classical management theory is like the great grandparent of organizational studies we're gonna look at the context at the time it emerged the three primary theories that generally make it up and talk about whether or not it's still relevant today so first let's look at the context at the time this came about as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution which is the late 1700s to late 1800s industry equals work revolution equals rapid change big changes in the way people worked the rapid explosion of big factories that's what was happening at the time people were moving from farms to factories from small shops to large companies one of the main sparks or ingredients of the Industrial Revolution was power steam power and hydro power specifically the machines used to manufacture in these new large factories were run powered not by hand it's like the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle this sped up worked dramatically and helped factories grow very quickly there are also some machinery innovations inside of these factories for example in 1873 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin gin is just short for engine it was a little apparatus that separated the seed from the cotton much more quickly than could be done by hand and inventions and innovations like the cotton gin another machine sped up work even further transportation was also booming at the time that's another key ingredient of the Industrial Revolution like the railroads they connected most cities in the u.s. by the mid-1800s steamboats started to catch on around 1800 as well and the roads were improving in general this rapidly changing context created a great in need the three ingredients power machinery and transportation came together to spark the Industrial Revolution there were a lot of emerging issues at the time that people needed to grapple with they were new large groups of people working together people working alongside machinery the pace of industry was speeding up very quickly and companies were looking for more effective ways to handle their new challenges these issues prompted a lot of new questions for example how are we going to organize all this how are we going to maximize productivity with all these changes and how are we going to manage all of these people working together and we're going to look at three people that answered these questions pretty effectively at the time Max Weber Frederick Taylor and Henry fail in general when we talk about these three guys we're talking about the founding fathers of the classical management theory and these are the three names you're going to see in most textbooks on the topic so let's start with Max Weber he's most known for the term bureaucracy which to him meant the organization's should look like an extension of government and the legal system he wanted a legal rational approach to organizing that meant that he didn't want to follow the traditional family type system where the head of the family was in charge or perhaps you had a charismatic type of leader he thought these were not the right way to run large organizations and he wanted a legal rational approach where he saw each person's authority and should be tied to his or her official position in the organizational hierarchy in other words if you're in a job your responsibilities are tied to that position and if you leave that job you don't keep all that influence and power whoever the new person is is responsible so this was his way of balancing power and keeping things rational and organized he wanted clear rules that governed performance and standardized guidelines for hiring and firing so he was really concerned about issues of favoritism or what he called particular ism and he wanted to hire the best people to work in organizations and organize them in a logical sensible way Max Weber was a big-picture type of thinker compared to the two others we'll look at today and that big-picture term is bureaucracy Frederick Taylor also entered the discussion and unlike Max Weber who was very big picture Frederick Taylor is much more micro in his focus he used the term scientific management for his approach to him this meant applying science to work specifically he thought that the customized approach was very inefficient he saw a lot of factories and people basically all doing things their own way however they wanted to do their particular job in that organization they could and he thought this was not efficient this was not the best way to do jobs so he said let's do time in motion studies to study how much time every single little task should take and how many motions every single little task should take and we can speed things up and come up with the one right way so each task is broken down into very small steps and standardized to the one right way and so he would go into an organization look at all the inefficiencies and figure out the one right way to do every single job and as the results were actually pretty impressive for example when he went into a Bricklin organization they were laying brick down and they were bending over to pick them up and he thought it was all very inefficient so he came up with a system where the bricks were all right at hand level and they were up on a shelf and people didn't have to bend over to pick them up and he made some other changes to their time and the way they used their motions then he sped it up about three hundred percent so now one brick layer could put down as many bricks as it took three to do in the past so his work was pretty dramatic and successful in some ways so Max Weber took a big-picture bureaucratic approach Frederick Taylor took a micro-level approach to looking at the specific tasks and Henry fail or honoree and the French fail took a mid level approach he was looking at the management side of things how shall we manage people that was the big question that he wondered about he put forward a theory of management called administrative science or sometimes just called classical management and he believed that managers needed to be trained in a much more systematic approach he didn't really see any good theories out there for how we should train managers and so he wanted to contribute to that discussion in fact he wrote it is a case of setting it going starting general discussion that is what I am trying to do by publishing this survey and I hope a management theory will emanate from it so he wrote a book that then became popular in the late 1940s in a section of that book he talked about the management activities that managers should be pretty competent at and this is a list that you'll see in many textbooks on the topic he thought we needed good planning that managers should look ahead and a course for the organization he also thought that organization was a key management activity they need to select and arrange people in an orderly and efficient fashion he wanted the manager to be in command in other words to oversee to lead and to drive the process but to stay out of the details that was up for the regular workers manager should also be good at coordination needed to harmonize and facilitate the general activities of different departments and groups in the overall organization and lastly control the manager needed to ensure compliance on everything from accounting finance the technical side quality control and other areas like I said this is a list you're going to see in a lot of classical management sections of books when they talk about henry fail in addition to the details we talked about for a weber taylor and fail they're also some common elements that they really all wrote about in one way or another that bring them together they all wanted a clear hierarchy in an organization that chain of command they all wanted some form of division of labor they wanted a standardized approach to work they wanted the centralization of authority largely in the managers hands they wanted the separation of personal life from organizational they all really wanted the best people in the right jobs and that was one of the reasons why they wanted to separate personal life from organizational so people didn't pay favorites in other words they wanted to select the best employees based upon qualifications and performance and they also by the way wanted people paid fairly at least in theory frederick taylor and henry fayol talked specifically about paying good employees your best people more so you can attract and keep your best and most talented people and rafail even talked about profit sharing which was pretty innovative at the time and i say at least in theory because not a lot of organizations necessarily took this advice but these researchers did write about that so weber taylor and fail all come together to form a foundation of what we call classical management theory and this is an approach you're going to see in a lot of textbooks because it really has become the great-grandparent of organizational studies almost everything that comes after the classical management era is a reaction against it so if you see human resources or human relations or Systems Theory or a team approach these are all responses to or reaction against classical management and it's difficult to imagine an organization that's not influenced by this approach in one way or another even today so is it still relevant today well absolutely you see it in a lot of places especially in manufacturing and even though we might not think that manufacturing is still happening as much in the United States it's absolutely still having the United States and all over the world we have more than 7 billion people on the planet we're still making a lot of things and you still see this approach and a lot of manufacturing companies you see in warehouses and delivery services like Amazon you see it certainly in foodservice if you've ever worked in foodservice like fast food then everything is really like a production line same thing with farming and food production it's really gone almost to look just like a manufacturing process and so a lot of ways not only is it's still relevant it's still more common than ever now of course it is still only one way to do things and some of the new knowledge-based expertise based information based companies don't necessarily take this approach so Google Facebook and other kinds of companies like that are not generally manufacturing tangible goods and so they do not take this classical management approach as much although they are still very aware of it and just like the theories we mentioned like Systems Theory human relations human resources they are in many ways reacting against the classical management way of doing things so it's absolutely still irrelevant in many of our workplaces and when it's not directly touching us we are certainly indirectly influenced by it so that's a little bit about the context at the time we've three primary theories that generally make up classical management theory and we looked a little bit and whether or not it's still relevant today and I believe it certainly is