Re: the "old" Hawthorne studies.....
Have you run across the "new" interpretation of the Hawthorne raw data?
I think it was in HBR 8-10 years ago and I've misplaced the reference.
Apparently, the anomolies can be BEST explained in terms of feedback
loop. When the experimenter's clock (which was in full view of the
employees) was working, the productivity went up; when the clock was
broken, the productivity went down. While the rest of the results
wandered all over, the REAL lesson is that worker behavior was
intimately related to their own perceptions of how they were
doing....independently of any "human relations" interventions.
I think this result is much more in keeping with activity theory and I'd
love to find that reference, if anyone has seen it!
dale
Paul Ballantyne wrote:
>
> Yes please do post the Industrial paper on xmca. I have some industrial
> psychology students in my Psychology and Human Nature class who would be
> especially interested to read it. We have covered the old "Human
> Relations" based Hawthorne Research (of the 1920s -al la Baritz, 1960) and
> have contrasted it with the more "transformative" methodology used by Luria
> and Vygotsky. I agree that Activity Theory (in the Leontiev form) may be
> valuable for Industrial relations research.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul F. Ballantyne
> Dept of Psychology
> York University
> Toronto, Canada
>
>
>
> >
-- Dale Cyphert, Ph.D. Business Communication Program Coordinator __________________________________________ College of Business Administration University of Northern Iowa 1227 W. 27th Street Cedar Falls, IA 50613 (319) 273-6150 dale.cyphert@uni.edu
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