“No one who looks at the war story of Great Britain since 1940,” the management theorist E. F. L. Brech wrote in 1945, “can fail to see how the human element has been thrown into relief.”Footnote 1 To many of his readers, Brech's exhilaration was reminiscent of the previous total war and its unfulfilled promises of a new age of “humanism in industry,” in the words of David Lloyd George.Footnote 2 But the sentiments to which Brech gave expression referred to something that was altogether different and novel. As Brech observed, those who previously had been interested in questions of industrial management for the most part conceived of the “lessons of the last war” in terms of the physiological aspects of labor (hours of work, ventilation, and the like) and at times their (individual) “psychological significance.”Footnote 3 The current war, however, suggested that these factors were of less significance to the outcome of collective effort than the state of collective morale. “Throughout the war,” he told his readers in what seemed like a well-rehearsed truism, “morale has been the foundation of resistance and successful attack, whether in military affairs or in the activities of civilians at work and home.”Footnote 4
Brech's article in the British Management Review can be taken as a starting point for the “golden decade” of human relations management in Britain.Footnote 5 Those years saw an immense effort to promote and disseminate research into human relations forms of management by myriad public and private organizations, all actively supported by the postwar social-democratic state. The following article sets out to explain this discursive “explosion,” seeking to explore the efforts undertaken by state-related bodies to orchestrate and promote human relations managerial practices and approaches, and to understand the vitality of such approaches during those years. The article argues that these trajectories should be explained by, and shed light on, the broader story of postwar social reconstruction.
Readers of this journal will recall the intense debate on the nature, and very existence, of political consensus in the aftermath of the Second World War. Sparked by Paul Addison's seminal The Road to 1945 (1975) and emerging in full force during the 1990s (a period marked by Thatchers brutal and successful offensive against the British welfare state), the consensus thesis served as an important organizing principle for historiographical debate.Footnote 6 It suggested that during the Second World War and the period of reconstruction, British politics was marked by an agreement upon several principles of government: namely, a mixed economic policy along the lines suggested by John Maynard Keynes and the elimination of want through pragmatic welfare measures along the lines suggested by William Beveridge. According to this account, the postwar consensus was strong enough to sustain attacks from both the Right and the Left until its collapse, ushered in by the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. The consensus thesis has since been attacked by scholars who have suggested that there was no broad agreement on either of those policies, that conservatives never really agreed to such policies, or that the left wing of the Labour Party was promoting an agenda much closer to socialism than centrists like Beveridge would allow.Footnote 7 There has been, in short, no agreement as to the nature of postwar political consensus or whether such consensus existed at all.
My aim here is not to revisit the debate but rather to use the concept of consensus in a different manner. Broadly understood, the notion of consensus reflected a particular type of political aspiration that animated new institutional practices. Consensus was a fantasy, national unity a myth, and the elimination of class conflict a façade, but the existence of belief in such things demands that historians ask questions about the discourses and practices that helped forge such myths or were generated in order continuously to sustain them. These were political artifacts, central to the project of social reconstruction.Footnote 8 In order to understand them, we need not think of consensus merely in terms of the familiar sources of political debate—party policy, pamphlets, and so on.Footnote 9 These tell only part of the story. They neglect the emergence of new, always contested, forms of expertise in manufacturing and governing consensus.Footnote 10 Consensus is here examined in terms of the efforts to produce and manage it. The contestations over these activities of government are best understood as the politics of consensus.Footnote 11
The management of morale was at the center of these efforts, and in the aftermath of the war, the focus was on the industrial sphere. The more interventionist state that emerged worked to place an important value on the promotion of new forms of industrial management. While these circumstances tell us why industrial management came to be seen as an important political question, they explain neither the shape that these efforts took nor the justifications that often underscored them. Thinking about these questions in terms of “advancement” of the science of management (for better or worse, depending on one's taste and inclination) would merely leave us reiterating contemporary, internalist accounts. However, even management experts never lost sight of the simple fact that managerial solutions have to do with much more than technical questions of shop floor organization. Solutions to managerial questions could be many, but in postwar Britain, these were sought in the promotion and management of morale. Those who worked on such questions drew on the new significance of morale, now central to thinking about collective enterprise in a mass-democratic civil society. They did so because to them the proper management of morale appeared as a better way to get the job done, as well as an important technology for manufacturing affect, responsibility, and a sense of collectivity, all deemed necessary for successful social reconstruction.Footnote 12 Linking the legacy of the war to the building of the New Jerusalem, individual effort to collective enterprise, and productivity on the shop floor to the travails of democratic citizenship, morale was now at the heart of the new technopolitics of consensus.
