporary reader would most likely find the Taylor Society’s diversity awareness partial.

Contemporary research suggests that including people with diverse backgrounds can improve an organization’s problem-solving abilities (Bell, 2012). Because people use information from their identity-group experiences and affiliations to understand problems, having different perspectives at the table increases the information that problem solvers can include (Canas and Sondak, 2014). The Taylor Society stands out as an early example of an organization that understood that any given person’s background limited his or her perspective to a certain path. To obtain a reasonably complete understanding of social issues an organization needed to encourage dialogue among diverse constituencies. Thus, when a union member rose at a Taylor Society meeting to give his view of a company project, a manager in the audience noted that in this case who was speaking was even more interesting than what was being said (Bruere, 1926). Person (1930) explicitly noted that he put Geiges on the industrial code committee to give organized labor’s point of view. Person (1929) was so confident that this move yielded better solutions that he urged other professional organizations studying industrial changes also to put an AFL official on their committees.

At the same time, contemporary diversity research suggests that at least in the short run diversity can lead some participants to find communication more difficult as in a diverse organization communication occurs across group boundaries (Bell, 2012). The prior section of this article delineated some instances of sharp discourse between managers and labor officials over the issue of company unions. There is evidence in letters that were never meant for public perusal that at least some Society leaders who were Christian were uncomfortable interacting with some of the Jewish participants (Cooke, 1926). The Society

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sought gender and socioeconomic diversity despite these upsets because it valued getting multiple perspectives on industrial issues.

A question can be asked about the representativeness of the labor officials who participated in Taylor Society endeavors. Did they represent widespread labor sentiment or did they constitute a small non-representative sample specifically chosen for window dressing by Taylor Society leaders? Taylor Society leaders had extensive interaction with labor officials even before America’s entry into the First World War. Cooke (1911) guided John Tobin, the Boot and Shoe Makers Union president through Philadelphia plants using scientific management to show the researchers actual relationships with workers. During the war, Cooke participated in government councils with AFL president, Samuel Gompers and Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) president, Sidney Hillman (McKelvey, 1952; Fraser, 1991). In 1920, Morris Cooke co-edited a volume on productivity with Gompers and American Society of Mechanical Engineers president, Fred Miller, who had started his career as a toolmaker (Cooke et al., 1920). The editors designed the contributor list to represent viewpoints both of organized labor and scientific management researchers; contributors included union officials such as Rolland Cornick and Hugh Frayne who would later appear at Taylor Society meetings. Hillman’s biographer says that Cooke and Hillman viewed each other as “kindred spirits” (Fraser, 1991, p. 173); Hillman welcomed Cooke’s invitation to start a relationship between ACW and the Taylor Society’s production experts.

Given these early interactions Taylor Society leaders had a roster of potential labor officials who could be asked to give talks at Society meetings or partake in discussions. Records show that Taylor Society presidents and the managing director discussed which labor personnel to invite to speak at Society conferences and who would be unsuitable usually concentrating on how well a particular union leader knew the topic under discussion (Cooke, 1927a, 1927b). To this extent, it is accurate to say that the labor officials appearing at Taylor Society meetings were a group handpicked by people with managerial or professional backgrounds. But the participants’ claim to represent a distinctive labor view still stands because of their position in the labor movement. Many held high elected positions in their unions. William Green was the AFL president in the mid-1920s, a position hardly allotted by managerial fiat. That he held such an important position showed that he had the trust of a significant labor segment.

It should be noted that some union people who spoke at Society conferences had left their union positions and were actually working in government or industry when they appeared. Abraham Portenar was a New York State administrator when he spoke at the Taylor Society, although he had previously had a vigorous career organizing workers and overseeing strikes for the printer’s union. Gustave Geiges resigned his presidency of the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers in spring 1929 and became the welfare manager at the unionized Gotham plant in Pennsylvania so he did not hold a union position for his last Taylor Society appearances (Scranton, 1989). These protean career shifts, however, did not negate the long experience as labor organizers that Portenar and Geiges brought to the Society’s meetings. When union leader, Gustave Geiges, reminded his audience that he had started working as a textile mill knitter at 14, he brought a new set of experiences into the meeting room even if he was no longer a knitter at the time he spoke.

Finally, we need to understand that no one person or small group of individuals could have represented all of labor on some issues, as labor was divided on the best strategies to achieve its aims. The same multiplicity of opinions arose for women at the Taylor Society where some speakers such as Rose Schneiderman applauded the industrial code’s endorsement of no night work for women while a National Woman’s Party participant, Jane

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Norman Smith, assailed the endorsement as enshrining inequality and hurting women’s chances to gain employment (Industrial Employment Code, 1931).

In a critique of scientific management, Waldo (1948, p. 173), a public administration scholar, argued that with its doctrine of one-best way and its constant search for facts, Taylorism’s proponents came to think that “people are fundamentally the same” and facts exist apart from the perspectives of fact-finding people. If this interpretation of scientific management described the Taylor Society, its leaders would not have cared to enlarge their perspective by recruiting female or labor leader participants as they would have assumed that all people attending their meetings would have viewed industrial reality from the same lens. This view of interwar scientific management cannot stand once researchers take into account the Taylorists’ multi-year campaign to enlarge labor participation at their meetings and as writers for their publications. Scientific management leaders understood that life experiences affect which facts individuals consider salient.

