Management and the worker

ABOUT TWELVE years ago the Western Electric Company, at its Haw thorne plant, began the series of inquiries into the human effect of work and working conditions described in this book. In the last six or seven of these years many papers, monographs, books, have been published describing the investigation or analyzing some aspect of it. My own Lowell Lectures in published form (The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, The Macmillan Company, 1933) gave three short chapters to "the Hawthorne experiment." North Whitehead's The Industrial Worker (Harvard University Press, 2 volumes, 1938) is a careful analysis, partly statistical, of the original "test room" records. A monograph by the authors of this book, Roethlisberger and Dickson, "Management and the Worker" (Harvard Business School, Division of Research, Business Research Studies, No. 9, 1934), attracted much interest in the United States and in Europe: it was even quoted in an industrial case in the Chancery Division in London. The general effect of these and many other publications has been to give industrial audi ences an illusion of familiarity when the Hawthorne experiment is mentioned. But this is illusion: many of us have long been aware that there is no sufficiently general understanding in industry, or elsewhere, of the course that the inquiry ran, of the difficulties it encountered, and of the constant need to revise and renew the attack upon the diverse problems presented. This book offers for the first time a continuous history of the entire series of experiments; it also relates together the many different inquiries.

It is too often assumed that almost any young university graduate of sufficient intelligence can charge out of university and into industry and, armed with some rags and tatters of scientific method borrowed mainly from physics or chemistry, can proceed to make interesting findings. This belief ignores completely the mutual dependence and complexity of the facts of human association. If Mr. G. A. Pennock, who began and developed this series of experiments, had not been in timately acquainted with this human complexity, if he had not been thus inspired to critical inspection of the first apparent findings, then this history would not have been written. It would have been easy, for example, to shut down the "test room"