SOME GROUND CLEARING
Those who promoted human relations management were the first to situate their work within a historical trajectory. One exemplary text here was the trilogy The Making of Scientific Management, written by two of the most prominent figures in the British managerial profession, Edward Brech and Lyndall Urwick, and published in 1949. It was arguably the first serious piece of historical research on the topic, but more important, it was a contribution to the politics of the new management profession, to which the authors had sought to provide an ethos and an identity (they were not alone in this endeavor). In this work, the authors situated human relations as the end point of a progressive history of the “humanization” of industrial practice, a story characterized by increasing attentiveness to the “human factor.” Choosing the “human factor” as an organizing principle enabled Urwick and Brech to incorporate into their history more disputable chapters such as Taylorite scientific management. Human relations management, then, was explained in terms of the vision of the authors for a professional ethos and was presented as its finest example.Footnote 13
Other contemporary management theorists offered interpretations that were much less celebratory. The most important of these was John Child, both a theorist and a historian of management thought. Writing in 1969, Child offered a critical account that was diametrically opposed to the former. It viewed human relations forms of management as developed versions of earlier programs to secure the domination of workers, albeit under a more human guise, and to bypass the essential questions regarding the nature of modern capitalist societies.Footnote 14 Child, then, turned the previous thesis of humanization on its head. Yet, in a similar fashion to the whiggism explored above, Child explained the story of management in the new profession's own terms.
More recently, scholars have examined human relations management, and management thought more generally, within broader historical trajectories. Jim Tomlinson and Nick Tiratsoo, for instance, have situated human relations management within the history of political contestations over state intervention in economic life and in the question of industrial productivity. Here the writers emphasized the centrality of labor politics to the readiness of the state to secure efforts to promote industrial productivity (as opposed to the Tory commitment to laissez-faire), efforts of which human relations management now seemed an essential part.Footnote 15 In relation to this interpretation, in his work on Anglo-American collaborative efforts to secure industrial productivity, Tiratsoo has viewed the promotion of human relations management in Britain in terms of the Americanization of managerial approaches and the “limits to Americanization” set by the reluctance of British managers to adopt such measures.Footnote 16
“Human relations” was an amorphous term to begin with. Child has written of the “Human Relations School,” but such a designation suggests the existence of a managerial program more coherent than it actually was. It has been mostly associated with the work of Elton Mayo, an Australian psychologist who had moved to the United States after the First World War. His writings on a series of experiments conducted in the Hawthorne Works near Chicago during the interwar years resulted in a common identification of Mayoism with human relations management. However, as the sociologist Michael Rose has persuasively demonstrated, this view merely reflects the efficient public relations efforts by Mayo and those in his circle. Even within the American context alone, human relations management referred to a much broader and more diverse group of approaches.Footnote 17 Similarly in the British context, human relations meant more than Mayoism or other American approaches. Some Britons were familiar with Mayo's work already before the war, but according to all accounts, those were relatively few in number until the publication of Urwick and Brech's Making of Scientific Management, the third volume of which was entirely devoted to the Hawthorne experiments.Footnote 18 More important, however, the real question to be answered is why Britons turned to Mayo or other writers when they did.Footnote 19 British writers on management were familiar with the American literature, but in order to understand the British fascination with human relations, and what it actually meant to those who promoted it, one has to look to local British cultural and political trajectories. These suggest that, as proponents of human relations themselves often argued, more than merely the destination of the long march of expert knowledge, human relations management was a new political endeavor.
MORALE AS A NEW PROBLEM
Postwar calls for the professionalization of management echoed three decades of similar calls for transformation of both managers and management, presented as the substitution of politically neutral expert knowledge for amateurism and partisanship.Footnote 20 As Oliver Sheldon, who directed Rowntree's works in York, wrote, management “is no longer the ‘middle man’ between Capital and Labour. . . . It stands rather in co-ordinating position between the two, owing allegiance to neither, but acknowledging as master the public will of the community alone.”Footnote 21 Early British management thought was characterized by its distinct emphasis on practices of industrial welfare. Interest in such practices had emerged in earlier years and received a major boost during the First World War.Footnote 22 This particular outlook of early British writers on management meant that at the level of self-presentation they rejected wholesale F. W. Taylor's rhetoric and techniques, which they regarded as impractical, un-British, and ethically unsound.Footnote 23 They did accept his call for a “mental revolution” in the approach to management, which they too sought to reform.Footnote 24
The crystallization of such voices during the interwar years was linked to larger debates regarding economic planning.Footnote 25 The extent of the actual impact of such calls on management practices has been a matter of some debate.Footnote 26 Two things, however, clearly marked this period. First, professionalization, in the sociological sense (understood largely in terms of identity, ethos, claim for monopoly on expertise, and institutions), was slow to come. The principal associations that were established to promote the professionalization of management, such as the Institute of Industrial Administration or the Institute of Personnel Management, failed to draw more than several hundred subscribers each.Footnote 27 Second, the state was not involved in such matters. In the aftermath of the war and the election of a Labour government things changed dramatically, and the government now actively sought to promote professional management through new institutions such as the Personnel Management Advisory Board or the British Institute of Management.Footnote 28 Furthermore, the government actively sought to promote and disseminate applied research on managerial questions through existing scientific departments. To sum up, by the period under examination, the management of the shop floor had become amenable to scientific observation and management in ways that had been unthinkable only a few decades beforehand. A complex institutional apparatus, oriented toward dissemination and application of new forms of expert management, and supported by the state, had been set in place; and owing to the distinct welfarist inflection of interwar British management thought, the links between shop floor practices and social organization had been forged and secured.Footnote 29
Postwar human relations management has often been understood as a version of interwar industrial welfarism.Footnote 30 There were, however, important differences. Welfare, and increasingly in its technocratic form that it had acquired during the 1920s, related to all those physical aspects of work (such as hours of work, wash basins, chairs, and ventilation) or the improvement of the individual worker (by the creation of saving banks, recreation facilities, opportunities for education, and industrial canteens).Footnote 31 Industrial welfare was a characteristically late Victorian and Edwardian liberal solution to both productivity (factory discipline) and social organization (government). At its core, it was premised on the “idea of character,” which, as Stefan Collini has shown, linked will to duty and was central to the political idiom of the long nineteenth century.Footnote 32 “Character,” Edward Cadbury explained, “is an economic asset,” thus pithily summing up the entire philosophy of interwar British managerial thought.Footnote 33 Character linked productivity to individual ethical conduct; for those who thought about morale, however, it was collective attitude that mattered most.
