In moving from smaller to larger and more elaborate units of economic activity, increased proportions of employees are drawn into co-ordinating and managing. Managerial and professional employees and office workers of varied sorts – floorwalkers, foremen, office managers – are needed; people to whom subordinates report, and who in turn report to superiors, are links in chains of power and obedience, co-ordinating and supervising other occupational experiences, functions and skills.
C. Wright Mills (1951)
Some dozen years ago, Professor Mayo’s Department of Industrial Research and the Fatigue Laboratory were established in the Business School. These two undertakings are correlated. They collaborated in the study of men in everyday life, thus contributing to what may be described as human biology.
Wallace Donham, Dean of Harvard Business School 1919–1942 (1945)
Abstract
In 1929 the newly-reorganized Rockefeller Foundation funded the work of a cross-disciplinary group at Harvard University called the Committee on Industrial Physiology (CIP). The committee’s research and pedagogical work was oriented towards different things for different members of the alliance. The CIP program included a research component in the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and Elton May’s interpretation of the Hawthorne Studies; a pedagogical aspect as part of Wallace Donham’s curriculum for Harvard Business School; and Lawrence Henderson’s work with the Harvard Pareto Circle, his course Sociology 23, and the Harvard Society of Fellows. The key actors within the CIP alliance shared a concern with training men for elite careers in government service, business leadership, and academic prominence. But the first communications between the CIP and the Rockefeller Foundation did not emphasize training in human biology. Instead, the CIP presented itself as a coordinating body that would be able to organize all the varied work going on at Harvard that did not fit easily into one department, and it was on this basis that the CIP became legible to the President of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, and to Rockefeller’s Division of Social Sciences. The members of the CIP alliance used the term human biology for this project of research, training and institutional coordination.
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Oakes, J. Alliances in Human Biology: The Harvard Committee on Industrial Physiology, 1929–1939. J Hist Biol 48, 365–390 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9396-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-014-9396-x