Human Relations in Industry--A Discussion of Recent Literature

tT-HE author of Psychology and the Ind?strial Worker has an impressive | purpose to examine from the social standpoint the principles unders lying the researches of industrial psychologists. His achievement, however, is disappointing; the varied activities of industrial psychologists are described as having a common function to secure at the same time greater satisfaction and increased efficiency but apart from this there is little attempt at unification, and virtually no analysis of fundamental principles. Nevertheless, some of the individual chapters-those which deal with test reliability and validity, and with the use of scores and measurement scales -are concise and useful; while the discussions of the physical environment and of problems of industrial health are adequate, if elementary. But in the remaining chapters too many important topics are far too briefly discussed, or are even entirely omitted. Personality tests, for all their limitations, really cannot be dismissed in a dozen doubting lines, nor can a similar amount of space do justice to the W.O.S.B. technique and its variants. Most reredrkable are the limitations of the chapters on The Psychological Environment and The Worker as a Member of Society , which do not so much as hint at the existence of a considerable body of theory and research on problems of formal and informal organization in industry. Even the Hawthorne studies remain unmentioned, and their implications, as well as those of more recent work, receive no consideration. Instead, the author attempts an analysis of <' the larger issue of the place in society of the worker . The startlingly improbable hypothesis that one of the causes of industrial discontent is the unconscious realization by some svorkers that they are not working hard enough to deserve their pay, is followed by a discussion of the unhappy consequences of the decline of small-scale enterprise. As a result of the bureaucratization of industry, discontent began to spread, and the workers readily

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