Research and practice in occupational and organisational psychology: Are we learning from the lessons of our history?

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Up until recently, there has been a trend to artificially separate the history of scientific development from the activities or the ‘doing’ of psychology. However, a movement away from a history of personalities towards a history of ideas in psychology is evident in recent decades. Thus, attempting to write a chronological or ‘great person’ history of organisational psychology has limited value in that it runs the risk of suggesting a neat and linear progression that reveals little of the different forces that have shaped the development of the field. Thus, in the present paper, I will examine some of the key landmarks in the field and reflect on the key historical factors informing our approach to practice and research in occupational and organisational psychology (OP). This selective review of the field is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather the challenge is to reflect on the two major historical narratives that have shaped the field of OP; namely the scientific management and humanistic. These two narratives have valorised different approaches to the research and practice in OP. The paper delineates how they have been contradictory and/or unconnected, and how this intellectual zoo has had deleterious effects on the development of OP. The scientific management tradition has dehumanised and lessened the role of both the individual and context resulting in both reductive research and practice. Conversely, the humanistic approach, rooted in ethics and social justice, has been allowed to either drift towards other disciplines (e.g. sociology, philosophy) or marginalised to the edges of OP. This paper is a call for us to inject our intellectual history directly into the study of OP.