Pathfinders; 13; Elton Mayo

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I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry If you want to learn anything important about a shrub or a bush you have to look inside Elton Mayo was the first American social scientist to look inside the factory and make important a sense of what he saw My name is Benjamin Dammott, that's Western Electric's Merymact Valley Works in North and over, Massachusetts The late Elton Mayo was a professor at Harvard about 40 miles from here In the 1920s, he went into another Western Electric plant, the Horthon plant, to get first hand knowledge of how workers in an industrial

society lived. To see workers in this plant, as we're going to do, is to see people confronted with much the same problems that Mayo studied in his day. The hours are shorter now, and the working conditions generally better. But a fundamental fact remains unchanged. Although the man who works with a machine doesn't become a machine, he does become a different man. By the work, one knows the workman. Off on ten. Work keeps it bay, three great evils, boredom, vice, and need, balteir. The glory of a workman, still more of a master workman, that he does his work well, ought to be his most precious possession. Cala. This is the essential nature of the human.

With all the will in the world to cooperate, he finds it difficult to persist in action for an end he can't dimly see. Elton Mayo. Nearly 9 ,000 people work here, turning out some 30 ,000 different parts. About 12 million Americans are in their living and factories, not always as quiet and comfortable as this one. Since the labor force is growing, even more Americans will be working in industry in the future, the automation notwithstanding. Many of these people came from shoe factories and textile mills, places that were once the bulwark of the New England economy. Now they make telephone carrier

equipment. One of the end products of this plant, this well -stuffed box, or the microwave transmitter receiver. Few workers in any plant know precisely how the whole plant works. Elton Mayo wasn't the first man to recognize this. Karl Marx studied the brutal conditions of the working man and manchester in the 1840s and he asked himself, what if a workman doesn't really know the end product of his work and only knows how to perform one little job. He answered that the worker who doesn't know his work ends as an alienated man. Elton Mayo's approach to problems of factory life wasn't really like Marx's. Mayo wasn't a philosopher of history, he wasn't a dialectical materialist. When he looked at American society, he saw sites that were familiar to observers of industrialized states. So a mobile

population always on the move, unsettled family life, new communities forming and reforming. But like Marx, he saw other images of alienation, and saw them in the life of the worker in his plant. As for us, we see technical complexity, printed circuits, intricate wire, intricate machines, it takes concentration, constant concentration, and nothing so simple as a pair of shoes that you make with your hands. The human problems of industrial civilization, this was the title of Mayo's first book, appeared in 1933. It was a remarkable study and a far in advance of its time. Charlie Chaplin got to the problem about the same time as Mayo in an unskullily but quite poignant way. Countless social observers at the same terrifying

vision, a society dominated by machines, demanding less and less sweat from men, but giving him less and less room for the play of his imagination. The assembly line where model T's were put together and workers live subtly dismantled. There were many benefits. The United States was on the way to becoming a mightier power than the world had yet seen. People were earning more, or from living better. The same industrial complex that gave people new cars also provided new medicines. But it was a strange world to work in. These factories were built to be worked in, of course, yet that they were lived in as well, lived in for a large port of every day by thousands upon thousands, women inspecting cable, man -maning drill presses. This is where Mayo did his

laboratory work. Knits the bustle and noise of the Western electric porthorn plant. This is where he did his writing. Where he used his observations of the worker and industry to form the principles of his books. It's where a man can hear himself, think. Harvard. We moved our cameras here in order to talk with Ellen Mayo's closest colleague, Dr. Fritz Rothlesberger, professor of human relations of the Harvard Business School. Mr. Rothlesberger, what was Elton Mayo's prime interest? What exactly did he set himself up to do? When he came here in 1927, I think he felt that there were too many opinions about workers and what made them tick. And what their major concerns were and things of that sort. And he was interested in trying to study the worker in order to answer some of these questions in his

