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The Search for Social Harmony at Harvard Business School, 1919–1942
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2022
Abstract
In the mid-1920s, Wallace Donham, the dean of Harvard Business School, recruited two intellectuals, Elton Mayo and Lawrence Henderson, to find solutions to the nation's ills. Like many intellectuals since the late 1800s, Donham, Mayo, and Henderson believed that laissez-faire modernization and competitive individualism had shattered the social bonds that had once harmonized the nation. Corporations, they believed, thus should use a new science of administration to tie workers into close-knit workgroups. These bonds would fulfill workers’ needs for stability and community, discipline workers’ wayward emotions and thoughts, and diminish workers’ susceptibility to labor activism and radical politics. Historians have shown that a vein of intellectuals turned the common “progressive” faith in social bonds into an argument for the strong state. This article shows, however, that this faith also contributed to conservative thought and tools of control.
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References
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2 Recent work on Donham, Mayo, or Henderson includes Kyle Bruce and Chris Nyland, “Elton Mayo and the Deification of Human Relations,” Organization Studies 32/3 (2011), 383–405; Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton, 2007); Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 2019), 393–8; Oakes, Jason, “Alliances in Human Biology: The Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology, 1929–1939,” Journal of the History of Biology 48/3 (2015), 365–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Gerard Hanlon, “The First Neo-liberal Science: Management and Neo-Liberalism,” Sociology 52/2 (2018), 1–18.
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19 Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900–1970 (New Brunswick, 2010), 63.
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23 Harvard University, Official Register of Harvard University: Report of the President of Harvard College and Reports of the Departments 1926–27 (Cambridge, MA, 1928), 123.
24 “Program for Architectural Competition, George F. Baker Foundation, Graduate School of Business Administration” (Harvard Library, 1924), 9, Baker Library, Harvard Business School; Wallace Donham, “The Professional Side of Business Training,” in Henry Metcalf, ed., Business Management as a Profession (Chicago, 1927), 227–8.
25 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948), 196–7, 205.
26 Ibid., 197.
27 Donham, “The Professional Side of Business Training,” 216; Donham, Wallace, “Business and Religion,” Bulletin of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, 2/4 (1926), 121–9Google Scholar, at 122, 124–6.
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30 Donham, “Business and Religion,” 125.
31 Elton Mayo, Democracy and Freedom (Melbourne, 1919), 49; Mark Griffin, Frank Landy, and Lisa Mayocchi, “Australian Influences on Elton Mayo: The Construct of Revery in Industrial Society,” History of Psychology 5/4 (2002), 356–75. For a guide to the capacious literature on Mayo see Kyle Bruce, “George Elton Mayo,” in Morgen Witzel and Malcolm Warner, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists (Oxford, 2013), 94–111.
32 Elton Mayo, “The Great Stupidity,” Harper's Monthly Magazine 151/902 (1925), 225–33, at 226; Bruce and Nyland, “Elton Mayo and the Deification of Human Relations.”
33 Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 7, 32, 38, 42, 48; Elton Mayo, “Industrial Peace and Psychological Research. V: Revolution,” Industrial Australian and Mining Standard 67 (1922), 253–4, at 253.
34 Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 13, 17, 33.
35 Tuomo Peltonen, “History of Management Thought in Context: The Case of Elton Mayo in Australia,” in P. Genoe McLaren, A. J. Mills, and T. G. Weatherbee, eds, The Routledge Companion to Management and Organization History (London, 2015), 241–52; Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 4, 6, 13, 47, 64.
36 Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 55.
37 Elton Mayo, “The Maladjustment of the Industrial Worker,” in Wertheim Lectures on Industrial Relations, 1928 (Cambridge, MA, 1929), 165-96, at 172; Mayo, “The Irrational Factor in Human Behavior,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 110/1 (1923), 117–30, at 123, 125; Mayo, “Industrial Peace and Psychological Research. III: The Mind of the Agitator,” Industrial Australian and Mining Standard, 67 (1922), 111; Mayo, “Industrial Peace and Psychological Research. II: Industrial Unrest and ‘Nervous Breakdown’,” Industrial Australian and Mining Standard, 67 (1922), 63; Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 53.
38 Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York, 1933), 118; on Hawthorne see Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge, 1991).
39 Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 164.
40 Ibid., 120, passim.
41 Oakes, “Alliances in Human Biology”; John Parascandola, “Organismic and Holistic Concepts in the Thought of L. J. Henderson,” Journal of the History of Biology 4/1 (1971), 63–113; Isaac, Working Knowledge; Steve Fuller, “The Higher Whitewash,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44/1 (2014), 86–101; Annie Cot, “A 1930s North American Creative Community: The Harvard ‘Pareto’ Circle,” History of Political Economy 43/1 (2011), 131–59.
42 Henderson was also building on a vein of thinkers who theorized the differential rate of change among society's parts. See Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 239; Stephen J. Cross and William R. Albury, “Walter B. Cannon, L. J. Henderson, and the Organic Analogy,” Osiris 3/1 (1987), 165–92, at 167.
43 Lawrence Joseph Henderson, “Sociology 23 Lectures,” in Henderson, On the Social System: Selected Writings, ed. Bernard Barber (Chicago, 1970), 57–148, at 62–63, 135; Henderson, Pareto's General Sociology: A Physiologist's Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 54–5.
44 Elton Mayo, “Psychiatry and Sociology in Relation to Social Disorganization,” American Journal of Sociology 42/6 (1937), 825–33, at 830; Mayo, The Social Problems of Industrial Civilization (Boston, 1945), 15–23. On Henderson's epistemology see Isaac, Working Knowledge, 63–91.
