Hawthorne Revisited

Landsberger, Henry A. Hawthorne Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell/The New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1958.

Non-fiction cited in Samuelson's "On Extrapolation: A Supplementary Bibliography." Reviewed by E. William Noland, Social Forces 27.4 (May 1959): 361+-64.

An important early study undermining the theory of "The Hawthorne Effect." Important for SF dealing with the "scientific management" of work in ways other than Taylorism, and important for the organization of real-world work.

From Hilda Bastian's "The Hawthorne effect: An old scientists' tale lingering 'in the gunsmoke of academic snipers,'" Scientific American on-line blog, 26 July 2013 (link below). In a series of studies starting with the effects on illumination on the productivity of factory workers: Three initial experiments were conducted between 1924 and 1927. [...] You would think from the way many people write about it now, that these were perfectly controlled experiments that proved that people’s productivity rose every time there was any change in lighting at all – up or down - and that it was because of something called “the Hawthorne effect.”

What people mean by that now can vary. Mostly it has come to mean that the “specialness” and novelty of being studied was all that was needed to motivate increased productivity. And that has been extended: from factory workers to all other workers, including surgical staff during operations; and from productivity to other aspects of people’s lives, including health outcomes.

Relevantly here, in Bastian's words: A manager at the Works and some researchers decided to do more experiments. Elton Mayo and his team were excited that they had discovered that workers were not only motivated by money, and they kept doing more studies till 1933. They published without a lot of data on the illumination studies, and the subsequent experiments were more about social aspects of motivation at work. There was enough, though, to establish the myths of “the Hawthorne experiments.” It led to a radical change in thinking about management, giving birth to a new school of human relations in management that still shapes theory and the way many of us work."