Video name: Hawthorne Studies

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7RHjwmVGhs
Canvas Location: T2 - The Evolution of Manager Material Preparation

Transcript:
The roaring 20s, an era of excitement like few others in American history. An era of
uproar in well everything. A scandalous dance called the Charleston caught on,
bringing hemlines up so they could swing to the new music, ladies bobbed their hair
and covered it with clothes hats. The noble experiment tried vainly to erase demon
drink from America, speakeasies though became as common as prohibition agents,
and bootleggers were both the heroes and the villains of the age, Scarface Al
Capone was a legendary example. Harding headlined the executive branch and
teapot dome but America kept cool with Coolidge. A young pilot named Charles
Lindbergh flew nonstop across the Atlantic, and shrank the world earning its lasting
adulation. The incomparable Babe Ruth too is no throughout the world.

But perhaps the grandest star of the era was the automobile. Nothing in the 20s
revolutionized the lifestyle of the Americans more than the incredible motorcar.
Henry Ford's development of the assembly line, boosted both employment and
wages, and set off the modern American industrial revolution. Everywhere more and
more people went to work in factories, turning out products by the hundreds of
millions, but somewhere along the assembly line, the workers often got lost in the
rush of production. Considered an extension of the machinery the industrial man was
often less important than his output, working conditions were difficult, supervision
usually autocratic, and benefits non-existent for most workers. In sweatshops and
even in better factories, it was production that mattered.

At Western electric's Hawthorne works in Chicago in the 1920s, telephone

equipment was being manufactured by 40,000 people. What Hawthorne employees
had received their company paid pension plan back in 1906, they had vacations one
week after five years, and they had sickness disability pay. Hawthorne was
considered a progressive place to work. Those who worked at Hawthorne really
respected in the in the neighborhood, but was considered quite a privilege to be
working here. At this and three other companies in 1924, the National Academy of
Science began an experiment to determine how illumination affects worker
efficiency. The premise was that output would improve if the lighting of work areas
was improved. Something very curious happened when new experimental lights
were installed, output went up among those employees being studied, and also
among those whose lighting had not been changed, and most puzzling of all, it
continued to go up even when lights were turned down.

Having proved nothing, these studies were called off by the National Academy, it
might all have ended there. Relay making was picked for a new experiment when
Western Electric alone decided to probe the inconclusive results of the illumination
studies. Six young women assembled the electromagnetic switches while rest
breaks and different hours were tried. It was the core of what would later be called
the Hawthorne studies, industry's first scientific inquiry into employee attitudes.
Continuing changes in routine were freely discussed with the workers whose output
as well as involvement in the project increased dramatically. Each completed relay
was counted by a tireless tape, which recorded an overall production increase of
30%. In this small room for more than five years, observers studied work producing
more in less time than ever before, industrial history was in the making.

The Hawthorne Harvard cooperative inquiry continued into the 30s, delving into
production areas all over the plant. When the early returns from the relay room
began to be understood, the investigators felt the attitudes of other workers ought to
be explored. They began industries first formal employee interviewing program.
Some twenty thousand Hawthorne people aired their feelings about their jobs, their
supervisors, their working conditions, about anything and everything. In other
experiments, investigators found the first clues to the social organization of people at
work, an organization that seemed to have as much or even more impact on output
than anything management did. Though not all the results were as dramatic as the
relay room, in general output increased wherever these tests were tried. The
investigators found industry had never tapped the workers real worth, and sent the
massive proof back to Harvard for compilation.
The point of view which gradually emerged from the studies was to regard a
business organization as a social system. Everyone knows that people are important
in business, but a way of thinking which allowed the satisfactions and
dissatisfactions of workers to be thought about in relationship to output and
productivity, and to allow new studies and new actions to be taken had not been
available before. This is the real contribution of the Hawthorne studies.