me:
> but isn't it true that the Hawthorne effect has been generalized to > form the "human relations" school of management that says (at least in > theory) that if a manager treats workers as thinking human beings, > they'll reciprocate more than it costs (to treat them that way)?
Gar:
To some extent - though it tends to emphasize participation without authority, and "non-material" rewards. In short it is used to argue that it is the sensation of self-management that is required rather than the actual self-management that produces the productivity increases observed in worker owned and controlled co-ops.
right -- that's why it's a school of management, not a school of socialism or self-management.
Similarly it is used to argue that praise and prizes (like the famous banana) can be used to motivate works - you don't need wages or bonuses. Also you physical comfort in the workplaces is still downgraded - in theory short of actual physical injury - though given prevelancee of RSI and general worker injury I would say that limit is not much observed in practice.
this sounds a bit like the "moral incentives" idiscussion in Cuba years ago.
> (Similarly, hasn't the Taylorist school of so-called "scientific > management" -- treating workers like machines -- been generalized?)
Sure. This is where very crude marxist analysis will work fine. In a capitalist society, theories of worker behavior that justify expoitation and claim to offer the means of carrying out that exploitation more effectively will tend to prevail over those without those characteristics. I suspect that Marx and Engels would would have dissected such a simplistic description with sharp sacrasm or dissolved it in vitriol. But it is amazing how much that goes on in capitalism can be predicted and understood with the most vulgar type of marxism.
of course, Lenin (in desperation? in ignorance?) embraced Taylorism at one point. I should point out that the use of the human relations school and the scientific management schools vary with the segment of the labor market. HR is used more in primary labor markets (though not in the craft-labor market, where there's a big element of self-management), while SM is used more in the secondary labor markets. I never noticed before that Scientfic Management has the same initials as sado-masochism. Appropriately. -- Jim Devine / "But the wage of sin don't adjust for inflation. It's a buyer's market when you sell your soul." -- Jeffery Foucault, "Ghost Repeater."
