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J. H. Smith1,2
When Human Relations first appeared, Elton Mayo had just retired from Harvard and was at the peak of his fame. All contributors to the journal in its first decade would have acknowledged his already legendary status as a pioneer of applied social science, especially in the workplace. His fall from grace in the late 1950s coincided with growing ideological-cum-methodological critiques of the Hawthorne Experiments. In the event, this sustained interest in Mayo himself, although much of the comment on his contribution remained speculative and ill-informed. Fifty years on, the enigmatic aspects of Mayo's career have largely been unraveled, thanks to the availability of family letters and other archival material. A more balanced assessment is now possible of Mayo's intellectual interests and long-term contribution to the field of human relations.
KEY WORDS: Elton Mayo; life; human relations movement; legacy.
INTRODUCTION
The first issue of Human Relations was published at around the same time as Elton Mayo left Harvard and America for retirement in England. Then in his 67th year, he was one of the most celebrated social scientists of the age, lionized on the eve of his departure by an article in the business magazine Fortune hailing him as the equal of John Dewey or Thorstein Veblen and by a gala send-off at the Harvard Business School, his academic base for over 20 years. In May 1947, a farewell conference, "The Mayo Weekend," was attended by over 60 participants, including representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, Western Electric, AT&T, Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil. Colleagues from the Business School, including his former assistant and now de facto successor Fritz Roethlisberger, took stock of Mayo's pioneering contributions to industrial relations and the human side of administration. Other speakers included the journalist Stuart Chase, whose article on the Hawthorne Studies in the Readers Digest in 1941 marked the beginnings of popular interest in what was to become the Human Relations in Industry movement.
The unusual esteem in which Mayo was held on both sides of the Atlantic reflected the widespread hopes at the end of the Second World War for new approaches to the problems of conflict and cooperation regarded as endemic in industrial societies. Wartime demands had swiftly energized novel strategies...