False Prophets by James Hoopes

Author:James Hoopes [JAMES HOOPES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Birth of Organizational Behavior

In the early 1930s, Mayo talked up the Hawthorne findings, then used the resulting interest to persuade Clarence Stoll, the plant manager, that the world would welcome a book on the experiment. Stoll stipulated that author’s credit go to Western Electric because it had run the experiment. Pennock, evidently wanting none of Mayo’s grandiose speculation, added that the book had to be “an account of the actual happenings rather than a discussion of implications.” Despite these provisos, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization appeared in 1933 with only Mayo’s name on the spine. And the book contained plenty of the big ideas Pennock had sought to avoid.

Yet Mayo made it hard for Western Electric to complain. Acknowledging the company’s sole sponsorship of the experiment, he shrewdly credited Pennock for what was really his own idea—a new social situation had caused Test Room production to soar. By attributing his big ideas about Hawthorne to Pennock, Mayo was able to present himself as a reporter of empirical facts.

With his objectivity established, Mayo excitedly depicted the Relay Assembly Test Room as a near utopia. Forgetting Rybacki and Bogatowicz, he claimed, “At no time in the five-year period did the girls feel that they were working under pressure.” Therapeutic supervision had created a “new industrial milieu” that paradoxically raised production by subordinating the company’s interest to that of workers, a “milieu in which their own self-determination and their social well-being ranked first and the work was incidental.” Not wild fantasy this, but “mere description of an empirical kind.”

To create such communities was the elevated mission of the “new administrator”— the vision of the manager as civilization’s savior that had charmed Donham into hiring Mayo at Harvard. By restoring workers’ “capacity for collaboration in work,” managers would also quell unreasonable democratic conflict: “The political function cannot operate in a community from which this capacity has disappeared.”

Had the Hawthorne experiment depended for its fame and influence on Mayo’s somewhat feverish book, it might well have been forgotten. He devoted only forty pages to Hawthorne, the rest of the book ranging with Mayo’s typical ease across a dozen topics such as his work with Philadelphia textile workers, Pareto, and the need for a new “administrative elite.”

But Mayo had chosen well in making the scrupulous Roethlisberger his right-hand man. Roethlisberger, not understanding that his patron sold himself by his grandeur, feared the consequences of Mayo’s disdain for anything resembling a report of his activities to the Rockefeller Foundation. When the Hawthorne records came to Harvard in the mid-1930s, Roethlisberger decided to write a thorough account of the Hawthorne experiment to show that the human relations group had given value for money received.

To Harvard along with the Hawthorne records came William Dickson, his Western Electric job preserved during the depression by Mayo’s Rockefeller grant. Having abandoned his earlier idea of a conflict between Hawthorne workers and bosses, Dickson was judged a safe pair of hands. He joined Roethlisberger in writing Management and the Worker

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