Abstract
THE recent death of Elton Mayo, until his retirement professor of industrial research in the Harvard School of Business Administration, is a great loss to the social sciences. ‘Social sciences’ is used advisedly in the plural, because Mayo's qualifications and his main work lay in the borderland between economics, social psychology, psychiatry, social anthropology and, to some extent, political science. The experiment at the Hawthorne Works, Chicago, of the Western Electric Co., for which he and team of collaborators are so justly famous, not only integrated several divisions into which the study of man has threatened to split, but also shifted the emphasis. As I wrote, when reviewing one of the publications of this team, “the general argument of the authors may fairly be summed up in the two propositions that psychological factors are more important than physiological, and that sociological and anthropological factors are more important than economic".
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FLORENCE, P. Prof. Elton Mayo. Nature 164, 646 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/164646a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/164646a0