Social Science and State Policy in World War II: Human Relations, Pedagogy, and Industrial Training, 1940–1945

Abstract

During World War II, the organization Training Within Industry (TWI) developed programs to help industry cope with the flood of new and unskilled war workers. Guided by representatives of the new profession of personnel management and assisted by university-based social scientists, the organization developed innovative methods of industrial training that drew on both the scientific management tradition and the newer human relations approach fostered by the Hawthorne experiments. The introduction of the human relations approach was severely criticized in the postwar era for its manipulative potential, but the wartime training program on which it wasbased did not exhibit that tendency. Moreover, management, which theoretically should have embraced TWI programs, was unsupportive, and organized labor, which had reason to be suspicious, wasvery responsive. Workplace reform, not the psychological conditioning of workers, drove the TWI programs.