Work Design

Work design, productivity, and automation

NUMMI reopened General Motors' troubled Fremont plant in 1984 with a workforce drawn largely from the people the old system had blamed, then achieved much higher productivity and quality under a different Toyota–GM–UAW work arrangement. The reversal shows that productivity belongs to a system of training, standards, flow, support, voice, and authority—not to a worker's character. It also preserves a dispute: participation and stop-the-line power can improve work while standardization, rotation, and lean staffing can intensify it.

When substantially the same people produce different results under a different system, what changed in method, authority, and burden?

W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming joined statistical reasoning about variation to a prescriptive philosophy of management. His wartime training, 1950 lectures in Japan, fourteen points, learning cycle, and System of Profound Knowledge are documented; their later use and effects must be separated from lone-guru histories and from claims that every program called total quality management implemented his ideas.

The Principles of Scientific Management

Taylor's 1911 program asks management to gather trade knowledge, convert it into rules, plan tasks, select and train workers, and connect measured performance to pay. Its cases are author-reported demonstrations whose accuracy, labor effects, and generalizability remain contested.