The Industrial Worker: A Statistical Study of Human Relations in a Group of Manual Workers, Volume II

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Some years ago the Western Electric Company began a series of experiments that have laid the foundations for orderly research into the motives and activities of men and women employed in industry. Starting with the notion that management should know more about its human material, in the sense that it knows about its materials of construction, the responsible executives quickly perceived that people are far more sensitive than are materials of construction to their wider environment, and that the relation between a man and his environment is extremely complex. They came to the conclusion that men and women must be examined under conditions which are sufficiently typical of their daily experience, and yet which permit of an orderly investigation not restricted by the necessity of finding an immediate solution to a practical question. These researches, therefore, represent the development of a new attitude on the part of industrialists towards their human problems. The results, as here set down by Thomas Whitehead, are of immediate importance to all executives and no less so to the large number of people interested in human behavior. The first volume describes in great detail the beginning and purpose of the investigation, the methods of analysis, and the results deduced from the data in hand. The second volume consists of a series of charts presenting statistical findings which accompany the text in the first volume. These two volumes constitute a distinctly novel approach to the understanding of human beings in their relations to one another, and particularly in work situations.