There was more to it than mere semantics. A close reading of this type of expert literature suggests that welfarism and human relations management should not be collapsed into each other as one “social” approach to management.Footnote 34 Brech, as we saw, thought the lessons of the Second World War were altogether on a different plane than earlier physiological or psychological studies. Those early promoters of morale management insisted that although all these aspects of work that were central to the welfarist agenda (hours of work, illumination, rest pauses, nutrition, or recreation) necessarily had a bearing on productivity, in the final analysis it was morale that mattered most. A survey conducted by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) among 105 of its subscribed employers in 1954 may serve as an example: asked to point to unresolved problems in British industry and to rank them according to what they deemed most urgent, most employers pointed to issues of morale, attitudes, and communications. Welfare, which had been the burning issue during the 1920s and the 1930s, now averaged at the bottom of the list.Footnote 35 The management theorist W. H. Scott articulated a similar sentiment when he suggested that industrial management had been previously interested in welfare and the individual's satisfaction with his job, concerns that he established as differing from human relations and morale.Footnote 36 To be sure, morale and welfare were seen as connected and never entirely mutually exclusive, but as Mayo had put it, morale was not determined by those factors that were generally associated with welfare.Footnote 37 The psychologist W. B. D. Brown explained that earlier studies of industrial psychologists were misleading because it had escaped their minds that “the morale of the worker . . . has no direct relationship whatsoever to the material conditions of the job.”Footnote 38 Understood as the care of the physical and moral well-being of individuals, welfare targeted individuals qua individuals; morale was understood in terms of collective attitudes and intragroup relations, targeting individuals as members of a collective.Footnote 39 Work was now regarded as a social activity, and emphasis was laid on informal affective structures.Footnote 40 In the final analysis, if welfare was understood as the care of the “Human Machine,” body and mind, the management of morale, with its wartime connotations, was understood as an exercise in collective mobilization.
This was a monumental theoretical shift, for it entailed a reconsideration of some fundamental approaches to the problem of work. Take the problem of incentives: during the previous decades, psychologists and managerial theorists had been promoting theories of incentives using two conflicting models with which they sought to understand and manage the worker. The first model, an economic one, assumed that workers would work better for more remuneration, an assumption that generated schemes of economic incentives to work, namely, payment by piece rate and profit sharing. The second, a psychological one, which had been developed during the interwar years largely as a reaction to the first, suggested that the worker was looking for satisfaction, and it was premised on the view that the job should be made more interesting and less monotonous.Footnote 41 But there were problems with both models. Economic incentives never completely disappeared from professional discourse, but they had by and large fallen out of favor. Piece rates and profit sharing never seemed to work: some argued that they were simply too complex, and hence too removed, to serve as an incentive to work; others suggested that when they did work, it was only for a short time, because the worker very quickly came to regard them as part of the basic payment. Most of all, it was argued that economic incentives would not work because they rested on an exaggerated view of the place of economic motives in determining human conduct.Footnote 42 As to questions of job satisfaction and monotony, it was difficult to establish objective criteria for a question that was as inherently subjective as that of what made one job more interesting than another. Leslie Wilkins, from the Central Office of Information, suggested to the readers of Occupational Psychology that an “interesting job” should not be considered in itself as an incentive because it was hard to know what the term meant: “A laundry sorter described her job as ‘very interesting’ because every garment was different,” he told his readers in astonishment.Footnote 43 Incentives increasingly seemed to represent a question wrongly posed.Footnote 44
Management experts and psychologists now shifted their gaze to the dynamics of the small group.Footnote 45 As the prominent psychologist C. A. Mace explained to the readers of Occupational Psychology: “We have to look not so much for a force within the individual but for a force that resides within the group, and usually in a very local group.” His view that the conduct of the worker was shaped by the expectations of the worker's mates no less than by those of managers or union officials led him to emphasize the importance of informal social structures. There was a limit, he thought, to what could be achieved by formal committees.Footnote 46 G. R. Taylor, in his elegantly titled book Are Workers Humans?, reminded his readers of the value of small teams in the military and suggested that in factories things were not different: “Public men frequently make appeals for team-spirit in British industry. They do not seem to realise that you cannot have team spirits unless you have teams.”Footnote 47 The underlying assumption was that workers whose morale was properly managed would not only do the job but also do more, and better.
