Taylor and Friedman

Question: Discuss about the Taylor and Friedman. Answer: The video Ford and Taylor scientific management opens with the story of Vulcan Motor Company Limited in the United Kingdom. The workers in the company manufactured cars using slow and unscientific ways that took weeks to manufacture cars. The production process was costly which added to the high cost of the cars. Only the rich people who could buy those costly cars and they were looked upon as status symbols. The founder of Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford was influenced by the scientific management of production methods of Fredrick Taylor(Ford.com 2017). He introduced the system of assembly line to manufacture cars. The cars passed from one point of the line to the next where the workers worked on them. Henry Ford believed that vertical integration of assembly would bring about faster and innovative integration of several parts (Argyres and Mostafa 2016). He prevented all sorts of trade union interference to ensure uninterrupted production and efficient management of the employees. Th e workers faced problems while working on the newly introduced automatic production system and some of them left the job. Henry Ford in order to motivate the employees and to ensure smooth production increased the wages. This scientific management proposed by Taylor and adopted by Ford spread into the other automobile companies. It became famous even in the European countries like Germany and led to foundation of systems like Diversified Quality Production or DQP (Sorge and Streeck 2016). The scientific management at Fords also found mention when David Moore, a Ford Foundry worker was interviewed. Section 2: The workers in Australia, Europe and America should adopt Taylorism and Fords style of working. Today every organisation has to compete with strong competitors which demands them to produce goods in high numbers and at cheaper costs. Taylorism stresses on scientific management of the resources like human resources and machinery. Even today there are millions of manufacturers in Europe, Australia and America who work in the small scale industry. These industries produce goods using manual labour (Uhl 2016). Application of Taylorism will help these factories to increase their production which will increase the efficiency of the workers. Taylorism is applied in the scripts of the call centres all over the world. The scripts are designed to adapt to needs of the customer on the other side of the line. The script may be digital or be in a hard copy. The scripts contain questions which the telephonic callers use to communicate with the consumer using computer or telephone lines. The process is systematically controlled and the calls are distributed automatically. The video tells stories which are aged around hundreds of years back and today most consider the Fords techniques outdated. This may be true for the multinational companies which keeping on innovating their production processes. However, there are many poor countries use unscientific methods of production. For example, the construction industries in the poor countries of South Asia lack modern technology used in the developed economy in civil construction. These construction processes in these countries should adopt Taylorism to increase to increase the pace of production (Amjad et al. 2015). They should also scientifically manage their resources and labour to ensure that the production can be done within shorter time. This will increase the efficiency, production and economies of scale which will lead of increase in GDP. Week 2 Activity 1: Section 1: Thomas Friedman in his first oration spoke about three eras of globalisation and their effects on the world. The first era was about global arbitrage and shrank the world from large to medium. The second was characterised by colonisation of various parts of the world by industrialized nations like Britain and Spain. This colonisation made the size of the appear even smaller. The next stage of globalisation led to companies exploring new markets and spreading their operations into other countries. The final stage of globalisation is the empowerment of individual to communicate with the world and carry out transactions. The second oration has the orator and friend discover environment friendly dishes in Peru which the latter promoted and sold in China. Section 2: As Friedman described in his oration that the world has become flat due to globalisation where today individuals have the power to communicate and transact with the world. He also said that if something has to be done will be done because people have to do what they want to do. His speech can also be interpreted that the radical powers like terrorism has gained considerable power using science and technology to operate around the world (Lutz and Lutz 2014). Friedmans iron rule of the flat world suggests that today world business education and drive towards entrepreneurship has empowered the companies to explore new strategic areas of innovation and improvement (Cairns 2014). The level of globalisation is not uniform across the world which is evident from the varying level of advancements and developments in various countries. Some countries like the United States are developed while countries like India and China are future economic giants sharing markets and resources for mutual developments. For example, Ford is an American automobile company which caters to India and even has an India subsidiary in the country (Ford India 2017). There are poor countries like Ethiopia and Nepal who are extremely underdeveloped and are dependent on the richer countries even to meet their basic requirements (Global Finance Magazine 2017). (Appendix 1) Conclusion: The study of the two activities reveals two very important aspects of the flat world. The first aspect is that Taylorism which was adopted by Ford in his factory was responsible for bringing about revolution in the automobile industry around the world. The application may seem outmoded to the multinational companies but there are several factories where Taylorism can be applied to revolutionise their production. The second lesson is that individuals have great responsibility in todays era of globalisation. References: Amjad, R., Chandrasiri, S., Nathan, D., Raihan, S., Verick, S. and Yusuf, A., 2015. What holds back manufacturing in South Asia.Economic and Political Weekly,50(10), pp.36-45. Argyres, N. and Mostafa, R., 2016. Knowledge inheritance, vertical integration, and entrant survival in the early US auto industry.Academy of Management Journal,59(4), pp.1474-1492. Cairns, J., 2014. Contextual disparities in pro-life positions. Ford India. 2017. Home. [online] Available at: https://www.india.ford.com/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017]. Ford.com. 2017. Ford Dealers | Locate a Ford Dealer Near You | Ford.com. [online] Available at: https://www.ford.com/dealerships/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017]. Global Finance Magazine. 2017. Global Finance Magazine - The Poorest Countries in the World. [online] Available at: https://www.gfmag.com/global-data/economic-data/the-poorest-countries-in-the-world?page=12 [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017]. Lutz, B.J. and Lutz, J.M., 2014. Economic, social and political globalization and terrorism.The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies,39(2), p.186. Pepsico.com. 2017. PepsiCo's Global Websites. [online] Available at: https://www.pepsico.com/Home/GlobalSites [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017]. Sorge, A. and Streeck, W., 2016.Diversified quality production revisited the transformation of production systems and regulatory regimes in Germany(No. 16/13). MPIfG Discussion Paper. Uhl, K., 2016. Work Spaces: From the Early-Modern Workshop to the Modern Factory Workshop and Factory.