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Abstract

This article explores the Hawthorne studies, an industrial research programme conducted at Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1933. The analysis focuses on the longest-running experiment, in which female workers in their twenties operated a relay assembly in a room specially designed for the experiment and were monitored by a group of engineers and industrial researchers. Based on the authoritarian setting, this research situates the experiment in the wider history of making workers through complex systems of value attributions, such as classifications and technologies of characterisation. However, examination of previous research and accounts of the Hawthorne studies suggests that the relay assembly test was also an ambivalent research setting characterised by negotiations and strategies which converged into the dynamics of knowing and being known. This article thus offers a new critical perspective on the experiment by regarding the operators as active players in an industrial labour process game rather than cooperative, adaptive laboratory subjects.

Keywords

class Elton Mayo gender Hawthorne studies industrial psychology scientific management value

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The riddle of adaptation: Revisiting the Hawthorne studies

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