natural environment. This was, I think, one of his primary focuses to not to try to answer these questions in the abstract, but to look and talk to and live with and see the worker in his natural surroundings. What was the conventional wisdom at the time he went to work? Well, so much of the wisdom at that time was coming from classical economic theory of the 19th century. And in these terms, the worker was primarily motivated by economic interests and the limiting factor to his output was factors like fatigue. He was treated as either a completely physiological entity or an economic entity. And none of those, excuse me, but none of those economists had gone into a factory, actually, a very few of them had. They were pretty much

deducing men from, as I say, the principles of economics. And Mayo had been quite influenced by social anthropology. And you might say almost that he wanted to go into a factory like an anthropologist went into a primitive community. And look at this worker in his whole total surroundings, which included not only the technology and the task, but the whole social structure in which he was operating. Well, he concerned himself with workers' motivation. The question that interests me is what were his own motivations? Why did he do what he did? Well, that's a very interesting question, and I've speculated often about it. I think Mayo was a good bit of his motivation. Let's say almost one -third of it. You might attribute to just sheer curiosity about people and the way they behave. And then, I think one -third was motivated by humanitarian interests

and concerns. He, after all, was a product of the, right, a part of the 19th century. And he was here at a period where the labor management situation was quite critical and acute. The situation of the worker wasn't nearly as good then as it is at this moment. But I think another part of why he did what he did do was because of his own curiosity about himself and his own involvement in the human scene. I think he felt too many people were doing what they were supposed to do or what they ought to do, and that they didn't do enough what they were interested in, what they wanted to do. Now, the conventional wisdom sort of says that doing what you want to do is a very easy sort of thing. But for Mayo, it was a very difficult achievement. What kind of a

man was he in personal terms? Let's say you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you knew him up close. Well, I, as I say, I started working with him. And for many years, I listened to many of the ideas, the newer ideas coming from the social sciences, that he felt had great bearing on the industrial situation. And I listened to him here at, right here in Morgan Hall. And wondered at many times just how you were going to translate these ideas into something that could be practically applied. How did he do it? How did he carry himself off with a businessman, for example, when he dealt with a corporation executive? Well, he was, Mayo had a great capacity to relate himself to different people at different levels. He could talk to a worker, he could talk to an executive, he could talk to the academic who was very sophisticated. And about his conceptual scenes and manners of definition and things of that sort. He was a pioneer, actually, an

early academic in the, in the, in the high corporation councils. I wonder how he handled vice presidents and presidents in the day. Well, I can give you a story, which I might illustrate this point very well. When Mayo used to go out to the factory, he never followed the rituals and rules and conventions of business life. He would come there at 10 o 'clock in the morning rather than 9 o 'clock. When he went out to lunch with the executives instead of going to the country club, where most of the top executives died and where it was customary to entertain distinguished visitors, he took them to a little restaurant where workers attended on Cicero Avenue, an am you running parallel to the company. And he wanted to talk to these executives in the environment of the worker. And it was curious the way he could get many of these top executives who I think had

lost touch with the common man, so to speak. And make them bend and get interested into the problems of little Susie or Tommy at the work level, you know. I do. In your mind, Dr. Rathus Berger, what, what are the practical applications of his work? Well, the consequences of it. It's hard to say because Mayo is a man of ideas. He stimulated a great deal of thought. I think he stimulated a great deal of people to go into the field as he was doing in order to study the worker and his problems of what they were important to him. It was very difficult to reduce some of these ideas of his into simple rules and procedures into some formula. What was his relation to this whole field of human relations, which is now taught as a subject here as I know? Well, you might say almost he was the father of this

development. I mean, he felt that a great deal of that he was concerned with and what he had learned about work of motivation could be applied, particularly by supervision and by management. If they had a little more sensitivity and perceptivity about human matters so that there was following Mayo, there was a tremendous development in the direction of human relations training, trying to get supervisors to understand better how they might apply in a simple way some of the ideas that he had. Thank you very much, Dr. Rathus Berger. Out in Mayo's office used to be here in Morgan Hall. He was appointed professor of industrial research in 1929 and he held on to the title until he retired in 1949. As Dr. Rathus Berger said, his ideas aren't the easiest kind to summarize, but some things are clear.

