Social Science and State Policy in World War II: Human Relations, Pedagogy, and Industrial Training, 1940–1945

2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Breen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Industrial Training ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Innovative Methods

During World War II, the organization Training Within Industry (TWI) developed programs to help industry cope with the flood of new and unskilled war workers. Guided by representatives of the new profession of personnel management and assisted by university-based social scientists, the organization developed innovative methods of industrial training that drew on both the scientific management tradition and the newer human relations approach fostered by the Hawthorne experiments. The introduction of the human relations approach was severely criticized in the postwar era for its manipulative potential, but the wartime training program on which it wasbased did not exhibit that tendency. Moreover, management, which theoretically should have embraced TWI programs, was unsupportive, and organized labor, which had reason to be suspicious, wasvery responsive. Workplace reform, not the psychological conditioning of workers, drove the TWI programs.

World War II

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-64
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
Wartime Experience

This chapter discusses the role of social science in the war effort. As the Second World War demonstrated, sophisticated social science methods are certainly sometimes applicable to policy. In particular, economists demonstrated that they could employ these tools yet remain directly relevant in some realms. However, the failure of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to employ them successfully on noneconomic issues constitutes a cautionary tale for those who think that discipline ought to serve as a model for the rest of the social sciences. Strikingly, even social scientists themselves who served in government came to realize that disciplinary dynamics worked against policy relevance. Nevertheless, the social sciences' wartime experience had a positive impact on them. This wartime experience had effects across the social sciences, but it was particularly evident in the areas relevant to national security.

THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II ON COST ACCOUNTING AT THE SPERRY CORPORATION

2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard K. Fleischman ◽  
R. Penny Marquette
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Performance Management ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Contractors ◽  
Management Techniques ◽  
Cost Awareness ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Positive Effect ◽  
The U.S

The impact of World War II on cost accountancy in the U.S. may be viewed as a double-edged sword. Its most positive effect was engendering greater cost awareness, particularly among companies that served as military contractors and, thus, had to make full representation to contracting agencies for reimbursement. On the negative side, the dislocations of war, especially shortages in the factors of production and capacity constraints, meant that such “scientific management” techniques as existed (standard costing, time-study, specific detailing of task routines) fell by the wayside. This paper utilizes the archive of the Sperry Corporation, a leading governmental contractor, to chart the firm's accounting during World War II. It is concluded that any techniques that had developed from Taylorite principles were suspended, while methods similar to contemporary performance management, such as subcontracting, emphasis on the design phase of products, and substantial expenditure on research and development, flourished.

Cultures in Contact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
At Home

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

3. The demise of scientific racism

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-49
Author(s):  
Ali Rattansi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World Order ◽  
Scientific Basis ◽  
International Level ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Population Groups ◽  
The Holocaust

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the ending of World War II in 1945, the role of eugenics and scientific racism in underpinning the ideology of Nazism was impossible to ignore. It was clear that the question of racism and its scientific basis had to be confronted at an international level as part of the attempt to build a successful post-fascist world order. ‘The demise of scientific racism’ describes the post-1950 period of work by biologists and social scientists to undermine the scientific claims of the category of race. It outlines the role of genetics, DNA sequencing, and genomics in showing that there is more genetic variety within different population groups than between them.

scholarly journals Belated Recognition for Work Flow Entrepreneurs: A Case of Selective Perception and Amnesia in Management Thought

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard R. Sayles ◽  
Alex Stewart
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Business Schools ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Work Flow ◽  
Scientific Management ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Selective Perception ◽  
Recent Trends

Recent trends, such as reengineering, require work flow entrepreneurship. Important principles about these practices were recognized in post-World War II field research, but by the 1970s this work suffered neglect. Amnesia was caused by deeply held assumptions of scientific management, and by a search within business schools for academic legitimacy at the expense of praxis, which skewed the perspectives with which organizations were viewed.

Agrarian Syndicalism in Postwar France

1953 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
World War ◽  
French Politics ◽  
Pressure Groups ◽  
Fourth Republic ◽  
Economic Council ◽  
Marginal Power

In an age of mass movements and pressure groups, even the most rugged individualists find that organization pays. So it is that the French peasants, surely among the most rugged of all individualists, have embarked since World War II on a major experiment in syndioal unity. In place of their prewar organizations, which were relatively weak and deeply divided, a single Confédération Générale de l'Agriculture has brought together approximately 80 per cent of all French farmers. In the lobbies of Parliament, in the antechambers of the ministers, in the Economic Council, and in some 280 government commissions, the CGA represents the interests of the agricultural profession. Its existence plainly constitutes a new socio-political factor in the Fourth Republic.Potentially, a united farmers' organization would seem destined to be the most powerful pressure group in France. Organized labor has mass voting support; the organized employers have rich financial resources; but only the farmers possess both of those weapons. Yet the CGA today, after eight years of existence, continues to be a somewhat marginal power factor in French politics. Its dues-paying membership has dropped off markedly since the 1947 peak; its lobbying activities have produced only spotty results; its central organs are weakened by internal feuds and tensions. Critics proclaim from time to time that the CGA has no real influence among its members and no real prestige in the nation; they predict that it is doomed to disintegration or collapse. Clearly, the organization has not yet fulfilled the hopes of its founders.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

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