Karol Adamiecki was a Polish economist, engineer and management researcher. In the early 20th century he initiated a system of management widely diffused in Eastern Europe and remarkably similar to scientific management.
Adamiecki was born on March 18, 1866 in the town of Dabrowa Gornicza, part of Silesia – a great cluster of mining and industrial towns in southern Poland. He was educated at the Higher Technical School in Lodz, and then went to study engineering at the university in St Petersburg, Russia, graduating in 1891.
After the graduation Adamiecki returned to Dabrowa Gornicza, where he took a Bank Smelting Works job as an engineer in charge of the rolling mill. He spent the next eight years working on the task of increasing production output.
Later on he moved to Lugansk and became head of the rolling mill at Hartman Smelting Works. While working there, Adamiecki began turning his early ideas into an organized management system. In 1903 Karol Adamiecki delivered his own groundbreaking paper, Principles of Collective Work, to the Society of Russian Engineers in Ekaterinoslav.
Adamiecki called his principles of organization and work the “theory of harmonisation.” The aim, he said, was to ensure that all employees in all parts of the company were working efficiently towards the same goal. Adamiecki identified the essential “harmony” on three levels: harmony of choice, harmony of doing, harmony of spirit. There are many points of comparison between Adamiecki’s theory of harmonisation and Taylorist scientific management. Where the Adamiecki system is arguably superior is on this final point. By adding this dimension of “spirit”, Adamiecki recognized that business organizations are not machines, but social structures composed of human beings.
In 1918, when Poland regained independence, Adamiecki returned home. He was appointed lecturer at the Warsaw Polytechnic in 1919. In 1922 the Polytechnic created its first chair in industrial organization and management, and the post was offered to Adamiecki, who held it until his death. He also founded the Polish Institute of Scientific Management in 1925, and remained its director until his death in 1933.
At that time, Adamiecki was becoming known internationally. The newly established International Committee for Scientific Management (CIOS) appointed him its first vice-president in 1926, and in the same year he became member of the board of the International Management Institute in Geneva. In 1932, at the Fifth International Management Congress in Amsterdam, the CIOS awarded him its gold medal for outstanding international achievement in the field of management.
Adamiecki died on May 16, 1933.
Main works (published posthumously)
- Nauka organizacji i jej rola w życiu gospodarczym (The Science of Organization and its Role in Economy), 1932
- O istocie naukowej organizacji (The Essence of Scientific Organization), 1938
- Harmonizacja pracy (Work Harmonization), 1948
- O nauce organizacji (The Science of Organization), 1985
Side note: Delivering his lecture in Ekaterinoslav in February 1903, Karol Adamiecki promoted the principles of scientific management before Taylor, whose Shop Management was published in March 1903 – a month following Adamiecki’s lecture.
