Tag: Elton Mayo

BookBlast® Archive | Elton Mayo, The Problem of Working Together | Lecture delivered April 30, 1932 nationwide over NBC radio

Elton Mayo’s pioneering research at a Western Electric Company manufacturing plant near Chicago between 1924 and 1933 represents one of the most important historical events in the development of Industrial Organization psychology. This body of research, collectively referred to as the Hawthorne Studies (named from the plant in which they took place), was influential in the development of the human relations movement and triggered research and debate into what it is that drives human behaviour at work.

We need, especially, to solve the problem of working together. There is no problem of greater importance at the present time. Every nation of the civilized world is facing one of the most serious economic and social crises in its history. And in every national group, though perhaps in varying degrees, there is difficulty in achieving effective co-operation, both within the group and internationally with other groups. One frequently hears the assertion that the present emergency is remarkable by reason of the lack of effective leadership. What is meant by this, more often than not, is that in this large-scale modern world we have failed to make special studies of the conditions that make for effective human co-operation.

The problem exists in industry and is no less important in the industrial than in the national situation. It exists in an especially intense form in the industries of the United States because here the personnel of a Iarge industry usually consists of “strangers drawn from the ends of the earth.” Even where this is not wholly true, the personnel generally have no common life outside the plant. Consequently the need for developing a common life within the plant, a capacity for working together effectively, is more urgent here than in other countries. Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | Elton Mayo, The Problem of Working Together | Lecture delivered April 30, 1932 nationwide over NBC radio

BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

Good writing and good ideas of all kinds make the world go round! Since we first began our celebration of independent publishing in February 2015, seasonal newsletters rounding up our exclusive interviews and curated eclectic reads have been emailed to friends in the publishing and media industries in the UK, US and France. All the wonderful feedback  received over the years has been sustaining and heartening. For readers who have missed out on our latest activity, here’s a taste of what’s been happening . . .

“To define is to limit” ― Oscar Wilde 

Dandy at Dusk published by Head of Zeus on 5 October, is hailed as a “future classic” by Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and founder of the London-based interior design firm, NH Studio Ltd. Meet the author, Philip Mann, to whom we asked, “Why do you write?” . . . “Because I inexplicably missed out on being a film star.” He writes about Soho Bohemia, in his exclusive guest feature: “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns“. Our other guest writer this month, freelance writer, journalist and cultural historian C.J. Schüler, writes about all things dandy.
 Continue reading BookBlasts® | Autumn Reads for Independent Minds

BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Spain Revisited | Harpers & Queen Jan. 1985

Spain is a ‘place apart’ from Italy, France and the other Latin countries, with a very individual character, only partly explained by her language and history. The language contains many Arabic words; the Moors left much of their character in Spain after their defeat; Moorish mosques were converted into Catholic cathedrals; Romany lore is present in the flamenco songs of love which are always sad. But there is also a mystery — in the inhabitants’ pride, dignity and aloofness, and it is this inexplicable element that makes them so fascinating.

A traveller might start their journey into Spain by crossing the French frontier at Le Perthus, after which the first major town would be Gerona, standing out on the hillside, showing the coveted site for which it was so often besieged. Inside the old part of the town the streets are chasms too narrow for the sun to reach. The stranger feels compelled to stroll there, drawn into the core of a city where the Middle Ages seem to live on. “City of a thousand sieges”, it was called, from Iberian and Roman times until later, when its people organised several battalions against Napoleon, including one entirely of women.

Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, Spain Revisited | Harpers & Queen Jan. 1985

BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, The Magnum Photographic Group | Apollo Magazine, 1989

Gael Elton Mayo (1921-92) was writer-researcher for the Magnum Photographic Group, Paris, 1950-56, working with Robert Capa, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She wrote Generation X (England) with Cartier-Bresson, later changed to Youth of the World. 

The Memories of a friend and colleague
Magnum, the only photographic agency of its kind, was at its height in 1950. The name Capa still stirs some of the young, though they may not know why — but it has left an aura. The original photographers have retired or died and the world has changed from the time when people did not watch television, hardly anyone owned a set, and magazine photos were the only way of seeing life, which in Capa’s case meant showing up war; to witness world events and bring them back alive—a pictorial service. The visual images could be seen in Picture Post, Match, Epoca, Vu, Holiday Magazine . . .

Founders of The Magnum Photographic Group

It was founded in 1948 by four photographers: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known always as Chim), George Rodger and Henri Cartier-Bresson, subsequently joined by four others; but the true inventor who conceived what was almost a philosophy was Capa. The headquarters were in Paris in an office run by Margot Shore. It was owned and operated by the photographers themselves. Cartier-Bresson was the only Frenchman, with Werner Bischof, Carl Perutz, Ernst Haas, George Rodger, Fenner Jacobs and Chim. Capa was the catalyst, the unofficial boss; he had ideas that covered the whole world, he organized the assignments, the group became like a brotherhood, with Capa encouraging, helping, sometimes even clothing, and all the time appearing to be merely a wild, good-time, hard-drinking man. Ernst Haas said of him, “He was the only master I ever respected.”

I worked as writer and researcher with Chim, Cartier-Bresson and Capa, but when any of the others appeared in the office or in the café downstairs at St Philippe du Roule there was a quality of belonging to the same family. In whichever country we might meet we would automatically sit or dine together. There was no unemployment pay for us as we were freelance: if the time between jobs was long and someone was broke, Capa gave them money: he did not lend, he gave; he did not want it back. Perhaps because it was a new venture, or perhaps because the war was still fairly recent, there was always a feeling; of excitement. Capa spent lavishly and believed that life was for living, though as his brother Cornell said of him, “He was born without money and died the same way.”

Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | Gael Elton Mayo, The Magnum Photographic Group | Apollo Magazine, 1989

BookBlast® Archive | The Three Faces of Elton Mayo, J H Smith | New Society, December 1980

Elton Mayo was born in Australia one hundred years ago this month (on December 26, 1880) and died in a nursing home in Guildford almost sixty-nine years later. Towards the end of his life, through his association with the Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Studies, he enjoyed a public acclaim granted to few social scientists of his day. None however would have envied him the fall from grace which was to follow his death. By the mid-1950s, the terms ‘Mayoism’ and ‘Mayoite’ were recognised additions to the perjorative vocabulary of social science. In 1946 an overblown account of his work in Fortune compared him to Thorsten Veblen and John Dewey, praising his erudition, rare authority and beneficent influence on labour-management relations. Yet a decade later, in his influential monograph Hawthorne Revisited, Landsberger was obliged to devote a whole chapter to the deficiencies of Mayo, as listed by such critics as Daniel Bell, Reinhard Bendix, John Dunlop, Clark Kerr, C. Wright Mills and Wilbert Moore. Charges of conceptual ineptitude and of theoretical and methodological narrowness formed only part of the indictment: Mayo’s emphasis on industrial collaboration was said to ignore central economic and political issues (notably the functions of trade unions) and to relegate industrial social science to the role of a managerial or ‘cow’-sociology.

Continue reading BookBlast® Archive | The Three Faces of Elton Mayo, J H Smith | New Society, December 1980

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