The Fanonite

The Fanonite contributor Michael Barker uncovers another classic Alex Carey article: ‘The Lysenko Syndrome in Western Social Science’ (Australian Psychologist, Volume 12 Number 1, March 1977).[1][2]

As long ago as 1927 Bertrand Russell, observing how greatly the results of experiments carried out by psychologists were influenced by the personal beliefs and attitudes of the experimenters, remarked:

One may say broadly that all the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more, they have all displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness (Russell, 1927, pp.32-3).

This kind of influence from personal and cultural values on the con­clusions and theories which scientists extract from their data is not new and is not confined to social scientists.

For a thousand years, from the 5th to the 15th centuries, even the greatest among European thinkers who studied the natural world never ceased in their attempts to interpret the evidence they gathered so that it would support beliefs approved by the most powerful authorities and institutions in their societies. Thus it was accepted for 1000 years that all observations about the sun and the stars had to be fitted in, however difficult the task may prove, with the biblical belief that the earth is at the centre of the universe and the Aristotelian belief that all heavenly bodies move only in perfect circles.

Nor is there anything peculiar to the Middle Ages about the readiness of intellectuals, whether scientists, historians or philosophers, to construct and promulgate theories pleasing to the powerful and orthodox of the day. Early in the last century, for example, evidence from geology had accumulated that the earth is vastly older than the 6,000 years which the bible seemed to support. Since the bible was supposed to be the literal word of God this challenge to its accuracy was important to kings and bishops, whose authority was believed to be sanctioned by God and the bible.

A French philosopher, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, came to the rescue. He developed an ingenious theory which accommodated the geological evidence without disturbing biblical infallibility. He claimed that, because age and venerability are intrinsically valuable qualities, God, in his infinite wisdom, purposely created the world “with all the marks of antiquity upon it” (Robertson, 1929, pp.24-5). Thus, according to Chateaubriand, the world was actually created in 4,000 B.C. as the bible indicated. It only appeared to be much older.

To come nearer again to the present day, we may observe in the history of medicine an outstanding example of the subordination of science to orthodoxy, that is to beliefs favoured (for others at least) by the powerful and privileged. Dr. Alex Comfort, who is himself a medical scientist of some renown, has written in this connection:

“In the medical literature of sex … from … [the] 17th century … to the text­books of 1900 and even later … the concern 17-f the writers was far less to ascertain facts than to uphold existing beliefs by exhortations and threats … Every deviant form of sexual behaviour judged by the religio-cultural convention, was not only morally wrong, but, in case that failed to check it, ruinously unhealthy as well” (Comfort, 1964, p.15).

This is a role which the medical profession in our society has by no means wholly abandoned, whether in the area of sexual values or elsewhere.

Thus it is evident that social scientists are by no means unique in their disposition to develop theories and conclusions congenial to power and orthodoxy: a disposition one might call the Lysenko syndrome.

None the less, the situation of social scientists is peculiar. The work of geologists, astronomers and physicists only rarely has a significance that could conceivably bring them into conflict with the dominant values and ideology of their society. Social scientists, by contrast, are continuously concerned with questions about human nature and human behaviour; questions which, if answered one way, challenge the existing system of values, institutions and privileges and if answered another way support and strengthen this system.

All political and economic systems are based on and justified by one or another set of beliefs about human nature and human needs. These beliefs about human nature are, for the most part, as much founded on dogma and as little based on evidence as were the beliefs about the nature of the material world that prevailed in the Middle Ages. For this reason, if the work of social scientists is not kept under close ideological control it is bound to be subversive, in one degree or another, of con­temporary institutions and values,—just as the work of astronomers and geologists was eventually subversive of medieval institutions and values.

