[4][5] He came into prominence in the late 1910s after the publication of his PhD dissertation, Scientific Management: A History and Criticism in 1915,[6] translated into German as Wissenschaftliche Betriebsführung : Eine geschichtliche und kritische Würdigung des Taylor-Systems.
[12] Drury, in 1915, wrote The History of Management Thought as his PhD dissertation at Columbia under supervision of Henry Rogers Seager, and guided by Robert Thurston Kent, by then editor of Industrial Engineering journal.
In the early summer of that year, the railroads of the United States north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers and east of the Mississippi had filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission new freight tariffs, so framed as to involve a general and considerable advance in rates.
The Interstate Commerce Commission had, on July 13, instituted an inquiry into the reasonableness of the proposed advances, and there had then followed in September, October, and November a series of hearings.
The vast sums of money involved, and the fact that the impending decision might become an important precedent, led to a contest of extraordinary intensity on the part of both the railroads and their opponents, the shippers[16]And furthermore: It happened that Louis D. Brandeis had assumed the leading position among the fifteen or twenty attorneys lined up against the proposed advances.
The railroads, upon whom the law had placed the burden of proof, had maintained that the advances were necessitated by an increase in operating costs, due mainly to a recent rise in wages.
In the face of these arguments, Mr. Brandeis dramatically took the aggressive, and striking out on a novel and unexpected tack, he declared that there was a means by which the railroads could raise wages, and at the same time instead of increasing costs actually reduce them.
After those present had considered the merits of about half a dozen different phrases, all agreed that, for the purpose of the hearings, the term scientific management should officially designate the system.
The witnesses testified that in their experience the application of scientific management — whether to the handling of pig iron, the shoveling of coal, bricklaying, or machinery manufacture — had increased the output per workman to at least two or three times its former volume.
[19]And furthermore: Especially startling was the statement of Harrington Emerson that the railroads of the United States might save $1,000,000 a day by paying greater attention to efficiency of operation.
Since labor and raw material account for most of the cost in the majority of finished products, a large part of the expense incurred in carrying on the given industry can be avoided through the power to restrict volume which lies in the hands of the typical modern corporate producer.
By holding his frontier of operations back to the point at which unit profits can be assured because no business is accepted which will not pay its own way, corporate management has a considerable power to protect itself.
Advocacy of the system was in the hands chiefly of those in position to profit from it, — the management engineers themselves, or industrial leaders such as Henry R. Towne, James M. Dodge, and Brig.
George explained: Drury was an instructor of economics and sociology at Ohio State University ... [when] he wrote a History and Criticism of Scientific Management.
He felt that scientific management was based upon the principle that cheerful workmen were more profitable than sullen ones and that the individual was a more satisfactory unity of study and administration than groups.