I started writing about job design in 1947-in an anonymous teaching case. This early ''case'' will help mightily in making the point that the big problem with job design is still Taylorism, in a updated form. My 1947 case was published in . It is reproduced in its entirety below for the first time under my name. In the specified case I am ''Jim McFee''. Since we started teaching this case in 1948 for the first of probably 10 years in the required course Administrative Practices to all HBS MBA's, our teaching group had to keep its author a secret so I could teach it. Of course, now it does not matter, and it is essential to making my point in this paper. I will comment on this case later, in the light of my discussion below of the work I did with Arthur Turner (Turner & Lawrence, 1965) and with Nitin Nohria (Lawrence & Nohria, 2002).
Jim Mcfee (A) 1
I have been asked by one of the professors of the Harvard Business School to write up some of my experiences on a job in a Detroit automobile plant during a recent summer vacation. 2 At the time I took the Detroit job I was 24 years old. It was my first job as a worker in a large industrial plant. I had been brought up in a middle-class family, and my father was a successful businessman and banker in a medium-size community. I was graduated from college in 1943 and had spent 3 years in the Navy. At the time of my discharge in July of 1946 I completed plans to enter the Harvard Business School that fall and decided it would be helpful and instructive to spend part of the summer working in a large factory. I therefore left my home, secured a temporary room in Detroit, and through the United States Employment Service obtained a job in an automobile plant.
At the employment office of the automobile plant I was given a routine interview and physical examination, and was told to report for work the next morning. In approaching my new job, I was determined to find out as much as I could about industrial life from the workman's point of view.