From scientific management to process engineering: The spontaneous theory of technological value in the design of work in organizations

We view the activity of design as being the "plain vanilla" or mundane, everyday-sort of invention which goes on all the time and in all the various kinds of technological practice, from medicine to architecture, to public policy planning, to organizational process change, to product and production engineering. In other words, we construe the central task of technological practice to be invention. And we understand technology to be taken in its broad or general sense. Moreover, we construe the practice of technological design to be theory-laden. In other words, we see every act of design as resting on assumptions and hypotheses concerning how a particular slice of the world is, how it works, and in particular, how can it be improved. We submit, therefore, that every kind of design practice rests on a technological theory - a theory of what is of value and how such value can be attained. We illustrate our views in this paper by proposing the notion that Scientific Management as first expounded by F. Taylor in 1911 was the intellectual progenitor of a number of modern design technologies, Process Engineering being among them. As is true of every technological theory, both rest on a number of basic or foundational concepts even though their authors may be not have spelled them out clearly or may not even have been aware of them. Consequently, both share a common, albeit mostly implicit and spontaneous philosophy of technological value by the firm.