BOOK REVIEWS
The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. By Elton Mayo. Boston: Division
of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University,
1945. Pp. xvii, 15o. $2.50.
This is the second in a proposed series of three books by the senior professor in the
Department of Industrial Research in the Harvard Business School. The first, published in 1933, was entitled The Hubman Problems of an Industrial Civilization; the
promised third volume will be entitled The PoliticalProblems of an IndustrialCivilization. The present volume affords an excellent introduction to the research which Mayo
and his colleagues have carried on with a notable fixity of purpose since 1926.
In the brief space of iSo pages Professor Mayo sets out to bridge the gaps between
a detailed study of a high labor turnover in the mule-spinning department of a Philadelphia textile plant and the emergence of Hitler. We are told that if we had paid more
attention to the illumination afforded by such studies, we might have learned enough
to prevent the war; and we are warned to start our study at once. The thesis is presented with clarity in the quietly angry style of a man who has come to some hard won
generalizations.
The book begins with the sober presentation of the problem which today commands universal attention: unprecedented social collapse in the midst of unprecedented
technical and material progress; the enormous discrepancy between the achievements
of the social sciences and the physical and biological sciences; the paradox of increasing lack of communication between men as we perfect the technical means of communication. As Mayo says: "And, if it were necessary, the atomic bomb arrives at this
moment to call attention both to our achievement and to our failure."
Mayo then proceeds to the diagnosis. Rapid technical changes have produced a
constant flux in human relationships; the ordinary man today no longer stays in one
group long enough to develop the necessary social skills. We must "replace ....the
social aspect of the apprenticeship system."
Such study of the wellsprings of human cooperation should, he insists, be the primary concern of the social sciences today. But instead, "We have an economics that
postulates a disorganized rabble of individuals competing for scarce goods; and a
politics that postulates a 'community of individuals' ruled by a sovereign State. Both
these theories foreclose on and discourage any investigation of the facts of social organization. Both commit us to the competitive and destructive anarchy that has
characterized the twentieth century. Now it is certain that economic studies have
had many uses, and it may be that the time given to political science in universities
has not been wholly wasted; but, for so long as these topics are allowed to substitute
for direct investigation of the facts, the total effect will be crippling for society."
And it is because the social scientists have been too quick to raise a superstructure
of theory without painstaking observation and collection of facts that the social sciences lag so far in the rear. Mayo is effective in his portrait of the modem student of
society who himself has less and less ordinary contact with society. He makes telling
use of Alfred North Whitehead's acid comment: "The second handedness of the learned
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW REVIEW
world is the secret of its mediocrity ..... " Stress is repeatedly given to the point that
science has lowly beginnings. In fact, "pedestrian" is Mayo's favorite word.
The other half of the book is devoted to four case studies of the particulars of industrial organization, carried on by Mayo and his associates. It is to Mayo's credit
that he is willing to stand unequivocally on studies of this sort as showing both the
proper field and the proper method of research in the social sciences.
The studies are selected over a twenty-year span to suggest the increasing insights
of the research. The first study, carried on in 1923 and 1924, deals with the high labor
turnover and low productivity found in the mule-spinning department of the Philadelphia textile plant. Efforts by the plant to cure the problem with various bonus incentive plans had failed completely. Then Mayo and his group came into the picture.
The introduction of rest periods, after a careful listening to complaints, produced significant and measurable reductions in labor turnover and increases in productivity.
However, the results seemed actually to go beyond anything attributable to the introduction of rest periods, and awaited, as Mayo puts it, the illumination of further
studies.
One detail of the Philadelphia experiment came into sharp focus when the more elaborate Hawthorne and Western studies were begun. Initially, at Philadelphia, to test
the rest-period scheme only one third of the workers were given rest periods but the
work of all workers showed immediate improvement. In the Hawthorne and Western
experiment the research group was called upon after careful experiments on the
effects of lighting on work had produced curious results; once the experiments were
begun, changes in the experimental room alone produced equivalent responses in the
control room; actual deterioration in the lighting still produced beneficial responses.
