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EVERYBODY knows that the housewife's work entails long working hours and occasionally strenuous activity. Consequently the first question confronting the work study physiologist is: How high must we rate the physical demand on the housewife?

EVIDENCE of the importance which automation is assuming comes from the Institution of Production Engineers, who announce that they will hold a National Conference in Margate from 16th to 19th June, 1955, when it is proposed to examine the implications of the automatic factory, and to promote discussion on the technical, sociological and managerial problems involved. The impact on smaller factories will be particularly considered.

THE ideal to which all payment for work is striving is to reward “a fair day's work” by “a fair day's pay”. The two most usual methods of payment used in the attempt to achieve this ideal are:

WHERE are we going? The aim is to double our standard of living in the next 25 years and, as Sir Alexander Fleck, K.B.E., Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., so aptly staled recently, ‘The man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive.’ One might venture to expand this statement by adding that he is still more likely to arrive if the cluttering debris of inefficient methods and movements are cleared away.

WHAT a wonderful lady is Dr. Lillian Gilbreth. Whatever her age it can be discounted since years have little or no effect on one so youthful in spirit.

DURING some comments on the brain drain last month it was remarked that work study technologists stood on the periphery. Suddenly they have been moved right to the centre as the result of a communication from Dr. Robert N. Lehrer. He is among the six American work study experts best known to the profession in this country, ranking with Barnes and Mundel as having contributed much to a right appreciation of the subject's value and its techniques.

INDUSTRIALLY the two ‘in’ words today seem to be participation and consensus, the first leading to the second. How these can become a reality in modern business was discussed recently by the London Region of the Institute of Work Study Practitioners.

EVERY so often a new “in” word comes into fashion and everybody seems to use it whether it fits or not. Words like “situation”, “productivity” and “management”. Words like “y'know” or “Oh yeah?”. Usually they are started by comedians or pop singers. For a while they drive us mad. Then, gratefully, they fall into disuetude. They are quickly forgotten.

Do not reach for your pen—we are quite aware that this journal is for work study technicians. But it is also a journal for management, and is read by a great many readers who are not technicians, but who are otherwise interested in improving industrial efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to use an inter-disciplinary approach to examine the relevance of F.W. Taylor’s principles to modern shop-floor practices in the context of a manufacturing organization.

Standard time study guidelines laid out by the ILO were adopted and random observations made between two operators independently performing an identical operation in the shop-floor premises of a particular factory.

It was evident from the study that modern management has developed the science for each element of the operator’s manual work, as postulated and proposed by F.W. Taylor. It was also evident that completion of the operation on time was necessary for the operators but not as important as the total number of jobs performed during the duration of the shift. These empirical findings highlighted the high relevance of F.W. Taylor’s principles to modern shop-floor practices.

The authors adopted time study observation as the single method to collect real data from real practices but this could be considered as a biased approach. Since the time study observation is a slow, time consuming, and expensive process of obtaining data, the authors restricted the study to only two operators. Further, the study was carried out in a real setting under several assumptions that may limit its wider applications and practical implications. The study findings suggest that measuring the operator’s performance in terms of time consumption and resource utilization is necessary but not sufficient to evaluate and improve his/her productivity because operators evaluate their performance in terms of the total number of jobs completed during the duration of the shift. Therefore, it is suggested that the managers on the modern shop-floor measure the output at the aggregate level for the given input, while developing new work methods as well as devising performance management and reward systems.

The study has contributed to the body of knowledge by conducting a complete assessment of F.W. Taylor’s first principle from its origin to its application in modern shop-floor practices. Also, the authors empirically examined the relevance of Taylor’s principles to modern shop-floor practices in the context of a manufacturing organization. The study supports the descriptive work of Freeman (1996), who envisaged the relevance of Taylor’s ideas to modern management practices; also, it gives a few directions to test behavioral operations theory in terms of using real operational data to examine an established organization theory (Gino and Pisano, 2008).