It would be wrong, however, to view morale merely in technical terms fit for management specialists. Morale was now a ubiquitous concept that for many Britons came to define the experience of the Second World War, and those who spread the new gospel of morale in the context of industrial life drew on these common narratives of collective mobilization and sacrifice. The relation between civilian morale and victory had been prefigured in interwar military and strategic debates regarding the nature of a future conflict, but these discussions were largely understood in terms of the prevention of panic and collapse. The experience of the Second World War meant that morale came to be understood in “positive” terms of mobilization to action, and for the first time, the British state orchestrated a massive effort to observe, manage, and maintain morale on both civilian and military fronts.Footnote 48 The task for peacetime was indeed understood in precisely those terms: there was no question of panic in the management of industrial life but merely of mobilizing the citizen-worker and sustaining a high degree of active commitment to the job.Footnote 49 In war and peace, morale was understood to be not merely a question of mood or contentment but was mostly understood in terms of modifying conduct.Footnote 50
There was another side to the question of morale, one that rendered it a politically potent concept. British wartime morale, and the new practices that were generated in its name, were linked to radical transformations (whether real or illusionary) in the nature of British society, in the relations among citizens, and between citizens and the state. The new Britain that had emerged from a war that involved total mobilization was supposed to be more democratic, if the term is understood as a social and cultural, rather than merely constitutional, referent.Footnote 51 Democracy now seemed to have informed a desire to find, or invent, new forms of exercising power, in ways that addressed the new links that, as contemporaries were convinced, had been established between morale and successful collective effort. These imageries of war were pivotal in forging the links between democratic forms of exercising power, new styles of leadership, and the problem of collective capacity in postwar managerial literature.Footnote 52 Urwick, for instance, who had been an army officer before launching his career in industrial management, often referred to the links between leadership in the military and in the factory.Footnote 53 Management theorists repeatedly referred to the images of the popular heroes of the war, Generals Montgomery and Slim, who, as Gary Sheffield has noted, epitomized the personal leadership style appropriate for a democratic age, which was built on the promotion of a collective sense of purpose and on persuasion rather than (merely) on coercion.Footnote 54 Slim was later invited to deliver the seventh Elbourne Memorial Lecture at the British Institute of Management, where he suggested that “‘man management’ is a horrible term and I'm ashamed that the army introduced it. Men like to be led—not managed.”Footnote 55 Mobilization for work, too, was to assume a democratic form in ways that were modeled on the experience of war, beautifully captured in the title of The Battle for Output (1947), distributed by the government nationwide.Footnote 56
Best known of these efforts were the Joint-Production Committees, established by the thousands during the war and now remembered as the principal institutional manifestation of this spirit. Similarly, the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, which was later viewed (most improbably) as determining the “soldier's vote” and hence the outcome of the 1945 elections, was seen as a model for promoting democratic mobilization at the workplace by discussion and participation.Footnote 57 As George Isaacs, the minister of Labour and National Service, explained to the audience at the Industrial Welfare Society conference on works magazines, “[B]efore the war works magazines were useful. . . . After the war they will be valuable, because there has grown up a spirit among the employers to tell more.” The production of such newspapers demanded careful attention to detail. At the same conference, Lionel Birch, who had been the editor in chief at the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, explained the connection between factual bulletins and morale, and emphasized the need to organize such bulletins in a logical way: it produced a sense of familiarity, and the soldiers “came to feel that this was their paper.”Footnote 58 This interest in translating the lessons of war to the realities of peace led to the creation of dozens of new works magazines.Footnote 59 In the same manner, W. E. Williams, who had chaired the Army Bureau of Current Affairs during the war, now established a new civilian Bureau of Current Affairs, independent of government and funded by the Carnegie Trust.Footnote 60
The notion of morale stood for a legacy of collective affective ties that were both produced by the war and were necessary to win it. Richard Titmuss, who notoriously linked what he saw as the sound wartime morale of the British to the creation of the welfare state, placed morale at the heart of the project of social reconstruction. “The civilian war of 1939–1945,” he wrote, “with its many opportunities for service in civil defense and other schemes, also helped to satisfy an often inarticulate need; the need to be a wanted member of society. . . . New aims for which to live, work that satisfied a larger number of needs, a more cohesive society, fewer lonely people; all these elements helped to offset the circumstances which often led to neurotic illness.”Footnote 61 Titmuss was important here not only because he set the tone for historiographic debate for several decades but also because although his work was conceived as a work of history, it is best understood as sustained political argument about the relations among morale, mobilization, and social policy (the title of the final chapter was “Unfinished Business”). Titmuss saw the war as an opportunity for social reconstruction, and his work of history was an attempt to prevent such an opportunity from slipping away.Footnote 62
Since Titmuss, there have been endless debates regarding the “real” experience of morale during the war.Footnote 63 For our purposes here, such questions as whether Britons were right to argue that morale was high, or that the experience of war had indeed produced this type of imagined collectivity, are less important than the very attempt to mobilize the myth of the war toward a particular version of social reconstruction. It was this attempt that drove the myriad efforts to reform British managerial practices. Here, then, was the root of the centrality of morale to the new politics of consensus: on the one hand, it linked a technology of maximizing collective capacity to the politics of social cohesion; on the other hand, it linked a myth about Britain's recent past to a fantasy about her future.Footnote 64
THE STATE AND HUMAN RELATIONS RESEARCH
