The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Work, its rewards and discontents)
(In this volume Mayo discusses the Hawthorne experiments, ...)
In this volume Mayo discusses the Hawthorne experiments, relating the findings about human relations within the Hawthorne plant to the social environment in the surrounding Chicago area. The Chicago School of Sociologists were studying aspects of social disorganization and this was a topic pioneered by Emile Durkheim.
Elton Mayo was an Australian born teacher, psychologist and researcher in the social sciences.
Background
George Elton Mayo was born on 26 December 1880 in Adelaide, Australia and was the second child and oldest son of seven children of George Gibbes Mayo and Henrietta Mary (Donaldson) Mayo. His father was an engineer, but other members of the family through several generations attained prominence in medicine and law.
Education
Few facts are available about Mayo's early life. That he possessed a brilliant and inquiring mind seems to have been recognized early. His schooling began at home. When he was twelve, he went to Queen's College, Adelaide, and at fourteen to St. Peter's College, his father's school, where he won the Westminster Classical Scholarship in 1895. In 1897, Mayo entered the University of Adelaide to study medicine, but after a short time the routine aspects of the training began to bore him. In 1901 his parents sent him to the medical school first at the University of Edinburgh and then at St. George's Hospital, London; however, his interest in medicine as a career did not revive. In 1907 he studied philosophy and psychology under William Mitchell and in 1910 received both the B. A. with first-class honors and the M. A. from the University of Adelaide.
Career
Mayo tried journalism in London and on the Continent and later accepted a position in Obuasi on the Gold Coast in West Africa (now Ghana), but was forced to return to London because of ill health. Mayo lectured at the Working Men's College in 1904 and the following year returned to Australia and became a partner in a printing firm. During the next twelve years Mayo taught logic, ethics, and psychology, first at Adelaide and then at the University of Queensland, where he became lecturer in 1911. After World War I he was intensely involved in the treatment of returned soldiers who, after long periods in the trenches, suffered from nervous and mental disorders known as shell shock. To the exacting task of treating these patients and systematically reporting his observations in his lectures he brought the traditions of his medical training, familiarity with the newest trends in European psychology, and firsthand observations of life and work in societies on three continents. At the time European psychology was in ferment. The work of Ivan Pavlov, Jean Martin Charcot, William James, and Paul Bleuler was still fresh; that of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet was becoming widely known, as was also the work of the British physiologists, including K. S. Lashley and Sir Charles Sherrington. Mayo's interest was always to place the problems of individuals within the broad context of society as a whole. In line with his medical training he selected from his wide reading those authors whose ideas were based on observation: François Quesnay, Pierre Le Play, Émile Durkheim, and Bronislaw Malinowski were to him more important than better-known philosophers in the academic tradition. Mayo's lectures and studies in Australia received recognition. In 1919 he was appointed to a newly established chair of philosophy at the University of Queensland. His first book, Democracy and Freedom, was published that year, and a second, Psychology and Religion, three years later. As a result of his work the British Red Cross made a grant to the University of Queensland to establish a chair of medical psychology, to which it seems he could have been appointed. In 1922, however, he came to the United States, attracted apparently by the greater opportunities to study social and industrial problems. With the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he became a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania from 1923 to 1926. Becoming professor in 1929, Mayo remained at Harvard until his retirement in 1947. He was active in the work of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, established in 1927 under the direction of Lawrence J. Henderson, a prominent physiologist. Over the next two decades the two men and their associates conducted active research on industrial working conditions; the laboratory focused on physiological problems, and Mayo and his group, on the psychological, organizational, and social aspects.
Mayo retired from Harvard in 1947 and returned to England, where he lived at Polesden-Lacey. He died at a nursing home in Guildford, Surrey, at the age of sixty-eight.
In 1924-1925 Mayo wrote a series of articles, published in Harper's, on the problems of life and work in industrial societies. Most such statements at the time drew primarily on the ideas of economists. On topics in the area of industrial organization the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor the rationalization of work, efficiency, and time and motion study had special importance. Mayo's approach was from the perspective of studies and of peripheral groups, such as the mentally disturbed, in industrial societies. Such concepts as non-logical behavior, social structure, obsessive thinking, reverie, and dreams were prominent in his thinking. These articles attracted the attention of Wallace Donham, dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, who in 1926 invited Mayo to join the faculty as associate professor of industrial research.
Shortly after his appointment at Harvard, Mayo became interested in a study of working conditions at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant in Chicago. Company officials were puzzled by the results of an earlier study that revealed that worker productivity increased when plant lighting was either increased or decreased. Mayo suggested that the major variable was not the intensity of the light but the attention that the workers normally ignored and anonymous received from those studying them. This groundbreaking study, which established a pattern for the examination of group behavior, led to a series of studies about the feelings and attitudes of workers and supervisors in relation to their output. Mayo's insights and interpretations guided the development of these studies. He published the first extensive report of them in The Human Problems of an Industrial Society (1933).