But—let me hasten to assure nervous readers—it isn’t going to hap­pen. Social scientists in the West (and also in Russia, for that matter) are, in fact, under very effective ideological control. There are three powerful reasons for this condition. Firstly, the rewards available to social scientists who are willing to assist in maintaining the existing ideology and associated system of power and privilege are very great, while the career prospects for those who are not willing to adopt this role are relatively bleak. This contrast in prospects is sufficiently evi­dent to have caused a recent president of the American Psychological Association, Professor Albert Bandura, to draw attention to it, in his 1974 presidential address, as a problem of some magnitude. Professor Bandura observed:

“If psychologists are to have a significant impact on common problems of life they must apply their corrective solutions to detrimental societal practices rather than limit themselves to treating the casualties of those practices. This, of course, is easier said than done. Practitioners, whatever their speciality are reinforced more powerfully for using their knowledge and skills in the service of exLti,pg operations than for changing them. Socially oriented efforts are hard to-sustain under inadequate reinforcement sup­ports” (Bandura, 1974, p.863).

Secondly, physical scientists do not have to ask the world for permis­sion to study it. Social scientists do have to ask the social world, or any particular bit of it they want to study, for permission to study it. In con­sequence access to social groups, social organizations or institutions is restricted to social scientists who can produce a track record that reas­sures the elites of such groups and organizations that they (the social scientists). Will neither raise questions nor come to conclusions that could disturb the power and privileges enjoyed by such elites.

Thirdly, knowledge is power. Therefore the powerful want no inside knowledge of them broadcast to the multitude. In consequence, it is only the weak and vulnerable whose lives, motives and attitudes are subject to unending psychological and sociological scrutiny: children, women, students, factory workers, the mentally or emotionally han­dicapped, and minorities who do not conform to the dominant political, economic or sexual ethos of the society.

You may, by contrast, search the textbooks in vain for penetrating empirical studies of the motives, attitudes and personality hang-ups of those who have great power to do damage to our society: generals, cabinet ministers, bishops, financiers, managing directors, owners and editors of major newspapers, heads of police forces and security forces, governors general, vice chancellors, professors, headmasters; all these are quite exempt from such “scientific” probing and assessment.

Western psychology and its theories have been built almost entirely on a study of the vulnerable, the powerless. Hence it is of very little use, except to the powerful. A radical sociologist, Martin Nicholaus, asked some years ago:

“What if the machinery were reversed? What if the habits, problems, secrets and unconscious motivation of the wealthy and powerful were daily scrutinized by a thousand systematic researchers … were tabulated and published in a hundred … mass circulation journals, and written so that even the fifteen year old high school drop-out could understand them and predict the actions of his landlord—manipulate and control him?” (Gedicks, 1973, p.644).

But again, the nervous reader may be reassured. It isn’t going to hap­pen. The system of ideological control is far too deeply entrenched.

As remarked earlier, all ideologies from Plato and Saint Paul to Adam Smith and Karl Marx and Nietschze, make assumptions about human nature and human needs that are based more on rhetoric and dogma than on anything approaching the status of evidence. Hence, perhaps, the readiness of all ideologists to resort to violence in defence of their ideology.

If the high priests of the Middle Ages had possessed the hydrogen bomb they would, no doubt, have contemplated blowing up some alter­native system of religion in the name of their own particular assump­tions about human nature and society. Nowadays the high priests have turned secular and contemplate blowing up all of us in the name of preserving one or another economic system with its alleged superior ap­propriateness to human nature and human needs. Because of this shift in the locus of ideological confrontation it is social scientists working in industry—and in American industry, in particular—who are subject to the most severe ideological constraints.

We shall shortly examine some outstanding examples of the Lysenko syndrome at work in American social science. But in order to under­stand the political significance of these examples it will be necessary to review briefly the re-definition of human nature which the Industrial Revolution imposed on Western society.

Max Weber has shown that a greatly revised form of the Christian religion was invoked throughout the Industrial Revolution to provide divine endorsement for the disciplined and ascetic life-style that factory owners desired their employees to adopt. This new set of attitudes to work, unknown in earlier centuries, is referred to as the Protestant Ethic. Its chief effect was to turn older Christian traditions and values on their heads.

