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Title: Citing Taylor: Tracing Taylorism's Technical and Sociotechnical Duality through Latent Semantic Analysis

Authors: Nicholas Evangelopoulos

Addresses: Author address listing can be found in the "About the Authors" section at the end of the article.

Abstract: The body of scholarly works that cite F. W. Taylor's book, The Principles of Scientific Management is examined. Latent Semantic Analysis, a method that statistically estimates the semantic and conceptual content in textual data, is used to analyze 5,057 titles and 671 abstracts of citing sources. Management concepts and practices, research topics and application contexts, as well as two high-level perspectives of Taylorism are quantitatively extracted as principal components of word usage patterns. The results chart the intellectual territory that was influenced by Taylor's ideas and, through a technical/sociotechnical duality, suggest their continuing relevance through their post-industrial evolution.

Keywords: Taylorism; technical duality; sociotechnical duality; latent semantic analysis; scientific management.

DOI: 10.1504/JBM.2011.141191

Journal of Business and Management, 2011 Vol.17 No.1, pp.57 - 74

Published online: 05 Sep 2024 *