Following the experience of war and the election of a Labour government, the British state now pursued the promotion and management of industrial morale in new ways.Footnote 65 These efforts stemmed from the new significance and prevalence of morale and Labour's readiness for government intervention in economic life. Ideas regarding economic planning were central to the question of industrial management. Approaches to the meaning of planning varied, and contestations over them never settled, but the question of human relations in industry was to assume an important place in Labour's approach to this issue. On the one hand, improvements in human relations would mark the new type of society that was to be forged. On the other hand, the very success of this enterprise depended on the cooperation and active participation of the citizenry. The exemplary figure here was Stafford Cripps. The years during which he had served as the wartime minister for Aircraft Production saw the maturation of his ideas regarding the meaning of “democratic planning.”Footnote 66 Consultation and consent were at the core of his approach to the planned economy. As Richard Toye nicely puts it, during those years Cripps was “in the process of becoming a consensus politician.”Footnote 67 The issue at stake was greater than industrial productivity or economic policy alone; it was the moral foundation of society seeking its sense of purpose.Footnote 68
A first attempt in these directions was made in 1947, when Cripps created the Panel on Human Factors Affecting Productivity, later known as the Human Factor Panel, under the auspices of the Committee on Industrial Productivity.Footnote 69 The panel was chaired by George Schuster, a capable administrator and a former Liberal MP who had aided Cripps at the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the war and continued to assist him after the appointment of Cripps to the Board of Trade in 1945.Footnote 70 Like Cripps, Schuster approached the task of social reconstruction with a deep commitment to religiosity. Significantly, he thought welfare should prioritize moral, rather than material, aspects of life, and he had criticized Beveridge for doing otherwise.Footnote 71 In addition to chairing the panel, Schuster received an appointment at the Medical Research Council (MRC), first as a council member and a year later as the treasurer, because the MRC was to channel the funds allocated for scientific research. Of these days, Schuster later wrote that he found himself “an unwelcome ‘cuckoo in the nest’” by the “orthodox members of the council.”Footnote 72
Schuster's difficulties at the MRC serve to remind us that far from a coherent set of scientific methods or assumptions, promoted by the progressively minded and the scientifically inclined, and resisted by everybody else, “human relations” was a political construction with which scientific, managerial, and other arguments could be promoted or confronted. Under Schuster's guidance, the panel was involved in several studies on the human problems of industry, largely executed by other research organizations. These fell under one of five areas: industrial health, fitting the job to the man (“human engineering”), fitting the man to the job (selection), work measurement, and human relations.Footnote 73 There was hardly any dispute regarding the nature of the work that came under the first four headings (these fields had been established during the previous decades), although what questions or methodologies should come under human relations remained unclear. Further difficulties arose when, toward the end of the decade, the Committee on Industrial Productivity, which had appointed the panel, recommended its own dissolution.Footnote 74 The scattered nature of human relations research, the lack of clarity as to what it meant, and the impending dissolution of the panel required, according to the proponents of human relations, a new set of inquiries as to the nature of, and the means to promote, research in this field.
Schuster's chief opponent at the MRC was Frederic Charles Bartlett, perhaps the single most important psychologist working in Britain during the half century that followed the First World War.Footnote 75 Bartlett was a proponent of a psychology that he regarded as “scientific” (i.e., empirical) and individual (he strongly opposed the group psychology as it emerged during the early part of the century).Footnote 76 Bartlett therefore regarded positively the work undertaken on other aspects of the “human factor,” but he thought that “problems of human behavior and human relations—heading 5—were not yet capable of solution by scientific research.” Schuster, by contrast, believed in the power of an appropriate institutional arrangement to promote promising and applicable research, and, indeed, to create fields of investigations where there were none. He therefore suggested the creation of a new Working Party in the hope of advancing the cause of human relations in industry.Footnote 77
Representatives of the MRC and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) now conducted a series of surveys in an attempt to map out the current terrain of human relation research.Footnote 78 These revealed a seemingly wide gap between the evident excitement about human relations research and the realities on the ground. First, it was conceded that what constituted the field still remained unclear: attitude surveys, studies of social organization, practices of joint consultation, machineries for joint negotiation, effects of different systems of payment, conceptions of what constituted a fair day's work, and regional differences in working habits were all related to human relations. Second, at least at first appearance, it seemed that existing research work in the field of human relations was surprisingly sparse, amounting to only six projects undertaken in the United Kingdom.Footnote 79 Finally, the evidence collected suggested to the critical observers at the MRC that human relations research was characterized by a lack of an apparently “scientific” method: the “considerable interest displayed mostly confuses empirical practice with research,” and private industrial enterprises had manifested “a widespread failure to appreciate what constitutes scientific research.”Footnote 80 To be sure, there was no lack of interest among employers, as every survey had revealed: General Electric, for instance, “held exhibitions for the benefit of their employees and their families” and “opened the works on Saturdays to enable employees to show their wives and children where they work and what they make”; ICI (metal division) sponsored research on labor turnover, absenteeism, recruitment, travel, and housing, and further coordinated with the MRC and the Faculty of Commerce and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham; Kodak experimented with placing the responsibility for personnel-related decisions within the hands of the line supervisors; May and Baker worked together with the trade unions and shop stewards on new mechanisms for joint consultation or new incentive schemes, to name a select few.Footnote 81 Enthusiasm, it was concluded, was hardly a problem.