In the Genesis story the Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve knew perfect happiness, was a place where idleness (if not dalliance) abounded—with God’s approval. Work, according to this story, came into the world as a bane, not a boon, as a punishment and burden heavi­ly restricting human enjoyment of life and its natural delights. But that conception of human nature provided, of course, no ideological basis on which to launch an industrial revolution.

With the Protestant Ethic, work ceased to be represented as a punishment imposed on man by God. Rather, to work now became man’s peculiarly human distinction. It was discovered to be God’s will that man should find Grace and Salvation through work: that he should, to this end, make his work a vocation and the ruling concern of his life; should give his body and mind willingly, cheerfully to work for its own sake, for the intrinsic vocational and pietistic satisfactions it provided, and should abjure sloth and idleness as he hoped to escape eternal damnation.

In the modern, secular society God’s Will has substantially fallen from favour as a source of legitimation for social institutions and values. As His authority has declined that of science in general and the social sciences in particular have risen. Ever since Freud, at least, psychologists—and to a lesser degree other social scientists—have been supposed to know about “human nature” in a way that no one else does. So, nowadays, “scientific facts” about “human nature- are a dis­tinctly more powerful ally in any political or ideological contest than is God’s Will. It may, therefore, be not wholly surprising that according to the latest “scientific” discovery by the most renowned American in­dustrial psychologist, precisely those attitudes to work which were once regarded as necessary for piety arid`-grace are now found to be a fun­damental part of “human nature” and absolutely necessary to “mental health”. But that is to anticipate.

The puritan preachers of the Protestant Ethic are the spiritual ancestors of today’s industrial psychologists. The major effect, if not the conscious intention, of their sermons was to reconcile men to the values and other requirements of (then) modern industry as these re­quirements were judged by owners of capital and hirers of labour. In­dustrial psychologists in general perform a similar function. Indeed, in the aspirations of American industrial psychologists, people must not only carry out industrial work in reasonable accordance with the basic contract by which they sell their time, labour and skills for the material means to live; they must like what they have to do—even love it—and identify wholly with the institution that hires them.

We may now consider some case studies which exhibit the role of the Lysenko syndrome in American social science, as this applies to in­dustry.

In the last 50 years a single American school of thought and theory has held a wholly dominant position in*industrial psychology and sociology. This tradition was known until about 1955 as the “Human Relations School”, thereafter as the “Neo-Human Relations” or “Human Resources School” (Strauss, 1971). Three groups of experi­ments carried out between 1920 and 1950 constitute the “classic” studies of this tradition and provide its most important “scientific” foundations. All these studies and their conclusions have been reproduced over decades in millions of copies of textbooks and taught as “objective” social science to millions of students.

A fourth study, reported in 1959, established the reputation of the most renowned American industrial psychologist of the past 15 years, Professor Frederick Herzberg (Herzberg, Mausner & Snyderman, 1959).

In every case the evidence produced by these studies either does not justify the conclusions drawn from it or is in open contradiction of the conclusions.

The first of these classic experiments comprised a series of studies conducted at the Hawthorne works in Chicago, which is part of the Western Electric Company. The Hawthorne studies were carried out between 1927 and 1932 under the general direction of Elton Mayo, who was Professor of Industrial Research at Harvard University and an Australian from Adelaide via Queensland.

These studies have long been celebrated as “the scientific coming of age of industrial psychology” (Blum, 1949, p.47). A textbook in wide use for 20 years describes them as providing “a foundation on which all future research must be based” (Brown, 1954, p.85); and a UNESCO report on the social sciences observes that “it is unlikely that any subse­quent investigations could have so great an impact as the Hawthorne Studies” (Smith, 1961, p.56).

