Scientific Management of the Public Business1

Morris L. Cooke

American Political Science Review, 1915, vol. 9, issue 3, 488-495

Abstract: The evolution of business organization is from the unsystematized through the systematized to the scientific. Governmental work—federal, state and municipal—is still almost exclusively in the unsystematized stage.Among the causes of municipal inefficiency are the attempt to hamper and control the action of individuals by a multiplicity of petty restrictions unknown in private business, and the separation of the municipal service into scores of divisions with little or no mutuality of interest. Both of these practices tend to prevent group action in the large sense. But undoubtedly the greatest bar to efficiency is the unwillingness to trust the individual as shown by the attempt to thwart evil or selfish designs of the official by board control. This committee management is in my opinion, the most costly hallucination of democracy. As a present day cause of expensive and inefficient government, this bulwark of the stand patter, of special privilege, of the politician and of the crook makes other influences tending in the same direction such as the complacency of civil service and the lack of definite standards, seem almost negligible.

Date: 1915
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