By the end of the year, proponents of human relations research were able to point to a much broader collective effort on behalf of private industries, universities, and research associations to investigate problems of human relations. Whether this was merely a natural outcome of a year of research or the product of an attempt to cast a wider net is likely to remain unknown (one suspects it was a little bit of both). Either way, by the end of the year, the reports portrayed a field of research marked by abundance rather than scarcity: relevant research, they suggested, had been undertaken by Birkbeck College, London (on incentives and morale in the building industry); the Group for Research in Industrial Psychology at the Universities of London and Manchester (satisfaction and discontent in the nonferrous metal industries, promotion and joint consultations, comparative studies of wage systems, and the size of the working group); the British Institute of Management (on industrial peace); the NIIP (on joint consultation and the size of the working group); the Society of Friends (management and human relations), the Tavistock Institute, and other bodies in Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, London, and Manchester.Footnote 82
Schuster was most enthusiastic about such endeavors, and he was now convinced that a new institutional apparatus was needed. At a conference on human relations organized by the Ministry of Labour and National Service, Schuster cautioned his audience against the (“American”) desire to reach scientific exactitudes in the field of human relations and that he saw the greatest obstacle in the application and dissemination of current research.Footnote 83 Still, opposition on scientific grounds was rampant: “I shall be inclined,” Bartlett wrote to Harold Himsworth, the secretary of the MRC, “to put even more emphatically than you do the case against having a special body of any kind to organize and direct work on human relations. . . . I could not agree more strongly than I do about what you say earlier concerning the artificiality of defining spheres of operation or research in terms of subject content.”Footnote 84 Himsworth, for his part, thought the problem was that because there was “such a keen realization of its importance . . . research workers are being pressed to do more than they know how to do.”Footnote 85 A compromise of sorts was agreed upon in October 1951 when it was agreed to create two joint committees that were eventually set up as the Joint Committee on Individual Efficiency and the Joint Committee on Human Relations in Industry.Footnote 86 The two committees were eventually formed in 1953, mostly with the aim of dispensing Conditional Aid funds. Footnote 87 Due to his problematic relations within the MRC and the removal of his supporters from office with the end of the Labour government in 1951, Schuster was not invited to participate in these endeavors, and Bertram Waring, then the managing director of Joseph Lucas Industries, was appointed as chair of the Joint Committee on Human Relations in Industry (the second committee was chaired by Bartlett). The committees were disbanded in 1957 (a year later than initially planned) and replaced with a single Committee on the Human Sciences in Industry.
THE NATURE OF HUMAN RELATIONS RESEARCH
The preliminary surveys that were conducted in 1950 singled out the following as the three most important studies: research on joint consultation in British industry, undertaken by the NIIP; the Glacier project, undertaken by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations; and T. T. Patterson's study of a coal-mining community. Here I will examine two of those in greater detail, with a focus on the formation of a research agenda around the problem of collective morale.
The most well known of the three projects, and the one that left a lasting legacy in the British social sciences, was Elliott Jaques's work at the Glacier Metal Factory. It was one of the “founding projects” of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.Footnote 88 Jaques's work is particularly interesting here because existing accounts of his work, for the most part based on his published work, have not taken stock of the centrality of the problem of morale to the crystallization of Jaques's research agenda and methods.Footnote 89 A clearer understanding of the original intentions of Jaques and of his associates can be gained by examining the archival records. As they explained in a letter to the Occupational Psychological Committee of the MRC, Tavistock investigators sought to discover the “sources of low morale in industry . . . which are not accessible to study by other means.”Footnote 90 Methodologically, the researchers were inspired by new group methods developed by John Rickman and Wilfred Bion, who had placed morale at the core of the therapeutic process (a fact glossed over by scholars who emphasize the psychoanalytic dimensions and legacy of his work).Footnote 91 Tavistock researchers rejected the notion that low morale could be ascribed to one or two underlying causes, or the idea that it could be prevented by the mere introduction of incentives or schemes of joint consultation. They proposed adopting a dynamic approach that dealt with “a multiplicity of inter-acting and inter-depended factors.” The implications of this approach were immense: “[I]n this light, the task of industry becomes that of creating optimal conditions for the development of working morale. This task being in recognizing the manner in which all new methods and administrative decisions influence, and often adversely disturb, human relationships, and conversely, in recognizing the extent to which the existing morale situation determines the success or failure of decisions and methods.”Footnote 92
An opportunity to test such theories and to interrogate the bearings of group-related therapeutics and morale made itself apparent when in 1949 the Service Department recommended a reform in payment schemes. What began as a discussion of the suggested policy turned into a guided collective attempt to maintain morale by removing the workers' suspicion of management's intentions, what Rose has pithily summarized as a “psychoanalysis of the organization.”Footnote 93 On the workers' side, what emerged in the process was an exercise in democratic citizenship: the Shop Committee discussed matters freely, “more as representatives and less as individuals.”Footnote 94 Good morale was secured, and “it was this morale which made it possible for the members to tackle problems in a comprehensive manner, as well as in greater depth.”Footnote 95 It was not so much the content (what was discussed) as the form (the discussion itself) that mattered: an “opportunity for collaboration between groups in the solution of a concrete problem,” an opportunity to exercise, or train oneself, in the travails of democratic citizenship.Footnote 96
