The Cultural Diffusion of Scientific Management: The United States and New South Wales

The significance of scientific management has traditionally been assessed by refer ence to the industrial labourprocess. Most studies have privileged the ‘nuts and bolts’ of this technology without considering its social impact. This approach has, I argue, obscured the way scientific management was diffused to other sectors, such as education. This paper identifies those scientific management principles and methods that were directed toward training and considers how they were adopted by American and Australian middle-class professionals to assist in their reeform of industry-related training during the early decades of the twentieth century.