A Game of Two-Halves: World War II and the Institutionalization of Human Relations in the U.S.

Abstract

Much has been made about the enduring legacy of the human relations movement, especially how it shed new light on tensions between labor and management in industry. Histories of human relations have played a game of ‘two halves.’ On the on hand, scholars have furnished our understanding of the Hawthorne Studies and their numerous implications on management and organization. However, on the other, this plethora of research has not yet fully considered the impact of World War II and its contribution to the institutionalization of early human relations. What we set out to address in this paper is how the War formed a specific historic context from which leading voices such as Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard helped institutionalize the nascent human relations movement as a focal of management and industrial relations research. We reassemble archival material from four archives that help trace the influence and impact of the War on human relations theorizing in the United States during the early 1940s. We conclude by suggesting the war brought about new thinking on the importance (and attention) of social relations at work.