Hawthorne Studies Case

Do the Hawthorne Studies truly deserve to be recognised as producing a fundamental change in the development of management thought?

The Hawthorne Studies, a classic in the history of the social science in industry, have been subjected to many criticisms. Carey (1967) argued that ‘one might have expected therefore that the Hawthorne studies would have been subjected to the most searching and sceptical scrutiny; that before the remarkable claims of these studies, especially about the relative unimportance of financial rewards compared with purely social rewards, became so widely influential, the quality of the evidence produced and the validity of the inferences from it would have been meticulously examined and assessed’ (p.403). Despite these criticisms, the Hawthorne Studies administered the impetus to revolutionise theories and practices of management. This essay will argue that the Hawthorne Studies truly deserve the recognition as producing a fundamental change in the development of management thought. The essay will firstly discuss the ideological and methodological debates followed by an analysis of the contribution of these studies to the evolution of the management theory and practice.

As expected with any ground-breaking research, the Hawthorne Studies are not without their faultfinders. The resulting Hawthorne discord can be sorted into two qualifications: ideological disagreements and methodological challenges. The ideological dissenters contended that the Hawthorne

Studies exhibited a tight perspective of society further stressing that the conflict of interest was disregarded and an assumed pro-management bias was utilised to manipulate the labourers (Sonnenfeld, 1985). For instance, Dunlop (1950) complained that the ‘analytical frameworks oriented towards the individual workers in his relationships to a single community of interests cannot provide a basis for a full explanation of the facts of collective bargaining’ (p.393). On the contrary, it is believed that these critics had a tendency to concentrate on the conflicts outside the plant while the Hawthorne researchers did not ignore the conflicts and examined the sources of conflict within the plant (Sonnenfeld, 1985).

Moreover, most methodological critics found major discrepancy mainly at the Relay Assembly Test Room, either ignoring the other components as they ‘…believe them to be as nearly worthless scientifically as the studies which have been discussed’ (Carey, 1967, p. 416). These critics inferred that the small sample size, the lack of adequate controls, changes in the incentive plan and the changes in the number of participants undermine the validity of the findings. For example, Carey (1967) support the view that ‘even if both of these points had been met, the experiments would still have been of only minor scientific value since a group of five subjects is too small to yield statistically reliable results’ (p. 416). Nevertheless, Whitehead (1938) alluded that, although a small sample yields little knowledge, the use of a small sample is deemed appropriate as long as each member is studied as an organisation and events can be studied accordingly to the natural time sequence and their functional relationships.