Economics The Industrial Revolution - Essay Example

For the grand majority of pre-industrial revolution merchant shop business owners, not only was business conducted locally, it was conceptualized locally. Inventory, marketing, sales and accounting were only different departments in the mental space of the owner. The few workers a business owner employed would be managed on a daily basis, and that management strategy dealt more with the particular personalities involved rather than the torrent of theories that currently occupy rows of shelves in local bookstores.

The Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered almost every aspect of business organization and operation. Most integrally local owners could now sell and trade nationally; however, that required them to now think on a national level. That rapid conceptual expansion could not be contained within the mind of even the most industrious and intelligent business owner. As a result the birth of the modern office is concomitant with the occurrence of the Industrial Revolution. The owner now had to employ people to do portions of the thinking for him or her.

This meant increased bureaucracy and new methods of control had to be quickly established in order to make sure the different parts of the new business mind, decentralized and no longer localized in the head of one individual, could function efficiently. The second important feature of the Industrial Revolution is the creation of the factory system, as mass production became necessary and required to function on this national level; factories, characteristically structured and stratified, required new "scientific management" strategies in order maintain efficiency and increase profit margins as costs could easily spiral out of control in the attempt to keep up with production.

This paper will briefly analyze the nature of the office and the rise of scientific management as two fundamental effects of the Industrial Revolution on business organization and operation. The rise of the modern office was a necessary result of the Industrial Revolution simply because of the exponential increase in logistic complexity that serving a national consumer base, brought about by the ubiquity of the railroad system, entailed. As a brief illustration of this principle consider the nature of competition before and after the advent of railroads.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, merchants could only walk across the street or take a carriage ride to the other side of town to gather what his or her competition were doing and adjusted accordingly. After the Industrial Revolution one was no longer competing with just local companies, but now they were competing nationally, gathering information was a full-time job and as such a forward-thinking owner would invest in someone responsible for reporting back that information. However, as prices and resources now fluctuated on a national level, bookkeepers needed to be hired for each segment of business operations.

The owner, the accountants, and those responsible for marketing now had to be in near constant communication in order to remain competitive, and here the modern office is born. Frederick Winslow Taylor is considered the founder of scientific management. His seminal text, The Principles of Scientific Management laid the groundwork for applying the scientific model to management strategies in order to maximize efficiency and minimize costs. In the early part of the 20th century concern grew over the rise of mass production and the factory system, as these factories were inherently wasteful of natural resources and human effort; thus, something had to be done in order to increase "national efficiency" so that our forests and water-resources would not be exhausted.

One of Taylor's unique insights, which he mentions in the introduction to his work, is that the competent man of industry can be made, trained in fact, rather than what the old system of thinking held, which was that such men must be born (Taylor 6). Moreover, in order to increase "national efficiency" personal management strategies must be abandoned in favor of a systematic one, so that first-class men will rise to the top more quickly. This was crucial so that such individuals could be rapidly sent out to the factories of the nation in order to curb the unnecessarily wasteful expenditure of resources.

This kind of thinking is a consequence of the factory system because its ordered regularity is especially conducive to the systematic application of the scientific method, as mass production in a factory represents nothing more than thousands of controlled "experiments." Data from such experiments could be easily analyzed and slight changes in management strategies could be easily tracked and measured. The Industrial Revolution increased the pace of production and consumption well past the conceptual limit of most individuals and as a result the modern office and scientific management were put in place in order to systematize and make comprehensible the rapidly shifting ground of a new business world.

Works CitedTaylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientifc Management. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Publishing, 2005.