Re: Hawthorne Research

From: Paul Ballantyne (pballan@yorku.ca)
Date: Tue Mar 28 2000 - 12:52:01 PST


Greetings,

The most recent sources I used for the upcoming *Readers Guide* entry on
the Hawthorne Reseach are as follows:

Bramel, D. & Friend, R., "Hawthorne, the Myth of the docile worker, and
class bias in psychology", American Psychologist., 36 (1981): 867[-]878.

Gillespie, R., Manufacturing Knowledge: A history of the Hawthorne
experiments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Nelson-Rowe, S., "Corporation schooling and the Labor Market at General
Electric", Hist. of Ed. Quart., 31(1991): 27[-]46.

The last paragraph of that all too brief entry reads as follows:

"Whereas scientific management decorticated workers, and the mental
testing tradition individualized workers, social relations research
portrayed workers as ruled by a sentiment of interpersonal irrationality.
This was, of course, an improvement; but not much of an improvement.
BRAMEL & FRIEND caution modern researchers to bare in mind that the results
of industrial research can not be fully understood by mere appeal to subject
expectancy effects, nor even to contextualized social work group relations.
They must be understood in the wider, shifting, societal-historical context
of management-union relations."

  
>
> > Cheers,
> > Paul F. Ballantyne
> > Dept of Psychology
> > York University
> > Toronto, Canada
> >
>



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