Fritz Roethlisberger: Socialism

“That any social solidarity did develop in this heterogeneous group, was astonishing, and showed what could be accomplished through segregating workers into small compact groups.”

Fritz Roethlisberger

Cited in: Urwick & Brech (1961: 177)
Management and the worker, 1939

“According to our analysis the uniformity of behaviour manifested by these groups was the outcome of a disparity in the rates of change possible in the technical organisation, on the one hand, and in the social organisation, on the other. The social sentiments and customs of work of the employees were unable to accommodate themselves to the rapid technical innovations introduced. The result was to incite a blind resistance to all innovations and to provoke the formation of a social organisation at a lower level in opposition to the technical organisation.”

Fritz Roethlisberger

Cited in: Urwick & Brech (1961: 186)
Management and the worker, 1939

“The Hawthorne researchers became more and more interested in the informal employee groups which tend to form within the formal organisation of the Company, and which are not likely to be represented in the organisation chart. They became interested in the beliefs and creeds which have the effect of making each individual feel an integral part of the group and which make the group appear as a single unit, in the social codes and norms of behaviour by means of which employees automatically work together in a group without any conscious choice as to whether they will or will not co-operate. They studied the important social functions these groups perform for their members, the histories of these informal work groups, how they spontaneously appear, how they tend to perpetuate themselves, multiply, and disappear, how they are in constant jeopardy from technical change, and hence how they tend to resist innovation.
In particular, they became interested in those groups whose norms and codes of behaviour are at variance with the technical and economic objectives of the Company as a whole. They examined the social conditions under which it is more likely for the employee group to separate itself out in opposition to the remainder of the groups which make up the total organisation. In such phenomena they felt that they had at last arrived at the heart of the problem of effective collaboration, and obtained a new enlightenment of the present industrial scene.”

Fritz Roethlisberger

Cited in: Lyndall Fownes Urwick, ‎Edward Franz Leopold Brech (1961), The Making of Scientific Management: The Hawthorne investigations https://archive.org/stream/makingofscientif032926mbp#page/n191/mode/2up. p. 166-167 <br class="br">Management and the worker, 1939