The second important study to receive funds through the Human Factors Panel was Paterson's study of a coal-mining community. A senior lecturer in industrial relations at Glasgow University, Paterson developed his interest in morale and work during his wartime service at the Royal Air Force, on which he later reported in his Morale at War and Work, published in 1955.Footnote 97 His wartime experience had played a central role in the development of his social-psychological and anthropological research on industrial life. In 1941 Paterson had been stationed at Bogfield Royal Air Force station and was soon asked by the station commander to look into the prevalence of accidents. Because there was no correlation between accidents and flying experience, Paterson concluded that the problem was deviant behavior rather than lack of skill. Accidents, then, were perceived in terms of individual and collective conduct, and he linked problems with both to the lack of group feeling (and not to individual psychology or pathology): the station, he thought, was seen as “a geographical entity, not a social [one].”Footnote 98 The solution was found in the management of morale, which was to produce the “intensification of normative behavior.”Footnote 99 Paterson now sought to unite the station against a common enemy. Because Germans were far away, Paterson suggested flights in bad weather (which the station as a whole would work to “defeat”). The experiment, Paterson reported, was a successful one: the station was now united (against the bad weather), morale was high, and accidents were rare. The social implications of these experiments for the period of social reconstruction were immense: “We search for belongingness,” he wrote, “in the masses of crowds in cinemas and sports stadia. . . . We join clubs, union, and societies. We read ‘escapist’ literature, escaping from the loneliness of our society. It is a fragmented society. . . . Bogfield in 1941 was a microcosmic picture of our society today.”Footnote 100
Drawing on his wartime experience at Bogfield, Paterson now embarked on an ambitious anthropological study of life in a coal-mining community. Once more, Paterson sought to promote normative conduct through the proper management of morale: it would have significant implications, he thought, for the prevention of accidents, the management of productivity, and even the prevention of disease (such as miners dermatitis). Minute details mattered. In one case, for instance, morale and group solidarity were promoted by choosing a unified color scheme for beams and equipment in a particular colliery (the pit closed after ten months so it was impossible to draw conclusive results). Initially, the experiments were funded by the Psychological Committee of the MRC, but it was not long before funding was withdrawn. It was Bartlett's committee by now, and it voted to withdraw funding from both Paterson's and Jaques's studies. Paterson's work, it was argued, “shows the most striking lack of appreciation of the nature of scientific evidence.” Similarly, Jaques and his associates working on the Glacier project had shown “no sign of any appreciation of the nature and requirements of the scientific methods. Many conclusions are expressed, and they may be right or wrong. There is no means of telling.”Footnote 101 Paterson's work was left unfinished and fell into oblivion; Jaques found additional sources of funding, and his work endured, although with the fading of collective morale as an industrial managerial problem in the 1960s, the original questions that animated this study were hardly mentioned.
MORALE, INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, AND THE SHOP FLOOR
If the DSIR and the MRC were interested in human relations from the point of view of applied scientific research, other departments, led by the Ministry of Labour and the National Service, developed an interest in human relations as a derivative of the problem of industrial relations.Footnote 102 Within the ministry, significant effort was invested by the National Joint Advisory Council (NJAC), established in 1939 in an attempt to bring together representatives of the new tripartite “coalition” (employers, workers, and the state).Footnote 103 It now took a broad view of human relations management and its promotion.Footnote 104 Furthermore, it adopted the view that because “improvement in human relations,” which it had defined as the development of team spirit, “should be considered as an end in itself,” the council should distance itself from any association with the productivity drive.Footnote 105
The NJAC launched myriad initiatives in this direction, but it is most remembered for its campaign to promote practices of joint consultation. Such schemes had a long and troubled history and had been heavily contested during the interwar years.Footnote 106 Significantly, management theorists in the interwar period, including those who were considered “progressive,” did not support granting such committees any managerial authority, either because this did not fit within a characteristically paternalistic worldview, or on the grounds of professional jealousy: management, they argued, was a matter for “experts,” not for “representatives.” Rowntree, for instance, thought that women in particular were not interested in such questions.Footnote 107 This attitude now completely changed. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the government actively encouraged the creation of such committees (with few exceptions, such as Royal Ordnance factories, the Royal Dockyards and pit-production committees, which were made compulsory). Official statistics do not give us an exact number, but we know that thousands of such committees were established. In 1942 there were already 2,644 registered joint-production committees (JPCs) in the engineering and allied services alone; in 1943, there were 4,567.Footnote 108 It has been estimated that by 1944 joint-consultive schemes had covered more than three and a half million workers, mainly in the engineering, shipbuilding, coal mining, and building industries.Footnote 109 “A War Innovation That Will Remain,” the Birmingham Mail termed them in 1944.Footnote 110
