Elton Mayo and the English Dream

Abstract

Elton Mayo remains a controversial but elusive figure in the development of applied social science. A re-examination of the principal myths surrounding him is made possible by new evidence chiefly from family letters. These show the importance of England to him both personally and professionally and throw a new light on his lack of integratioit into American academic life and on the nature of his influence in Britain.What Elton Mayo did for -or to -sociology has managed to remain a live issue both in Britain and in the United States for nearly half a century. The most important factor in prolonging the controversy has been the marked disagreement about the value of his work, or even whether others should be given the credit for it. What exactly was his contribution to the development of applied social science? And what was his precise role in the design and conduct of the Hawthorne Experiments? That these questions should still not have been answered satisfactorily is accounted for partly by Mayo's elusive identity, both as a person and as a social scientist; partly by the tendency of his critics to assess his work in terms of their own principles and perspectives, rather than his.'In order to assemble a more reliable account of Mayo's interests and contributions, it is necessary to resolve some of the ambiguities which continue to surround the image of this gifted man. A particular difficulty is that Mayo's career and personal qualities were unusual enough to generate a whole set of myths and misconceptions with which the study of industrial behaviour is still afflicted. To complicate matters further, some of the myths were fostered by Mayo himself and certain misconceptions persist only © RKP 1987 (m38-0261/87/3503-«OZ $1.50 Elton Mayo and the English dreambecause he himself made no effort to clear them up. Examples of these include his supposed indifference to the social structural or economic contexts against which behaviour within the industrial enterprise must be viewed; his unwillingness to recognise that trade unions provided a real focus for worker loyalty and action; his failure to consider fundamental questions of power and authority and the legitimacy of their exercise by management. In its more extreme forms, the critical indictment of Mayo is such that it is difficult to understand that he should ever have been regarded as a major figure.^ He can be written off as a right-wing ideologue whose scepticism about the democratic process was dangerously coupled with an enthusiasm for the training of managerial elites. When to this is added his close association with L. J. Henderson, the founder of the 'Pareto Circle' at Harvard in the 193O's, Mayo becomes indelibly labelled as a 'managerial sociologist', narrow in intellectual range and outlook and cotmnitted to maintaining the status quo. Some critics went so far as to discover Fascist leanings in his philosophy and a yearning to return to the social order of the Middle Ages.M ayo's indifference to these charges is, of course, no defence against them. Bu...