New Ways in Industrial Sociology

tF INDUSTRIAL SOCIOLOGY must be given a beginning, it | is generally agreed to have been fathered by the Hawthorne XExperiments and the subsequent writings of Elton Mayo and his colleagues. The full account of those experiments Roethlisberger and Dickson's Management and the Worker was published in I939, SO we shall shortly be able to celebrate the infant's coming of age. Looking back, he seems to have followed a fairly typical pattern of development: a secure infancy, with a tendency to over-protection on the part of his parents; followed by a period in which the lad's rate of growth threatened to outrun his stamina; and a turbulent adolescence, characterized by conflicts with parental authority and a desire to follow independent and not always profitable lines of action. As he nears his majority, the fellow has acquired an unmistakable confidence and is out to make his mark. Other members of the household are getting used to him and a prepared to allow for his less pleasant characteristics, as indeed they should, since whatever defects he may have certainly run in the famlily. We know enough of the social sciences to expect from this latest upstart a mixture of presumption and diffidence, tempered by occasional demonstrations of maturity. In fact, three recent books from the United States provide evidence of a developing maturity in the study of social relations in industry. They are Reinhard Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry, an ambitious comparative analysis of managerial ideologies; Eugene Schneider's Industrial Sociology, a textbook of considerably wider scope than most previous attempts of its kind; and Henry Landsberger's Hawthorne Revisited, a monograph devoted to the premier academic controversy of the field.l Collectively, they are important because they set high standards of scholarship and are notable contributions to the general field of sociology as well as industrial studies. Individually, each is important because it innovates in some way: Landsberger, because he is the frst writer to stand outside the proand anti-Mayo factions and to evaluate the controversy; Schneider, because of his attempt to relate industrial institutions to the total social 944

Epistemology · Social science · Sociology · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Philosophy