Commentary: Academic Learning, Worker Learning, and the Hawthorne Studies

After 50 years, the debate over the significance of the Hawthorne Studies (Roethlisberger and Dickson; Whitehead) rages on in our professional journals. These studies have been credited with inspiring major redirection in the disciplines of sociology, psychology, ard social anthropology, as well as helping to precipitate the emerging fields of social psychology, industrial relations, and organization behavior. Nonetheless, this research developed two schools of hardened critics. The ideological critics complained about the treatment of class conffict (e.g., Bell; Kerr; Mills), whereas the methodological critics complained about the study conditions, the research design, and the data analysis (e.g., Carey; Franke and Kaul; Parsons, a, b). Pitcher's recent article in Social Forces cogently used the arguments of Hawthorne defenders Schlaifer and Wardwell to refute the charges of the prominent methodological critics Franke and Kaul and Carey. He further discredited these critics through an interesting reinspection of the original study data. Pitcher supported the Hawthorne conclusion that the increased productivity of the workers studied in the famed Relay Assembly Test room phase of the research was best explained as a consequence of the passage of time. Unfortunately, however, he used passage of time as a surrogate for increased task experience, and thus explained the continuous trend upward in worker productivity as the result of greater worker competence or task learning. A review of the official Hawthorne records and conversations with the surviving study participants, however, casts a shadow of doubt on this learning hypothesis.