45 Elton Mayo, “Routine Interaction and the Problem of Collaboration,” American Sociological Review 4/3 (1939), 335–40, at 336; Lawrence Joseph Henderson, “Letter to Conant,” 11 Oct. 1939, Lawrence J. Henderson Papers, Baker Library Special Collections, HBS, Carton 1, Folder 35, 3; Lawrence Joseph Henderson, T. N. Whitehead, and Elton Mayo, “The Effects of Social Environment,” in Luther Gulick and L. Urwick, eds., Papers on the Science of Administration (New York, 1937), 154–69, at 168.
46 Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (Andover, MA, 1945), 81–2, 101, 112; Henderson, Whitehead, and Mayo, “The Effects of Social Environment,” 161, 164; Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 164; Elton Mayo, letter to Wallace Donham, Elton Mayo Papers, Baker Library Special Collections, HBS, [1937/1938], Carton 2, Folder 2, 7–8.
47 Henderson, Whitehead, and Mayo, “The Effects of Social Environment,” 167–8.
48 Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 91, 114; Mayo, “The Maladjustment of the Industrial Worker,” 184–5.
49 Lawrence Joseph Henderson, “Lecture Given before Prof. Doriot's Class,” Lawrence J. Henderson Papers, Baker Library Special Collections, HBS, 1936, Carton 4, Folder 27, 4, original emphasis.
50 Henderson, Whitehead, and Mayo, “The Effects of Social Environment,” 169; Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 32, 65–8, 108.
51 Lawrence Joseph Henderson, “Prospects of Liberty in the Modern World,” Lawrence J. Henderson Papers, Baker Library Special Collections, HBS, 1938, Carton 5, Folder 18, 14, 21, 24; Lawrence Joseph Henderson, “What Is Social Progress?”, in Henderson, On the Social System, 246–60, at 259–60; Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, xvi, 110.
52 R. C. S Trahair, Elton Mayo: The Humanist Temper (New Brunswick, 2005), 323–4, 351.
53 Wallace Donham, “Training for Leadership in a Democracy,” Harvard Business Review 14/3 (1936), 261–71, at 263, 266, 267; Donham, “Business in Wonderland,” Today: An Independent Journal of Public Affairs 3/14 (1935), 3–4, 22–3, at 4, 22.
54 Donham, “Training for Leadership in a Democracy,” 266.
55 Harvard University, Official Register of Harvard University: Report of the President of Harvard College and Reports of the Departments 1930–31 (Cambridge, MA, 1932), 140; Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 172, 183, 185.
56 Wallace Brett Donham, “The Theory and Practice of Administration,” Harvard Business Review 14/4 (1936), 405–13, at 409; Donham, “Training for Leadership in a Democracy,” 267.
57 Ethan Schrum, The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II (Ithaca, 2019), 24–32; for accounts situating Donham, Mayo, and Henderson in Harvard's departmental milieu see O'Connor, “The Politics of Management Thought,” 121–4; Isaacs, Working Knowledge, Ch. 2.
58 Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 54–63, 222; Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore, 2000), 166–7; Sklansky, The Soul's Economy, 110–11.
59 Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (New Brunswick, 2010).
60 Brooks Adams, Theory of Social Revolutions (New York, 1914), 208, 217; Lowell, At War with Academic Traditions, 108.
61 Donham, Wallace, “The Failure of Business Leadership and the Responsibility of the Universities,” Harvard Business Review 11/4 (1933), 418–35Google Scholar, at 424.
62 Lawrence Joseph Henderson, The Study of Man (Philadelphia, 1941), 14. See also Wallace Donham, Business Adrift (New York, 1931), 6–7.
63 Harvard University, Official Register of Harvard University: Issue Containing the Report of the President of Harvard College and Reports of Departments for 1941–1942 (Cambridge, MA, 1944), 262; Donham, “The Theory and Practice of Administration,” 411.
64 Donham, Wallace, “A School of Public and Private Business,” Bulletin of the Harvard Business School Alumni Association 11/1a (1935), 15–16Google Scholar.
65 Morton Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University (New York, 2001), 132; Gras, Norman Scott Brien, “The Development of the School's Curriculum, 1919–1941,” Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin 18/3 (1942), 222–5Google Scholar, at 225.
66 Sklansky, The Soul's Economy, 130–36; Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University, 132–5; Friedrich Hayek, Individualism and the Economic Order (Chicago, 1948), 8, 16, 22–4. On Hayek, Lippmann, and Knight see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2015); and Hanlon, “The First Neo-liberal Science.” Hanlon captures key similarities between the trio and Hayek, but his implication that the trio sought to shape the worker into an “entrepreneurial subject” is incorrect. The trio largely sought to dampen the market's effect on workers.
67 William G. Scott, Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State (Lawrence, 1992); Nils Gilman, “The Prophet of Post-Fordism: Peter Drucker and the Legitimation of the Corporation,” in Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2006), 109–31; Bert Spector, “‘Business Responsibilities in a Divided World’: The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement,” Enterprise & Society 9/2 (2008), 314–36; Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands.
68 Ryan M. Acton, “Harvard Business School and the Making of a Capitalist Elite, 1908–1980” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2015), 110–41.
69 Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, 1997), 221; Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in the 20th Century (Mahwah, 2004), 180. For recent critiques of Mayo see Kyle Bruce and Chris Nyland, “Human Relations,” in Adrian Wilkinson, Steven Armstrong, and Michael Lounsbury, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Management (Oxford, 217), 39–56; and Hanlon, “The First Neo-liberal Science.” For an appreciation see Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge, 2007), 11–15.
70 Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA, 2008). On using racial identity as collectivizing control see David R. Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History (Oxford, 2012).
71 Mayo, Democracy and Freedom, 52.