The Peripatetic Philosopher laments:

Why do academics always get it wrong about work and workers?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 7, 2015

Over the past seventy years (1945-2015), we have progressively handicapped our collective society economically thanks to the works of academics.  

Actually, it started much earlier when in 1927 Elton Mayo at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago began carrying out a long series of experiments with conventional industrial engineering there with hourly workers.

No matter what the researchers did, change the lighting, up or down, make the workstations more or less comfortable, production improved.  

It dawned on the Mayo researchers that workers enjoyed being treated as individuals, as persons,  and not simply as cogs in a wheel.  

The twentieth century had commenced with just that mindset, thanks to the guru of industrial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor.  He suggested that workers be treated as phlegmatic as an ox than any other type in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911).  Time and motion studies followed with reckless abandon. Lost in this steeple chase to efficiency was the more relevant factor of effectiveness.  

It was more important to do everything right the first time (efficiency), which made only 20 percent of the difference in outcomes, rather than concentrating on the right things (effectiveness) that made 80 percent of the difference.  

A century later we have a workforce trained to do not to think about the job at hand. 

Chester I. Barnard, a lecturer at the Harvard Business School, turned Elton Mayo’s discovery into a new campaign with The Function of the Executive (1938), which was about creating the right work climate to get the job done.  It was assumed -- from the Mayo study -- that academics understood what was wrong and what was needed.  

An enormous number of studies guided by Everett Hughes, who had been at Hawthorne with Mayo, followed rich in psychology, sociology, political science, and economics.   

Then World War Two hit in 1939 with the United States entering that war in early 1942.

The great manufacturing might of the United States literally decimated the Axis Powers as shown by David Halberstam In the Next Century (1991).  By mid-1943, he writes, the United States, now fully mobilized for war, was producing more ships, submarines, tanks, airplanes, and guns than all the Allies and the Axis Powers combined. 

THE WRONG MESSAGE LEARNED

Academics and Americans in general, heady from the Victory in Europe over the Nazis and in Asia over Japan, looked for what it all meant, that is, how it all came about.  

Car manufacturers in Detroit, especially Charles Wilson, CEO of General Motors, had the hubris to tell a Congressional hearing in 1953 that it was Detroit that led the way, and America followed:  

“As GM goes so goes the nation," he boldly instructed that committee.  Few if anyone questioned the veracity of that claim.  This proved a terrible mistake. 

Workers in the plants across America during WWII were again seen simply as cogs in the wheel of America's wartime mobilization as if management was the brains and workers simply the brawn reminiscent of  Frederick Winslow Taylor's sentiments.

It never seemed to occur to the labor unions, which were quite strong in the 1950s, to see it other than the way CEO Wilson saw it.

Management feigned reluctance to give concessions, when that was a smokescreen.  What management feared was giving more control of work back to workers, something that workers had enjoyed to a considerable degree during the war.

This was the first wrong message learned. 

Academics got into the mix without apologies.  Many came from industry such as Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875 – 1966), who had been president, chairman, and CEO of General Motors Corporation.  

Sloan helped GM grow from the 1920s through the 1950s, decades when concepts such as the annual model change, brand architecture, industrial design, automotive design (styling), and planned obsolescence transformed the industry.

When the automotive industry changed design styles, it had the concomitant affect of changing lifestyles in America for everything was built around the automobile.

Sloan's memoir, My Years with General Motors (1964), exemplified his vision of the professional manager and the engineering corporate structure in which he worked.  Given America's propensity to imitate success models, he came to be anointed apostle of a civil religion. 

Not mentioned in his memoir is his 1930s policy of orchestrating the layoff of tens of thousands of GM workers, while boasting never missing a dividend payment to stockholders during The Great Depression of 1929.  

Today the august Sloan School of Management resides at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sloan’s influence extended beyond the design of machines but to the design and style of management itself.  

Accepting the supposedly unassailable premise that management’s ingenuity and executive vision was cause celebre for America’s WWII victory, a cadre of academics charged into the void like the legendary Light Brigade to tell us all what it meant and to outline the next iteration of America's managerial progression.  

Douglas McGregor came out with The Human Side of Enterprise (1960) with his “Theory X” and “Theory Y” management style.  

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton with The Managerial Grid (1964) with “task centered” and “team centered” management.  

Frederick Herzberg followed with Work and the Nature of Man (1966) with his “hygiene factors” and “motivators.”  

Rensis Likert then followed with The Human Group (1967) with his “four systems” of management: exploitative authoritative, benevolent authoritative, consultative, and participative.  

There were many more to follow but these are representative.

Variations of each of these theories were treated with enthusiasm by CEOs across the United States and Europe, mainly because management in each case was in the driver’s seat, and what needed to be tweeted was how management dealt with workers, not how management dealt with management.   

This was the second wrong message learned.

A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES

From the 1960s when I first experienced the contributions of these academics to how I would or should work and how I would or should manage, it has been a consuming interest of mine and why I turned to writing books and articles on the subject, not from an academic point of view but from a worker's view in the trenches. 

By the nature of my working career, I have been employed as a laborer during five summers while attending university in a large chemical complex, then as a chemist in R&D in that same complex upon graduation, then as a chemical sales engineer in the industrial division of a small specialty chemical company that is a Fortune 200 corporation today, then as an executive of that same company working in North and South America, Europe and South Africa, then going back to school to earn a Ph.D. degree in industrial-organizational psychology, then consulting Fortune 500 companies, only to become embedded in a Fortune 100 hi-tech electronic corporation, first as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, then as a director of human resources in its European operation. 

What I saw during this long career is that academics got it ass backwards.  

The problem is not with workers.  The problem is with management, not only as it manages workers but as viewed as the atavistic profession that it is increasingly becoming.  Perks, power, compensation and the character of leadership is all wrong for the time.  

Academics bow to management the same way human resources acts as management’s union. 

Since World War Two, executive compensation, especially for CEOs, has gone from ten times what a worker might earn to a hundred, even in some cases, a thousand times what that worker earns.  

The soaring compensation of CEOs in particular and senior management in general has been escalating exponentially over the past seven decades.  This is largely because management is considered the “key” to private enterprise, and the worker is considered the equivalent of chopped liver. 

The third wrong message learned is that of equating management with leadership; management is good at managing things, and succeeds with managing workers as long as workers behave as things to be managed.  

But in this Information Age, where knowledge power trumps position power, and workers dominant knowledge power, leadership is needed.

Leadership cues not on itself, but on workers as persons to be led.

A few of you reading this know that I have written nearly a score of books and hundreds of articles on the subject since 1990, when I first recognized this matter had gotten totally out of control.

Then I read that Lauren A Rivera of the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has authored Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (2015).  The premise of the book is that employers' screening processes should be such that potential employees blend and be consistent with the company’s dominant culture.  

This, on the surface, seems innocuous enough, but it implies that those in charge, the creators and sustainers of the dominant culture would find their company more successful, indeed, more productive if they would hire like-minded and like-thinking people.  

We have been there; we have tried that; and that is one reason we are in the mess that we are in.  Alas, were academics to get out and live among workers they would soon learn that workers are not the problem!  But managers, human resource types and academics buy books, and workers are not inclined to buy much less read such books.  

In any case, this premise is inviting what I call “pyramid climbers” to come in droves to such companies, climbers who are only interested in getting ahead, making an impression, not a difference, people with a private agenda.  Good luck with this!

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