Frederick winslow taylor and the idea of worker participation: A brief against easy administrative dichotomies

The public administration literature tends to depict Frederick Taylor as promulgating a “men-as-machines” approach to motivation. The literature contrasts Taylor and Mayo/Maslow, leading to analysis that dichotomizes engineering and psychological theories of motivation. This dichotomization seriously distorts the thrust of Taylor's work, which actually prefigures many human relations insights currently attributed to Elton Mayo or Abraham Maslow. The partialization of Taylor's work raises questions about the way the discipline passes on knowledge.