No abstract

As a pioneer of both scientific management and industrial psychology, Lillian Gilbreth was ideally equipped to extend scientific management into the service sector in the 1920s. When her husband and partner Frank Gilbreth died in 1924 and she encountered sex discrimination among industrialists and engineers, she volunteered her consulting services at Macy’s department store, a work site rife with gender‐based conflict, coordination problems and inefficiency. This paper describes her work with Eugenia Lies, Macy’s director of planning, to revamp both the motions and psychological atmosphere of occupations within the store between 1925 and 1928. By uniting an industrial relations approach with personnel management techniques, Gilbreth and Lies made the Gilbreth brand of scientific management useful for the field of retail management.

Critical social histories of consumption often attribute the rise of consumer culture largely to the success of advertising and marketing while leaving unexplored a wide range of consumer education practices that aimed not to minimize but to maximize thoughtful consumer conduct. In this article I move beyond the manipulation hypothesis that I find embedded in these critical histories in order to investigate how one woman's consumer education practices contributed toward a discourse and subjectivity for the modem, urban, middle-class woman consumer. Lillian Gilbreth (1 878-1972) developed her own psychology of work satisfaction as a scientific management consultant in the 1910s and applied this industrial psychology to women consumers in the late 1920s. Michel Foucault's image of "government" as "the conduct of conduct," along with newer lines of analysis developed by scholars interested in governmentality, provide useful tools for showing how Gilbreth attempted to make women into careful organizers of family consumption. Her story allows us to glimpse a whole dimension of governmental power that has been overshadowed by a preoccupation with manipulative power in many sociological and historical studies.A penny saved is a penny earned.

Purpose -Lillian Moller Gilbreth extended scientific management into marketing practice in the late 1920s. This paper aims to illuminate several of these practical extensions. Design/methodology/approach -The paper is an historical case study. Findings -Gilbreth brought her psychologically enlightened brand of scientific management to Macy's Department Store in New York City in the mid-1920s; she accomplished early marketing research for Johnson & Johnson in 1926; and she designed model kitchens in the late 1920s and 1930s which showed homemakers how to minimize wasted motion and unnecessary fatigue in housework while maximizing the psychological well-being of their families. Practical implications -Gilbreth's accomplishments show that marketing research has a longer history than was once assumed, offering further support for the revision of Keith's 1960 periodization of this history. Originality/value -This paper is the first to reveal how Gilbreth's unique mix of psychology and scientific management entered the field of marketing in the interwar period.

After sociology undergraduates have learned about inequalities in their substantive courses, a research experience course in which they critically apply these concepts can be invaluable for fostering deep learning. Coteaching a sociological research experience for undergraduates course three times, the authors witnessed the emergence of an emotional connection to critical perspectives on race and ethnicity that enabled students to analyze and creatively apply these concepts to their research projects. The inquiry-based course was built around the authors’ current research project on how families with tween and/or teen children manage food provisioning. Although the course was not explicitly about race or whiteness, many students could relate to the marginalization felt by study participants because of their own ethnicity or race, leading the whole class to become a cohesive team that was attuned to the power of white supremacy in food discourse. Here the authors describe two key assignments they believe were essential components of the course: (1) writing and sharing your food autobiography and (2) analyzing “what’s interesting here?” to find themes in the interview data. The authors found that the intercultural sensitivity cultivated in the first weeks of the course through personal storytelling carried forward into the interviewing process, into the grounded theory discussions that took place in the classroom, and into the students’ final research projects. The result was that each semester, students interrogated the whiteness of American food discourse by studying the forms of difference embedded in the food stories of themselves and of the study participants.