The fame of the Hawthorne studies rests on their claim to have demonstrated that social satisfactions, deriving from human relations—style supervision, are much more important for workers’ morale and output than is monetary reward. The researchers also con­cluded that management’s thought and behaviour is governed by logic, workers’ thought and behaviour by sentiment, irrationality and neurosis. However, all this could be overcome, they concluded, by training supervisors in techniques for promoting social satisfactions and work-group togetherness.

These conclusions, which dominated industrial psychology for the following thirty years, were derived from three experiments, each of which was conducted with five women operatives. In these experiments the effect on output of friendly, “human relations”—style supervision was compared with the effect of a preferred payment system. The results are readily summarized.

When the preferred payment system alone was introduced output went up; when it was withdrawn output dropped.

When friendly supervision alone was introduced no improvement in output occurred.

When both friendly supervision and the preferred incentive system were introduced there was no improvement in output until supervision became unfriendly to the point of sacking two out of five workers.

By some remarkable strategies of argument and omission the ex­perimenters conclude from this evidence that friendly supervision and attention to social needs provide the keys to higher output and morale. [3] In particular they conclude that: “none of the results gave the slightest substantiation to the theory that the worker is primarily motivated by economic interest;” and that “a wage incentive system was so depen­dent on its relation to other factors”—especially social factors—that: “it was impossible to consider it as … having an independent effect on the individual” (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1964, pp. 575-6).

Those are the most celebrated experiments and the most celebrated conclusions in the history of industrial psychology.

The second classical study was carried out in 1939 under the direc­tion of Professor Kurt Lewin of Iowa and Michigan Universities. The Subjects were twenty 10 years old schoolboys who were divided into four after-school hobby groups. The purpose of the experiment was to compare the levels of aggressive behaviour and the levels of produc­tivity in groups working under democratic and autocratic leadership respectively (Lewin, Lippitt & White, 1939).

Each group was to have democratic and autocratic leadership in turn. However, for one group the first period under “democratic” leadership turned out badly; the boys displayed a high level of aggres­sion. So a third category, called “laissez-faire leadership” was invented, and these unwanted results were banished to that category (White & Lippitt, 1960, pp. 20-22).

Even so the final results were still hardly what the experimenters had obviously desired. One group produced a high level of aggression under all conditions (Lewin et al., 1939, pp. 281-2). The remaining three groups produced about ten times more acts of aggression under democratic than under autocratic leadership (Lewin et A, 1939, pp, 281, 283); and productivity was highest under autocratic leadership (White & Lippitt, 1960, pp. 87, 65).

By exercise of considerable ingenuity the experimenters contrive to interpret these results in a way favourable to “democratic” leadership, and to conclude that it was more efficient and produced less frustration, less aggression or both (Lewin et al., 1939, pp. 290-9).

The most obvious thing about this study is its total triviality, and ir­relevance to anything whatever. Yet for thirty years subsequently un­ending versions of it have been spread over thousands of pages of jour­nals and textbooks—from child education to international relations. This study was particularly influential in courses in industrial psy­chology and management where it has been much cited to prove the superiority of a “human relations” style of supervision that is commonly referred to as “democratic.” After a time it was widely reported that output was highest in the democratically led groups; by, for example, the latest edition of the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Benoit-Guilbot, 1968, p.23; Raven 1968, p.289).

The third “classical” study I shall refer to only briefly. It was reported in 1948 by disciples of Kurt Lewin (Coch & French). Its sub­jects were women seamstresses in a pyjama factory. These women thought, and with good reason, that they felt resentment about their low pay rates and ever-fasting job changes. However the psychologist-researchers know better. They know from the outset that the women aren’t really concerned about money; that they are, in fact, displaying irrational “resistance to change” caused by unconscious resentment of the fact that management doesn’t “democratically consult” with them before making disagreeable changes it is going to make anyway (Coch & French, 1948, pp. 531-2). The researchers set up a nonsense experi­ment to prove their point: and do so to their own satisfaction and to the eventual misguidance of millions of students, managers, etc.

