Operational concepts terminate in improved methods of social control

Evidence

I shall take as an example a “classic” of industrial sociology: the study of labor relations in the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company. It is an old study, undertaken about a quarter of a century ago, and methods have since been much refined. But in my opinion, their substance and function have remained the same. Moreover, this mode of thought has since not only spread into other branches of social science and into philosophy, but it has also helped to shape the human subjects with whom it is concerned. The operational concepts terminate in methods of improved social control: they become part of the science of management, Department of Human Relations. In Labor Looks At Labor are these words of an automobile worker: The managements “couldn’t stop us on the picket line; they couldn’t stop us by straight-arm tactics, and so they have been studying ‘human relations’ in the economic, social, and political fields to find out how to stop unions.” — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 431

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that industrial sociology ‘helped to shape the human subjects with whom it is concerned’ is an anticipation of later performativity-of-social-science debates (e.g., MacKenzie on economics) decades before they surfaced. — connects to: Workplace friendliness programs extend social control into private impulses — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115; Operationalism in physics parallels behaviorism in social science — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 132; Actions carry special social controls that experiences do not — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 615 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Operational concepts perform a political function by inducing adjustment to society #expands (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 427
• Actions carry special social controls that experiences do not #expands (0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 615
• Prisoner behavior control generated a continuous individualizing knowledge #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 202
• Technical rationality makes irrational social control appear reasonable and rational #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 124
• Social control includes winning consent, not just coercive punishment #expands (0.75)
• Control of time enables coordination of activity and social control #expands (0.72) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 848
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality #expands (0.72) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612