Manufacturing Systems Foundations of World-Class Practice (1992) / Chapter Skim
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Taylorism and Professional Education
Taylorism and Professional Education
Pages 149-157
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From page 149... ...
Some observers believe that American manufacturing managers have been late coming to the party, that they have been slow to recognize the advantages of Japanese and, to a lesser degree, European developments. I believe that a more fundamental question is why leaders in American manufacturing practice have received little or no help in their struggle from the professional schools where they must 149
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From page 150... ...
In his obsessive optimization of individual job shop operations, his disregard of the human side of enterprise, and his rigid separation of thinking from doing, Taylor is the paradigmatic manufacturing engineer. Taylor is important, not merely because he made revolutionary contributions to the manufacturing canon, but also because the general style he set became the universal paradigm for American engineering practice and for engineering education, and remains so even today.
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From page 151... ...
It is clear that the Tayloristic process works best if the boundaries of the subunits are sharp and well-defined and interconnections are clear and separable. When devices demand extraordinarily tight tolerances, however, tighter even than tens of thousandths of an inch, we cannot break such complex and precise devices into subunits and assign the design and production to different teams.
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From page 152... ...
This absence of the goaldefinition phase is the second major distinguishing feature of conventional Tayloristic engineering practice that is crippling our national attempt to regain manufacturing leadership in world markets. The third crippling attribute is engineering practice in a mechanistic vacuum, without regard to human factors.
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From page 153... ...
Individual reward for individual effort in the workplace implies an emphasis on piecework, separate postproduction quality inspection, and a resistance to the team concept. For example, auto factory line foremen long waged war on any sort of worker interaction on the line.
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From page 154... ...
But this academic process is patterned after the old Tayloristic suboptimization of individual operations on a manufacturing line with no thought for overall production efficiency. Suppose we examine the features of Taylorism we have discussed and attempt to describe the world for which they seem appropriate.
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From page 155... ...
These suggestions seem naturally to fall into the following four general categories, for each of which I suggest more specific tactics. Empowerment of our professional students Encouragement of cooperative student work practices Participative management of the educational enterprise Development of a supportive professional accreditation process Empowerment of Our Professional Students Our students should be encouraged to take charge of their own learning.
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From page 156... ...
Establish courses within the engineering curriculum in which student teams solve industrial and community problems for real clients. Set up design juries of industrialists or national design competitions in required courses, thus turning faculty members into coaches and advisers for student teams under student leadership.
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From page 157... ...
Furthermore, it appears that the unresponsive, change-resisting attitude exhibited by many engineers in American manufacturing practice is in large measure due to this primitive and ineffective educational paradigm. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I benefited from participative deliberations and advice from several of my faculty colleagues, including K
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