Mayo looked at the worker doing his work and discovered those things. First, he discovered that workers don't just work for money and then he discovered that workers doing their job aren't just performing a function but are living together with other people. With all the problems and all the potential pleasures perhaps that that entails. In intellectual terms, he put an end to the simpler 19th century moralizing about isolated individuals. He drew on the insights of the new sociology and the new anthropology and argued that what a man was was at least in part what his culture directed him to be. For just that reason, a worker at his machine can't often express his sense of alienation, which simply

means the distance there is between the narrow job that he does at that machine and the final end product that the factory produces. Means that and as well as awareness that his being at this particular machine at this particular time may be a kind of accident or even perhaps a joke. Not all the lessons that Elton Mayo taught have been fully learned, of course, but they are being taught here now. Indeed, few influences on professional business education or as powerful as that of this man. He showed students of business, if you wanted to know the truth about workers, you had to go out and look at them. You had to go look at the plant, go look at the assembly line, see the managers firsthand to study the case and the case study method is still a key one at this institution. The studies Dr. Rathlisberger referred to, especially the

ones of the Hawthorne plant, are a perfect example of this. This is a picture of Elton Mayo hanging inside Morgan Hall. This is a room inside Morgan where writings buy and about Mayo and his field are kept. In 1927, Mayo met a Western electric man who told him about a study the company was making at its Hawthorne plant in Chicago. It was a simple effort to measure the effects of lighting on workers. One lighting improved, productivity improved. But when the lighting was cut down, the workers still did more work than before. The illogic of the thing fascinated Mayo. He began his own study at Hawthorne, working with a small group of girls making telephone relies. The Mayo made constant changes in working conditions, giving the girls longer rest periods, coffee breaks, shorter hours. The better the conditions, the more work the girls did, of course. But when he took away all the new benefits,

the same illogic again, the girls worked harder than ever before. Mayo looked for the source of the mystery in the individual girls and never before were workers' lives explored so thoroughly for clues. But he didn't find any clues, not until he gave up looking for causes in the individual and turned instead to the life of the group. The girls were working better as it turned out because the company cared and because they themselves as a small group had a new sense of their power. In a way, the study itself had changed the girls' lives. Man has long known himself to be a social animal. But not until Mayo was the worker in industry seen clearly as a man in society. And Mayo himself couldn't see clearly until he'd organized the study in the Hawthorne relay room where the individual girls had little or no idea why a Harvard professor was making life easier for them. That was in 1928. One of these girls from the

Hawthorne relay room, Mrs. Teresa Zajak, is still an employee of that plant. She has come east to the plant where we were a few minutes ago. Mrs. Zajak, at the time that picture was taken, what did you think Mayo was doing? I thought he came over to visit us. Well, he came over to visit us from where? From the Mayo Clinic. Well, he was going to give you a medical inspection or something of that sort. Now, how did they set up the experiment? How did you happen to be chosen for the job? My supervisor asked me if I wanted to work in a test room. Did you know what a test room was then? I had no idea what it would be like. And you said yes, obviously, and then went in there and what happened at that time? Well, they started serving us breakfast at 9 .30. And by us eating every morning, we turned out more work and we doubled

our pay. Did you enjoy being a member of this group? Well, now you had a lot of fun. Why? I mean, where was the fun? We all became friends. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Zajak. A recollection of 1928 in the Telephone Relay Room in Chicago. Here in the Merrimac Valley of Massachusetts, the technology is more intricate and the working conditions more pleasant. But there is still a matter of repetitive work in an industrial society. To the workers' satisfaction, dissatisfactions differ greatly today. One place to seek an answer is the main floor of this factory. This is Mrs. Ernestine Cartier. Mrs. Cartier, how long have you worked for Western Electric? 11 and a half years. That looks like

