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The Hawthorne Experiments1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

C. W. M. Hart
C. W. M. Hart*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

In the opinion of many observers the most serious malady from which the social sciences suffer at the present stage of their development, is their compartmentalism. At the theoretical level, most social scientists would agree that the subject-matter of all the specialized social disciplines is the same, namely human behaviour: in practice most specialists deal with some aspect or department or area of human behaviour, or human behaviour viewed from some “viewpoint.” This separation, however, into areas or aspects, convenient as it may be, or at least as it is asserted to be, for research purposes, is a somewhat arbitrary proceeding and it has resulted, among other things, in a breakdown of communication between the different social science compartments. Another result has been a less, not a greater, understanding of man. There is a strong case to be made, as Robert Lynd, for example, has made it, for the view that the social scientist is the worst example extant of the person who knows more and more about less and less. This is particularly sad when it is noted that less and less in such a context is the human animal, who is clearly a complicated and many faceted piece of work on any viewpoint or from any aspect.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , May 1943 , pp. 150 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1943

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Footnotes

1

The Hawthorne experiments refer to a series of interrelated pieces of research carried out jointly by Harvard University and the Western Electric Company at the Hawthorne plant of the latter company between 1927 and 1937. The fullest account is in Management and the Worker by F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1939). Roethlisberger has pointed out the implications of the research for business executives in Management and Morale (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1941). Elton Mayo sketched the programme in broad outline in Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York, 1933). The statistical material of the earlier experiments is to be found in T. N. Whitehead, The Industrial Worker (2 vols., Harvard University Press, 1938).

References

2 Lynd, R. S., Knowledge for What? (Princeton, 1939).Google Scholar

3 Vide, Eleven Twenty-Six (University of Chicago Press, 1939).Google Scholar

4 It was this type of argument, that even so-called negative results must mean something and call therefore for a re-examination of assumptions, that led Lavoisier in chemistry, for example, to some of his most important discoveries. French, Vide S. J.: Torch and Crucible: The Life and Death of Antoine Lavoisier (Princeton University Press, 1941).Google Scholar

5 Roethlisberger, and Dickson, , Management and the Worker, pp. 227–8.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 227.

7 Ibid., pp. 379-550.

8 Since Radcliffe-Brown, in fact published The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge University Press, 1922).Google Scholar This book, a specialized study of one of the most primitive peoples in existence, and based upon work done as long ago as 1909, has become a classic of anthropological method, and was studied with great care and profit by the Hawthorne group.

9 Roethlisberger, , Management and Morale, pp. 163–4.Google Scholar