Institute research for management could not serve workers’ emancipation

Evidence

Sentences like that, symptomatic of the tenor of the whole article, were telling enough. Workers were represented as people able to improve their own working life on the basis of the study, as if their chances of using it and acting on it had the slightest similarity to management’s; as if the study had not explicitly concerned itself only with observing subjective reactions, not with discovering objective relations; as if it offered any evidence of the opinions and behaviour of management, including management representatives, to correspond to its evidence of workers’ opinions and behaviour; as if workers had been provided with a suitable version of the main report, which in fact had only been given to the executive board of Mannesmann and, at the most, to a few trade union experts; as if an uninterpreted presentation of data crying out for interpretation in terms of history, politics and social psychology, could contribute to workers’ emancipation; as if research carried out in the interests of the workers would not have been drafted and executed in a totally different way from that done for the board of Mannesmann. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2088

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Critical Theory interest—the Institute’s own critique of empirical sociology serving management interests, echoing Adorno’s critique of positivism and the general Frankfurt School stance on industry-funded research.