Management writers and government officials were highly enthusiastic.Footnote 111 It was understood that despite the government's insistence that JPCs should be encouraged rather than enforced, thus heeding the voluntary tradition in British industrial relations, the state's role in the success of JPCs was critical.Footnote 112 An official recommendation regarding the structure of joint-consultive schemes was issued in 1947. It suggested that their creation should be voluntary (rather than mandated), that such committees would not deal with issues regarding conditions of employments, such as wages, and finally, that each industry should decide whether such committees would be established at the factory level or as a collaborative effort within each industry. The ministry followed with a campaign to promote consultive practices and offered assistance to individual firms through its Regional Industrial Relations Officers and the Personnel Management Advisory Service. Numerous government and private agencies published practical guides on joint-consultive machinery.Footnote 113 There was hardly an institutional manifestation of the new desire to promote human relations that drew more support and generated more enthusiasm than joint consultation.Footnote 114
As Tiratsoo and Tomlinson have persuasively argued, the impetus for joint-consultive schemes came from the trade unions who desired greater industrial democracy, but what the ministry created was a radically different type of institution: joint-consultive machinery remained at the factory (rather than the regional) level, and questions such as wages or conditions of employment were not discussed.Footnote 115 From the ministry's point of view, these measures were essential to their success, for the value of joint consultation was measured not only in terms of greater productivity or improved management but also in terms of morale and team spirit: “The most important and permanent advantage to be gained from successful joint consultation is the improvement of relations between management and employee within the undertaking.”Footnote 116 Consultation was what made the difference between the management of old times and the form of management appropriate for a democratic age. Brech had lamented that during the war, despite the existence of an “over-riding common motive,” the outlooks of capital and labor were not unified.Footnote 117 Consultation was to remedy rift: “[A]ll will see that they have the same interest.”Footnote 118
CONCLUSION: INDUSTRIAL MORALE AND THE POLITICS OF CONSENSUS
In his seminal Citizenship and Social Class (1950), T. H. Marshall notoriously placed democratic citizenship, not social rights or the welfare state, at the heart of his argument about the postwar social-democratic state. Marshall was never really clear what he meant by citizenship; he defined it as “full membership in a community,” understood in terms of rights and duties, entitlements and responsibilities.Footnote 119 Marshall suggested that because citizenship rested on shaky foundations, a solution could be found in the inculcation of “industrial citizenship.” Marshall's use of the term “industrial citizenship” is itself indicative: when describing it historically, he used it to mean association in trade unions, but when writing about the new Britain that had just emerged from war, he used it to refer to the internal life of the factory. Here was the solution to the grave problems of reconstructionist politics, namely, that “a successful appeal to the duties of citizenship can be made in times of emergency, but the Dunkirk spirit cannot be a permanent feature of any civilization.” Industrial citizenship, inculcated through the development of loyalties to the small working group, “might supply some of the vigour that citizenship in general appears to lack.”Footnote 120 Marshall, as we have seen, was not the only one to view the workplace as a privileged site for the manufacture of consensus.
Within a decade, the forces that underpinned the politics of consensus were no longer in place. On the one hand, similar managerial practices were to be continuously promoted in various mutated forms, from the care of the moral well-being of workers to psychological understanding of workers' motivation (of which the hype around “nudge” economy is a recent manifestation). There were other efforts to promote workers' participation and greater industrial democracy, culminating in the Bullock Report on the eve of Thatcher's election. Yet, on the other hand, the particular form of such politics of consensus that was discussed here, human relations management, and the obsession with the manufacture of shop floor morale, enjoyed a relatively brief life. Criticisms of human relations management abounded and were not limited to either side of the political map. Some, for instance, argued that what was needed was not human relations but actual participation of workers in the government of industry and that human relations management was largely an exercise in manipulation of affect.Footnote 121 Others argued that the obsession with human relations diverted attention from the real task of management, which was to manage the economic affairs of the business enterprise.Footnote 122 It was quickly becoming apparent that the technopolitical solution of morale management at the plant level was fractured and contested. Enthusiasm for joint consultation as a form of manufacturing harmony within the factory waned as well. It was argued, for instance, that successful schemes of joint consultation depended on morale rather than vice versa.Footnote 123 As early as 1950, a study undertaken by the NIIP revealed widespread dissatisfaction with consultive machinery (with the exception of top executives and workers' representatives themselves).Footnote 124 The records all tell a familiar story of disappointment and disintegration.Footnote 125 The third edition of the Ministry of Labour's Industrial Relations Handbook, published in 1961, devoted little over two pages to the subject.Footnote 126 The perceived failure of such committees in nationalized industries only meant greater disappointment, because even public ownership did not seem to bring greater industrial democracy.Footnote 127 In the final analysis, broader transformations in the nature of British society meant that a more individualist and consumerist understanding of the nature of work made it increasingly difficult to discuss it in terms of collective attitude and mobilization.Footnote 128 As Paterson lamented in a later work, by the 1960s morale came to simply mean “mood,” a far cry from its earlier resonance with collective sacrifice and endurance.Footnote 129 The postwar politics of consensus, which had emerged during the period of social reconstruction, now came to an end.