A better controlled replication of this study, carried out in Norway, showed that so-called “democratic consultation” that leads to no significant change in management’s behaviour produces no change in worker’s behaviour either (French, Israel & As, 1960). But that study hasn’t become celebrated.

It will be noticed that a common feature in the interpretation of these studies is the conclusion that what workers really want from their jobs is not more money but more social satisfactions. If these are provided through so-called “democratic” discussions and through friendly human-relations style supervision, it is claimed, the worker will be happy in his job; and, being happy in his job will push up his output, will not ask for pay rises and not join militant unions. (c.f. the observation on “human relations policies” by Peter Drucker, doyen of American management consultants: “Most of us in management … have in­stituted them as a means of busting the unions. That has been the main theme of these programmes”-1950, p.7).

Now, while the appeal of these conclusions to management is ob­vious, the scientific evidence that is supposed to have justified them is, as we have seen, largely fraudulent. Consequently it is not surprising that, by 1955, attempts to put human-relations theory into practice had come unstuck at one crucial point.

It became evident that there is, in general, very little relationship between job-satisfaction and productivity. Workers may be miserable and productive or happy and idle (Brayfield & Crockett, 1955).

The solution to this dilemma was to discover (or decide) that there are two distinct sources of job satisfaction: on the one hand there are the social and material conditions surrounding the job; on the other there are egotistic or creative satisfactions inherent in the job itself. Only satisfaction deriving from this second, more vocational and egotistic source, it was now decided, leads to increased effort and productivity. So by 1960 “job enrichment” largely replaced “social needs” as the alleged key to unlocking (without expensive salary rises) the energy of employees.

This theory was given the nominally “scientific” foundations neces­sary to launch it on its public career by Professor Frederick Herzberg (Herzberg et al., 1959). On the basis of an “experiment”, which con­sisted only in interviews with 200 white-collar workers, Herzberg claimed to have found scientific proof that the true human nature and needs of men comprise just those attitudes and values which fit them ideally for a loyal, subordinate role in a free enterprise system. Human nature and the free enterprise system (with a little tinkering here and there) are, Herzberg (1968) proclaims on the authority of science, perfectly matched.

Herzberg’s extravagance is such that, had his ideas not dominated American industrial psychology for the last 15 years, one would not regard them at all seriously.

According to Herzberg, only vocational satisfactions of a Protestant Ethic kind (e.g. “sense of achievement”, “responsibility”, “challenge”, non-monetary “recognition”) can provide positive satisfaction and motivate workers to greater effort. Monetary rewards in particular cannot provide positive satisfaction at all and cannot motivate people to perform better.

For some employees, Herzberg admits, monetary reward is a source of motivation and positive satisfaction. But these he discounts, as an “unhealthy”, “neurotic”, even “pathological” minority. Managements should, he proposes, screen them out of their workforces before they in­fect others with their sickness (Herzberg, 1968, pp. 88-90).

To understand the political import of these studies one must unders­tand the political context in which their spurious results have been adopted and widely publicized.

Robert Brady’s superb study, Business As A System of Power, published in 1943, explored the history of business interests acting as a political unit in Germany, Italy and Japan before they became totalitarian, and in Britain, France and the U.S.

Brady found that in all these countries business, led by the corpora­tions, had developed the same kind of national organization, directing the same kind of nation-wide propaganda machines, dispensing propaganda based on the same principles.

In each country the propaganda was aimed at middle class fears and sensibilities; in each case the key themes were similar.

First, the harmony theme: that there is a basic harmony of interests among shareholders, managers and workers and that any who contend otherwise are unpatriotic agitators and subversives who, by “setting class against class” would destroy every cherished aspect of the existing “way of life”

Secondly, the theme of trusteeship: that for harmony and prosperity to prevail business must be granted a self-regulatory trusteeship of the national productive resources. For only business knows about business, and business is honourable and responsible while governments are doctrinaire and not to be trusted with power.