The next series of tests, which involved the introduction of various rest periods, changes
in working hours, etc., produced the same type of result. Eleven such experimental
changes had been introduced one at a time, and then in the twelfth period the original
unimproved working conditions were reverted to. The productivityin the twelfth period
was greater than that in any of the others.
These results suggested strongly that the cooperative aspect of the experiment itself was a more important change in working conditions than the more technical
changes introduced. The second phase of the Hawthorne study, a series of systematic
interviews, confirmed this hunch. They disclosed the vital role played in modern industrial organization by the "working group," frequently a self-constituted unit. Mayo
states the over-all insight well: "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."
The other studies covering absenteeism in two war plants underscored the basic insight. Particularly graphic was the situation in the California plant studied where due
to its effective self-organization and leadership one small group maintained the highest
productivity and regularity of attendance although the plant and the locale in general
were experiencing almost chaotic labor turnover, absenteeism, and change at the time.
It was this last study that served to highlight the counterpart of the working group-the
unsung and unrewarded hero of modern industry, the man who at a low administrative
level has great ability in securing cooperative effort in small groups. And as a further
BOOK REVIEWS
corollary, there was the discovery that group sanctions and incentives were frequently
a more effective motivating force than economic self-interest.
It is perhaps unfair at this point to say that all this is to the good and that it contains lessons for management, but that it does not quite explain Hitler after all. We
must remember that we are promised a third volume on the political problems. But,
even so, the complete absence of normative considerations in the present study is
disturbing. Cooperation on the level on which Mayo uses the term is richly ambiguous.
It need hardly be said that Hitler's Germany achieved internal cooperation to an astonishing degree.
Again, the analogy between the methods for the social and natural sciences is pushed
too far. Although much of Mayo's criticism here rings true it cannot be the whole story
that the social scientists are less patient than their colleagues. Part of the problem certainly lies, as the Greeks suggested, in the uncertain, inexact nature of the facts with
which they deal. Further in the insistence on the pedestrian nature of scientific accumulations of knowledge too little attention may be paid to the imaginative daring of the
Newtons, Galileos, Harveys, Darwins, Freuds. Finally, although Mayo handles his
statistics with care and discrimination and although he emphasizes the importance of
the interviews, there is the danger that too much emphasis on exact or quantitative
study will leave too much out of the picture. The best insights Mayo offers are not in
the tightly measurable results; it was the interviews, not the statistical studies, that led
to the clearest grasp of the working group phenomena.
And his best insights are not so far removed from those of the contemporary novelist. Consider, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald in a story about a boys' school:
"Here yar! Lee! Hey! Lee-y!"
"Lee-y!"
Basil flushed and made a poor pass. He had been called by a nickname. It was a poor makeshift, but it was something more than the stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision.
Brick Wales went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in particular or that he
had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the
selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn't given to us to know those rare moments
when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and
we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious
drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.
As stated before, the book gives us valuable access to the Harvard researches in this
field. It also serves to focus attention on three works which Mayo indicates have been
largely ignored: the works of Frederic Le Play and Emile Durkheim's volume on
suicide, neither of which has been translated into English, and finally, a recent work,
The FRuntions of the Executive, by Chester Barnard, "probably the most important
work on government and administration published in several generations."
On the other hand, Mayo appears at times to ignore too much the traditional materials on politics and ethics. What chemist, he asks, still finds it necessary to quote
Thales. As a result there is an unduly enthusiastic air of discovery in the attack on
classical economics and on Hobbesian theories of the authority of the state; so much so
that one is tempted to wonder if Mayo has come upon the comment "governments are
instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
And more serious, there is a tendency to state the problem too simply. Cooperation
and "social dexterity in handling people" are not, after all, enough.
* Tutor,
Law School, University of Chicago.
HAY KALVEN, J1'