** Apologies for cross posting

Please see below a call for papers for a special issue of The Business and Professional Ethics Journal concerning the ethics of Frederick Winslow Taylor.  Initial enquiries or expressions of interest can be directed to either René ten Bos ([log in to unmask]) or Carl Rhodes ([log in to unmask]).

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FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR'S ETHICS

Special Issue of Business and Professional Ethics Journal

Edited by: René ten Bos (Radboud University, The Netherlands) and Carl Rhodes (Swansea University, United Kingdom)

2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s book, The Principles of Scientific Management.  Influential, controversial and ominous, this is a book that has undoubtedly shaped much of our thinking about organizations, organizational engineering, management consultancy and the very nature of managing itself.  Today Taylor’s legacy remains a specter that walks silently and often unnoticed through factory floors and office hallways. Academically, Taylor is often cast as somewhat of a folk devil, vilified for what is thought to be his contribution to the dehumanization of work and the objectification of workers. Depicted as a gruesome and early management consultant, a kind of business process re-engineer avant la lettre, his prizing of efficiency as the value of values and his desire to obviate the antagonism between capital and labor are matters that are still at home in the world of business today. But while Taylor has been vehemently criticized for his aversion to sociality and humanity at work management, what is less well attended to is that in addition to his fascination for the engineering aspect of organization he was preoccupied too with the moral aspect of it. For Taylor, efficiency is to be coupled with values such as harmony and friendship.  

As Alan Liu argued not too long ago, the ethos behind Taylor’s scientific management was “to subtract from the workplace any antagonism of ‘man from man’ by absorbing antagonism into a relationship with something one could safely hate (or mourn, or love) with no practical effect at all: the technological system.”  As Taylor famously wrote “in the past man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”  But there are multiple readings to this, and the one less trammeled is that ethical relations between people might then be sustained by turning attention to the system. Taylor’s call to the appeasement of the antagonism of the capitalist labor process suggested that organizations and its managers ought to invest in what he referred to as ‘friendship.’ It is the case then that the ‘principles’ of scientific management extend beyond the mechanical toward this seeming obsession with friendship. The word 'friend' or any of its derivatives ('friendly.' 'friendship') are omnipresent in this book which was generally seen as laying the foundation of hard-boiled, technology-driven management. As Taylor himself wrote: “Each man should daily be taught by and receive the most friendly help from those who are over him, instead of being, at the one extreme, driven or coerced by his bosses and at the other left to his own unaided devices.”  100 years later, this sounds eerily contemporary.

On the occasion of the book’s 100th anniversary, with this special issue we wish to reconsider the legacy of The Principle of Scientific Management in relation its ethics and morality. Contributions should address this issue in relation to the meaning of the text itself, the various ways that it has been interpreted and misinterpreted, and most importantly its legacy in contemporary theory and practice of management. Specific questions that might inform contributions include but are not limited to:
- To what extent does Taylor’s focus on friendship and cooperation constitute an ethics of workplace relations?
- What is the historical evolution of Taylorism and how has this swayed how we understand its ethics today?
- Is Taylor best regarded as a ‘folk devil’ of management whose ideas have been selectively interpreted as dehumanizing?
- What are the politics or anti-politics of friendship in Taylor’s work?
- Were Taylor’s ideas a prototype for contemporary human resource management and its ethics of productivity and cooperation?
- Can scientific management inform organization justice through its attestation to meritocracy and the equal and impersonal treatment of all workers?
- What is the relationship between Taylorism and socialism, especially given Lenin’s avocation of Taylorism in the USSR?
- How does the 1912 Congressional Committee at which Taylor was called to defend scientific management against claims that it was un-American and inhumane reflect the ethics of now and then?
- Why have Taylor’s ideas been resisted with such hostility and is there an ethical basis for that hostility? 
- Does Taylor’s focus on efficiency offer a more tempered ethics for management than more humanistic theories in that its focus is more on managing what people do rather than managing who they are?
- What does Taylorism mean for contemporary business ethics and the ethics of contemporary business?
- What are the contemporary forms of Taylorism, generally referred to as 'neo-taylorism', and what forms of ethics and morality do they adhere to?
- What is friendship in the Taylorist scheme of things and what does it mean for ethical relations at work?

Submissions are only accepted in electronic form to the editorial office at [log in to unmask]

Authors must submit electronic versions of their papers in Word 2007 format as an attachment to an email addressed to [log in to unmask] by February 28, 2011. 

Cover letter specifications:   The cover email letter should include:
• Author(s) names and affiliations
• Contact information for one author, including at least email address and telephone number
• Certification that the manuscript is not currently under consideration by any other journal.

Manuscript Submission Specifications: 
General
• Manuscripts shall be original, unpublished works and may not be under consideration at another publication.
• Since a blind review process is used, no authors’ name should appear anywhere on the manuscript. In addition, because we share files electronically, it is the authors’ responsibility to strip the file of any other identifying notations, including references in the document’s properties, title, or first-person language in text of references. 
• Though the BPEJ enthusiastically encourages submissions across disciplines, submitted manuscripts must be in a condition ready for publication according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition.  Given the variety of disciplines from which our submissions may originate, the BPEJ accepts contributions using either CMoS “author-date” or “notes-bibliography” formats.  For a helpful online resource on either format of CMoS, please see http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html.  
• If using the author-date system of citation for references in the text, footnotes also may be used for substantive information inappropriate for inclusion in the body of an article; however, authors are encouraged to incorporate information in the text where possible.   
• Note: Under either format, please do not submit manuscripts with coding from bibliographic software like EndNote and Reference Manager.
• Because BPEJ is a cross-disciplinary journal, those articles that adopt a style that is accessible to colleagues from other disciplines, while retaining their academic sophistication, are appreciated; in particular: (a) indicative titling/subtitling; (b) descriptive abstracts, (c) exceptional clarity through structure, format, and the use of subheads.

Format
• Each submitted manuscript should include a brief abstract (150 words or less).
• Manuscripts should be double-spaced with 1" margins on all sides using 12 pt. Times New Roman or similar font.
• All pages should be numbered.
• Authors should indent new paragraphs rather than include an extra line between them, and should differentiate major and minor headings.
• Authors should avoid the use of first person, where possible, though some use (such as “we contend”) is understandable. 
• Please use italics or quotes for emphasis very sparingly. 
• Numbers less than 100 should be spelled out, unless they are a percentage (e.g. 5 percent)
• All tables, figures or other graphics should appear at the end of the article and be camera ready.
• It is the authors’ responsibility to obtain any necessary written permission for use of copyrighted material contained within the article.