Conclusions The record shows that the Taylor Society welcomed the participation of a group of highly placed labor leaders at its meetings as speakers, discussants and as contributors of articles to its journal. The Society appointed one union leader, Gustave Geiges, to a key committee writing an industrial employment code. While these actions ensured labor a voice at the Society, they hardly gave labor a numerically equal position with managers or academics as presenters, discussants or committee members. Although the Society never set official labor quotas, in practice limits existed to labor influence at the group’s forums. As with women participants, labor voices at the Taylor Society always constituted a minority. Most speakers and discussants came from academic and managerial ranks. Geiges was one voice among 19 on his committee. Although some women served as Society officers and board members, the Society’s leaders never offered such honors to union representatives. Readers can get some idea of labor’s participation rate simply by seeing the number of the six yearly bulletin issues in which articles, discussion comments or reviews on labor appeared each year from 1925 to 1931 (the period of highest labor participation). In both 1925 and 1926, labor representatives appeared in only two out of six issues. In 1927 and 1928, they appeared in one issue each while 1929 constitutes the only year in which they are listed in half the issues, three out of six. In 1930, labor voices appeared again only in one out of six issues, and in 1931 two out of six issues. The record, therefore, is not one of equality of participation – either by gender or socioeconomic status. But it is one that shows an organization of professionals and managers explicitly reaching out to labor to get under-represented perspectives and augment problem-solving. This was a new approach in the 1920s.

Contemporary diversity researchers have been concerned whether adding small numbers of traditionally under-represented people to a forum can influence organizational decision-making or whether a critical mass of minority voices is necessary to spark change. Kanter’s (1977) relatively early corporate case study on this issue suggested that having token female participation in traditionally male positions did not lead to changed outcomes, as the female officeholders accepted the dominant group’s positions. However, more recent work on women participating in traditionally male political positions has made at least some researchers skeptical of the need for a critical mass to bring about change (Childs and Krook, 2008). While tokenism may silence minority voices in some cases, several researchers on gender have argued that size of the admitted cohort is not the only variable affecting influence. Small group experiments done by Karpowitz et al. (2012) concluded that an organization’s decision rules as well as the size of the female cohort influenced women’s role in decision making; when groups required unanimity, even small groups of women had an

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important role. More germane to the issue of labor influence at the Taylor Society a United Nations report concluded that numbers alone do not tell the whole story because influence also comes from the type of women who participate in the organization. A small group of traditionally under-represented people can have influence if they have experience in decision-making and legitimacy within the group (United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, 2005). While labor never reached anything close to equality of participation at the Taylor Society its representatives were eminent in their fields. They had significant experience leading workers and negotiating on their behalf. Such successful backgrounds could lead to influence even when the number of labor participants was small. The achievements of traditionally under-represented people who enter a new forum matter as well as their numbers.

The record shows that the Taylor Society was an early practitioner of a proactive approach to recruiting participants from diverse groups because its leaders assumed diversity would help the Society make better decisions. The Society’s invitations to union leaders to participate at meetings provide important evidence refuting a picture of advocates of scientific management as anti-union in the interwar years. Anti-union leaders – or individuals who assumed workers lacked the intelligence to participate in a meaningful way – would not have envisioned union leader insight as key to solving industrial problems. In a similar manner, society leaders who believed that facts speak for themselves would not have sought diligently to enlarge the socioeconomic background of participants to improve problem-solving as was the Taylor Society practice. Lack of attention to key primary sources such as the Taylor Society’s own bulletin led some middle to late twentieth century management theorists to posit an anti-union stance for the group in the interwar period. This article, therefore, concludes by emphasizing the necessity to analyze primary sources in interpreting the role of scientific management in American organizational life. Additional information on the relationship between labor leaders and the Taylor Society could come from examining labor bulletins to see what role the Society’s leaders played at union conferences. McKelvey (1952) has noted that the Philadelphia Central Labor Union asked Taylor Society leaders to speak at its 1927 conference. The invitation itself shows the labor organization’s desire to continue dialogue with scientific management supporters. A more intensive examination of such invitations and any resulting articles in labor journals would be a useful supplement to what management historians can learn from analyzing the Taylor Society’s bulletin. The extant record shows the importance of positive interactions between labor leaders and the Taylor Society in the interwar era.

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About the author Dr Hindy Lauer Schachter (PhD Columbia University) is a Professor in the School of Management at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the author of Reinventing Government or Reinventing Ourselves: The Role of Citizen Owners in Making a Better Government (SUNY Press, 1997), Frederick Taylor and the Public Administration Community: A Reevaluation (SUNY Press, l989) and Public Agency Communication: Theory and Practice (Nelson Hall, l983. She co-edited with Kaifeng Yang, The State of Citizen Participation in America (Information Age Publishing, 2012). Her articles have appeared in Journal of Management History, Public Administration Review, Administration and Society and other journals. Hindy Lauer Schachter can be contacted at: [email protected]

For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm Or contact us for further details: [email protected]

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