a tricky job. The thing you were just doing. Do you enjoy doing it? I find it very interesting. You don't find it monotonous doing the same kind of tricky job over and over again? No, I haven't been on this job only. I've been other jobs throughout the plant. What are some of the other jobs? I've worked on the bench and fishing fanning, soldering. Did you like anything? Did you like any of those jobs better than this one or not? No, I find this one better. Why is it that this one is pleased with you? What is there about it? Well, it's the electronic counter and different operations of the same coil. There's more variety in your performance of wider variety of operations here. What are some of the operations that you do? I see you pulling the... I'm terribly ignorant here, pulling the strings down, I'll say. And then you have to watch that counter over there and decide when it is that you've done the right number of turns. Is that

right? Well, the counter does all that. You set your counter and the counter stops at that certain amount of turns on the coil. So far, is your concern then that the job isn't a... It isn't a dull and repetitive. No, it isn't. You enjoy the series of operations that you... I do. I enjoy it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Mrs. Cartier speaks from the point of view of a single worker. She thinks in terms of her machine, her satisfaction, and of course her livelihood. Inevitably, management's views of affairs, like its responsibilities, are different. One of the men at Maramack Valley, on whom this responsibility falls, is William Willett's assistant superintendent, industrial relation. How are you, Mr. Willett? Nice to see you, Mr. Chairman. Because I understand that you had something to do with the planning of this plan. Yes, I did. I was with the engineering group that did the specifications and the facilities planning

for this particular plan. My specific responsibility was the development and design of the materials handling facilities that were put into this plan. I see. So you've had a long experience with the workers who are doing their job. During their job? Yes, I would say so. When you think about such matters in your own mind, Mr. Willett, how do you set up a balance between practical and technological and economic and humane considerations in the management of this kind of operation? Well, I find it rather difficult to divide them. I find that you have to mix them or blend them in such a way that we can accomplish our end objective. Now, the man who does, for example, or lighting, would be specifically concerned with the practical aspects of lighting. But the man who has the overall facilities planning, would be very much concerned about the humanitarian aspects as well. I see. When you speak at the humanitarian aspects, I gather that you're not really in the position of saying that there is a technology or science of human relations,

are you so? I'm afraid I would have to call it an art. By an art, you would mean something that involves certain uncertainty principles. I'm afraid this is true. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. The invisible essential of these big buildings is the set of attitudes that governs them. Do factories run on purely economic principles or are other factors involved? Mayo said there were other factors, and he urged the owners of factories to find out about them. He wanted them to realize first that the industrial revolution had disrupted human life. Not because industries that particularly wanted to, but because they couldn't avoid it. Stable communities became unstable. Traditional ways of life were shattered. Like all of us, the worker wants and needs to be part of a group. Those groups go on or going to the family and the

church. His need for solid human relations and the community grows more desperate. So he creates his groups where he works. But because he wants so badly to do that, just for that reason, he may not do it very well. By this Mayo means that the underlying obsessiveness, what some people speak of as the neurotic quality of our society, is his plain inside of factory as it is outside. To live a terrible life in an industrialized civilization, Mayo says the worker needs new social skills. To help the worker find his place in the world, the managers of all of us new factories need new insights, new skills of their own. In some cases, they're seeking them. Industry, as we see, need not be unrelieved ugliness. Here's an artist's vision of a factory.

Charles Sheila sees it as a living organism, a place where soft contours and even the kind of beauty can be found. Elton Mayo's vision was for the mind, not for the eye, but he too appreciated the value of clear and honest observation. He was a clinician, taking his model from medicine. But he knew his limits as a dispassionate observer. He realized that the social scientist could never detach himself from society. You'd only see as far as his model vision allowed him to see. Some observers pretending to be quite detached, dispassionate about it, have seen Mayo's work as a sort of textbook for manipulating people. Others think of him as a kind of guidebook for the organization man. Others say that Mayo's work is

important as an instrument of raising productivity, or as a way of getting longer coffee breaks. And then there are those for whom Mayo said one thing above all, you can't plan work for a man as you do for a machine. Mayo has been called a socialist, communist, fascist, behaviorist, a determinist. He's also been called a humanist, which is a lot closer to the truth. When a waitress in Cambridge heard of his death in 1949, he's reported to have said, Mr. Mayo was a great man. I don't know if Harvard knew it, but we did. He understood us. I

don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network. Thank you.