SOCIOL 144 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Abraham Maslow, Western Electric, George C. Homans
Document Summary
To administer an organization according to purely technical criteria of rationality is irrational, because it ignores the non-rational aspects of social conduct. peter blau. In many ways it was an accident that enabled researcher and practitioners to begin studying informal relations (i. e. , the human element ) in organizations and, ultimately, to regard such relations as core, rather than peripheral to effective organizational functioning. The human relations school emerged from data collected from workers in one of the largest and most progressive factories of the. George homans and a group of researchers from harvard became interested in studying the plant to figure out how to make workers more productive. The hawthorne experiments (as they eventually become known), began as a study to understand how physical conditions, such as lighting, influenced worker output. (i. e. , scientific management). Much to the chagrin of the researchers, whatever physical aspect of the work environment they manipulated, workers produced more.
