Conjecture

The information chapter explains scientific management better than the chapter about scientific management does, and the two are never joined. Before the industrialisation of the 1800s most products needed less knowledge than one person could hold: a blacksmith or chairmaker knew every step from raw material to finished product and taught it to apprentices, so division of labour raised output in a pin factory but was not required to make the pin. With the railroads the knowledge needed for valuable products ballooned, and no worker can understand how to build a locomotive engine in its entirety, so the information had to be chunked across a network of complementary trades. But the system by which those workers interacted was a relic of guilds and small artisans, neglecting the linkages between complementary tasks and producing bottlenecks. Part I's conclusion: the discipline of shop management was born out of the need to coordinate these independent experts into a coherent whole. That is a mechanism for the claim the Taylor chapter asserts, and it is four hundred lines away from it.

Coordination architecture