Horkheimer publicly declared employers’ motives irrelevant to the value of workplace research.

Evidence

Even if one may have reservations about the theoretical value of research of this sort, information about the company, down to the smallest group of workers, will have to be encouraged in this country to the same extent that it has advanced in other countries, particularly the United States. What encourages a company owner to provide the opportunity for such research is of no importance: he may see human factors as creating the conditions for, or restricting, a desired increase in productivity and profitability, or else he may see them as ends in themselves; he may see the problem as one of leadership', or else as one of partnership’. Workers themselves have just as much interest in the development of scientific methods as management does. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 512

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A director of Critical Theory reducing motive to irrelevance is a genuinely hard sentence to sit with — it is the crux of the Institute’s American-era compromise.
• QUESTION: Is Horkheimer’s ‘motive is of no importance’ a strategic concession or the actual abandonment of critique? Worth tracing through his later writings.
• XREF: connects to: Horkheimer argued factory research serves workers regardless of employer motives; Horkheimer argued workplace opinion research benefits workers regardless of management’s motives. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2087; Horkheimer suppressed Fromm’s worker study as both too Marxist and not Marxist enough — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 195 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Horkheimer argued factory research serves workers regardless of employer motives; Horkheimer argued workplace opinion research benefits workers regardless of management’s motives. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2087; Horkheimer suppressed Fromm’s worker study as both too Marxist and not Marxist enough — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 195 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer argued factory research serves workers regardless of employer motives #corroborates (1.00)
• Horkheimer argued workplace opinion research benefits workers regardless of management’s motives. #corroborates (1.00) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2087
• Horkheimer suppressed Fromm’s worker study as both too Marxist and not Marxist enough #complicates (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 195
• Horkheimer suppressed the Institute’s most successful empirical study by denying Habermas its institutional label #complicates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2358