How is all this assisted by fraudulent social science?

To understand this, one must go back to Roosevelt’s landslide vic­tory in 1936. That result “gravely shocked businessmen all over the country” and led to an unprecedented enlargement of business’ political and propaganda activities (Walker & Sklar, 1938, pp. 428ff.). Popular resentment against the free enterprise system had become intense dur­ing the early depression years. If American business was to regain pop­ular regard it required a refurbished image.

And what better words to renovate that image than “human relations”, “participation”, “democracy”? And who better than sup­posedly non-partisan social scientists to plaster those words all over business’ public image? And who better than social scientists to endorse the “harmony” thesis by forecasting a new era of cooperation in industry that is to follow from the “scientific” discovery that there is no basic conflict in industry because, while managements are certainly in­terested in money, what workers really want is not more money, but love, human relations, vacuous forms of democratic participation, and finally non-monetary “self actualization”?

But all this sudden enthusiasm for words like “human relations”, “democracy”, “self actualization” might be seen through, as a propaganda exercise in manipulation of verbal symbols, if it were presented as sheer managerial benevolence. Thus a cover story is neces­sary, the solution being obvious. Reinforce the harmony thesis even further by having social scientists proclaim that applying all those nice, warm, value-laden words in industry not only makes workers happier but makes them more productive as well.

The material I have been able to cover does no more than touch the outer-most fringe of the subservience of American social science to the ideological and propaganda purposes of free enterprise business regarded as a political unit. Nor has the situation, until recently, been much different in Britain. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations has conducted major studies in coalmines in Britain (Trist, Higgin, Murray & Pollock, 1963) and in textile mills in India ( Rice, 1958) which, according to Bucklow (1966) “could well supplement the clas­sical studies of Mayo and Lewin as the mainsprings of thinking and ac­tion” (p. 70). However that may be, the relationship between evidence and conclusions in these Tavistock studies consistently preserves the pattern observed in the classical American studies reviewed here.

During the last 30 years American corporations have spent, on a very conservative estimate, $4,000 million on domestic propaganda aimed at controlling the minds and votes of American citizens. [4] As long ago as 1939 the La Follette Committee of the U.S. Senate reported that:

“The National Association of Manufacturers has blanketed the country with a propaganda which in technique has relied upon indirection of meaning, and in presentation on secrecy and deception. Radio speeches, public meetings, news, cartoons, editorials, advertising, motion pictures and many other artifices of propaganda have not in most cases disclosed to the public their origin within the Association” (U.S.A. Congress, 1939, p.218).

Immediately after the war a nation-wide blanketing by business propaganda was re-established in a much intensified form. Nothing in American, post-war foreign policy or domestic politics can be under­stood unless the role of domestic propaganda is understood.

But no matter how deceitful the propaganda, there has never been any shortage of social scientists willing to explore and develop new ways of making it more effective. Since Watergate there are stirrings that could promise an eventual rebirth of democracy in the United States. But that is still a long way off. And if it is ever to come it will have to be over the dead careers of a horde of social scientists.

– References –

Bandura, A. Behaviour theory and models of man. American Psychologist, 1974, 29, 859­869.

Benoit-Guilbot, O. The sociology of work. In W. L. Sills (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Vol.7), New York: Macmillans, 1968.
Blum, M. Industrial Psychology and Its Social Foundations. New York: Harper, 1949.
Brady, R. Business as a System of Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.
Brayfield, A., & Crockett, W. Employee attitudes and employee performance. Psychological Bulletin, 1955, 52, 396-424.

Brown, J. A. C. The Social Psychology of Industry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Bucklow, M. A new role for the work group. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1966, 11, 59-78.

Carey, A. The Hawthorne studies: a radical criticism. American Sociological Review, 1967, 32, 404-416.

