The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization

Boston: Harvard University, 1945. Hardback. Fourth printing in year of publication. VG. condition; exceptional for a book of this age. No DW. Includes looseleaf four page digest. Inscribed neatly on front end page by Pearl H. M. King the eminent British psychoanalyst and dated January 1949. No other inscriptions or annotattions. This is a seminal book in the history of social psychology and management studies. It discusses,among many other things, the research Mayo and his colleagues carried out at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago which led to the formulation of the famous 'Hawthorne Effect' hypothesis. "Elton Mayo's (1880-1948) main contributions to management were his revelation of the importance of the human and particularly the social factors in industrial relationships, and of the immense difficulty of developing true scientific techniques applicable to the study of social behaviour. His most significant work was accomplished in the United States at the Department of Industrial Research at Harvard between 1927 and 1947. The Hawthorne Investigations, conducted by a team which he led with the collaboration of the Western Electric company and the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, were by far the most comprehensive studies ever attempted of the attitudes and reactions of groups of workers under practical conditions. The material secured justified Mayo's new concept of the motives which influence industrial relationships. This concept was that logical, economic factors are far less important even in economic relationships than emotional and non-logical attitudes and sentiments. Moreover, of the human factors influencing an employee's attitudes and sentiments, the most powerful are those arising from his or her participation in social groups. Thus not only must arrangements for work satisfy the objective requirements of accomplishing the purpose towards which the effort is directed, but the arrangements will be effective only if, simultaneously, they satisfy for the workers concerned this subjective requirement of social satisfaction in the working process. The remedy Mayo proposed is that we should learn new ‘social skills'. "If our technical skills are to make sudden and radical changes in our methods of working we must develop social skills that can balance these moves by effecting social skills in methods of living to meet the altered situation. We cannot live and prosper with one foot in the twentieth century and the other in the eighteenth." [This change required] involves primarily a new concept of authority, as dependent not on the formal right to require action of others but on the degree to which individuals assent to orders. That in its turn depends upon "a co-operative personal attitude of individuals on the one hand and the system of communications in the organisation on the other". .