Mayo's best-known book, The Social Problems of an Industrial Society (1945), was written toward the end of his professional career and contained his most forceful statement of the ills of modern society. It was a diagnosis, in the medical tradition, based on observation guided by theory. Changes in technology, he wrote, affected more than the technical aspects of work: they also affected the relations of workers with one another and their sense of identity. The managers of organizations, intent on the efficiency of operations, missed these consequences and were not aware that the foundations of cooperation were being eroded without being replaced. They failed to see a connection, Mayo suggested, between the changes they advocated and the conditions of up rootedness, anomie, and loss of identity increasingly characteristic of modern society. The results were manifest, in industrial organizations, in complaints, grievances, absences, labor turnover, and other forms of protest. Mayo's most complete statement of his views on individual behavior is Some Notes on the Psychology of Pierre Janet (1948). Dominant in this book, as in his other writings, is the notion of social skill, which for Mayo began with the capacity to receive a communication from another person; thus, Mayo's interest in the interview, especially in the therapeutic setting. The skill of listening, in the sense of understanding another's problem from that person's point of view, Mayo found of great importance in clinical work. Like Freud, he found that an understanding of how a troubled person transferred to adulthood the meanings he had learned in childhood often helped the person to change his behavior. Like Janet, Mayo conceived the childhood meanings as oversimplifications of events, over elaborated as applied in later life. So too for Mayo the abstraction of, say, the cost accountant in the factory were too-simple evaluations of the human and social complexities of work on the factory floor, which were in turn elaborated too much when they became the major determinants of action at executive levels. Mayo believed that the emphasis that higher education gave to abstract theory, unrelated to practical knowledge about how events occurred, reinforced the dysfunctional aspects of these patterns of thinking and behaving. To correct these tendencies Mayo believed that the leaders of organizations needed social skill which could be developed like that of artisans through practice and familiarity, guided by study under the burden of responsibility for results. No concept was more central to Mayo's thought, none more misunderstood. There were many reasons. In Mayo's time and since then, skill in social affairs especially, but not only, in academic circles has meant manipulation of others for the leaders' self-interest. In addition, mathematics and abstract thinking, not clinical practice and relevance, were of greater interest in the social sciences. That the best known of Mayo's studies took place in business also became a factor in the controversies that developed. The professionals who dealt with persons needing help were in many ways separated from business. Common themes in the problems that the two groups encountered and in the methods they used were lost in controversies over the topics that divided them. The Hawthorne studies in particular became a target of these discussions. Although Mayo's reputation was established around the study of work groups in industry, his main interest was always broadly in the relationship of individuals to society. The behavior of persons, groups, and society were not different topics for him. Mayo approached these as but aspects of one problem. Few men's studies have been acclaimed in as wide a range of disciplines. This has puzzled and misled many students of Mayo's work, who failed to see that it had its own logic, on the basis, to be sure, of his own nontraditional training but also on the basis of the structure of the problems of work and workers as he observed them.
Quotations:
“What social and industrial research has not sufficiently realized as yet is that… minor irrationalities of the “average normal” person are cumulative in their effect. They may not cause “breakdown” in the individual but they do cause “breakdown” in the industry. ”
“Defeat takes the form of ultimate disillusion — a disgust with the futility of endless pursuit. ”
“The problem is not that of the sickness of an acquisitive society; it is that of the acquisitiveness of a sick society. ”
“If our social skills (that is, our ability to secure co-operation between people) had advanced step by step with our technical skills, there would not have been another European War. ”
“Management, in any continuously successful plant, is not related to single workers but always to working groups. In every department that continues to operate, the workers have whether aware of it or not formed themselves into a group with appropriate customs, duties, routines, even rituals ; and management succeeds (or fails) in proportion as it is accepted without reservation by the group as authority and leader. ”
“One friend, one person who is truly understanding, who takes the trouble to listen to us as we consider our problem, can change our whole outlook on the world. ”
“We have in fact passed beyond that stage of human organization in which effective communication and collaboration were secured by established routines of relationship. ”
Personality
Whether directing studies of factory workers, student mental health problems, or the changes wrought by technology on communities, the intense, chain-smoking Mayo had a strong impact on the social sciences through the numerous colleagues and students he influenced. His belief in the study of social organization as the basis for understanding workers' attitudes, for example, provided the inspiration for the pioneering series, Yankee City, which became a five-volume study of a Massachusetts industrial city published between 1941 and 1959 by W. Lloyd Warner and others.
Quotes from others about the person
"Mayo is known for having established the scientific study of what today is called organizational behavior when he gave close attention to the human, social, and political problems of industrial civilization. " - Trahair
Connections
Mayo married Dorothea McConnel on April 18, 1913. They had two daughters, Patricia and Ruth Gale.