Coch, L., & French, R. Overcoming resistance to change, Human Relations, 1948, 1, 3-19.

Comfort, A. Sex in Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964

Drucker, P. Have employee relations policies had the desired effect? New York: American Management Association (Personnel Series No. 134), 1950, 7-8.
French, R., Israel, J., & As, D. An experiment on participation in a Norwegian factory. Human Relations, 1960, 13, 3-19.

Gedicks, A. Guerilla research: Reversing the machinery. Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, 1973, 9, 645-663.

Herzberg, F. Work and the Nature of Man. London: Staples, 1968.

Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. The Motivation to Work. New York: Wiley, 1959. Is anybody listening? Fortune (Editorial), September 1950, pp.78-83 and ff.

Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. Patterns of aggressive behaviour in experimentally created “social climates”. Journal of Sociology, 1939, 10, 271-299, MacDougall, C. D. Understanding Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Raven, B. Group performance, In W. L. Sills (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. 6). New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Rice, A. K. Productivity and Social Organization: The Ahmedabad Experiment, London: Gower, 1958.

Robertson, J. M. A History of Free Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Vol. 1), London: Watts, 1929.

Roethlisberger, F., & Dickson, W. Management and the Worker. New York: Wiley, 1964.

Russell, B. An Outline of Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin, 1927.

Smith, J. H. The University Teaching of Social Sciences: Industrial Psychology. Paris: UNESCO, 1961.

Strauss, G. Human relations-1968 style. In D. McFarland (Ed.), Personnel Manage­ment. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Trist, E. L., Higgin, G. W., Murray, H., & Pollack, A. B. Organizational Choice. London: Tavistock, 1963.

United States:—Congress:—Senate: Committee on Education and Labor. Report of the Committee on Education and Labor, No. 6, Part 6, pursuant to Special Resolu­tion (of Congress) No. 266 (76th Congress, Ist Session) 1939.

Walker, S., & Sklar, P. Business finds its voice. Harper’s, March, 1938, pp.428-440. White, R., & Lippitt, R. Autocracy and Democracy. New York: Harper, 1960. Williams, D., & Peterfreund, S. The Education of Employees: A Status Report. New York: American Management Association, 1954.

– Notes –

1. This article, slightly abbreviated, was originally a contribution to a radio programme and Science,” broadcast in the ABC series “Investigations” on June 9, 1976. Other participants in the programme were: Dr. Randall Albury, University of New South Wales; Professor Stanislav Andreski, Reading University; Robin Blackburn, editor, New Left Review; David Ellyard, and John Merson (Chairman), ABC Science Unit; and Dr. Ken Minogue, London School of Economics.
2. A large amount of research and theory in psychology and sociology is occupied with explanation of human behaviour as a function of social context, group, and class af­filiations. Yet there has been very little examination of the research activities and con­clusions of social scientists from this vantage point.This exemption loses for social science disciplines an important safeguard against decline in the integrity and independence of their work which should be peculiarly available to them.

   The present paper examines the work of social scientists in American industry as a function of the reward, punishment and “socialisation” processes which are generally assumed to provide explanation for the behaviour of non-social scientists.

3. For detailed documentation of the above outline of the results of the Hawthorne studies see Carey (1967).
4. American business spends a great deal of money on propaganda and “public relations” that are expressly concerned with influencing public opinion against “welfare” legislation, “creeping” socialism and similar “threats”, and in favour of a minimally regulated free enterprise system. Coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers, and later by the Advertising Council, such expenditure grew rapidly from 1936 onwards.By 1948 expenditure on political advertising alone reached $100 million a year (Mc­Dougall, 1952, pp.568 ff.). By 1950, editorial comment in Fortune reported that “many of the largest firms have started extensive programmes to indoctrinate their employees” (Is anybody listening, 1950, p.78)—at an annual cost of a similar order (Williams & Peterfreund, 1954).