Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments by Richard Gillespie

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 703 Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. By Richard Gillespie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp· x + 282; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50. Of the few perspectives shared by historians of technology and of psychology, the most notable is probably respect for the Hawthorne experiments, carried out at Western Electric’s telephone-equipment manufacturing plant on Chicago’s South Side. After all, conventional wisdom teaches that this research project—begun in 1924 (under National Research Council auspices) by company illuminating engi­ neers and continued through 1933 by Harvard Business School academics—revolutionized both industrial engineering and industrial psychology. Before Hawthorne (according to standard accounts), industrial engineers addressed the physical environment of work and industrial psychologists designed tests to find workers best suited for particular jobs. But after the “discovery” of the “Hawthorne effect” (these accounts continue), both realized that human factors did more than anything else to promote a contented and productive work force. Tradition thus presents Hawthorne as a triumph of scientific method that benefited both workers and employers, and while some criticize “the servants of power” and “architects of adjustment” for coopting science for managerial capitalism, others explicitly look to the “ratio­ nal kernel” “discovered” at Hawthorne and seek its universal appli­ cation. But as his volume’s title intimates, Richard Gillespie believes that those at Hawthorne manufactured more than relays and switchboards and seeks “to show why social scientists and managers—and even the workers themselves—arrived at particular interpretations of the Haw­ thorne experiments and why one interpretation came to be accepted as ‘correct’ ” (p. 6). He thus reviews the political relationships among all participants and the multiple contexts that led individuals (includ­ ing Western Electric managers and engineers and Harvard profes­ sors) and institutions (including companies, universities, and founda­ tions) to take part in and support the study. And while he emphasizes that he hopes to go beyond earlier studies that sought to determine “what really happened” during the experiments, he traces in exquisite detail the activities and events in Hawthorne’s Relay Assembly Test Room and Bank Wiring Test Room and at Harvard, where Elton Mayo and his academic collaborators produced dozens of accounts and analyses of the experiments. This careful attention to the actions of all involved—including the workers in both test rooms, and the technical and social-scientific practice of the researchers who set out to interpret their behavior—provides Gillespie with the details he needs to trace how Hawthorne’s conventional wisdom emerged. In doing so, he emphasizes the perspectives from which all involved viewed these events and actions. These include the economic and social interests of the relay assemblers and bank wirers, the concerns about production 704 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE (and about how their superiors at AT&T headquarters would view their actions) of Western Electric engineers and managers, Mayo’s own psychopathological theories about the problems of industry (which led him to misunderstand and downplay workers’ perceptions and interests), and (perhaps most notably) the anthropology of work of W. Lloyd Warner, another Harvard social scientist. Gillespie care­ fully relates Mayo’s and Warner’s approaches to the course of each man’s life, thus further illustrating the significance of personal factors for such supposedly impersonal events as technological change. And while he gives each man and his ideas appropriate attention, his sympathies clearly lie with Warner’s subtle application of traditional anthropological techniques to the study of worker motivation and behavior. Indeed, in many ways Gillespie’s study is itself a historical anthropology focused on the work of managers, engineers, and social scientists, and this perspective adds much to its value. One major chapter exemplifying this form of analysis, “Manufac­ turing the Hawthorne Experiments,” carefully examines how Mayo wrote his best-selling The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1933), how Thomas North Whitehead (Mayo’s statistically minded colleague and the philosopher’s son) prepared The Industrial Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), and how, most important, Harvard researcher Fritz J. Roethlisberger and Western Electric manager William J. Dickson wrote Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), the most influential account and...