The Institute treated workers as unable to articulate their own decisive factory attitudes

Evidence

By contrast, the effect of single factors on attitudes to the factory and on the associated atmosphere in the workplace which was being analysed was assessed indirectly, since those being questioned were not considered capable of directly specifying the decisive factors in their relation to the factory on the basis of their own insights. Positive or negative answers to specific questions of detail, each representing a particular area of conditions in the factorysuch as `Is there another job that you would rather do?’ in the section related to the quality of the workplacewere taken as a measure of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction felt with respect to each area. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2068

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Adorno’s methodological suspicion of direct self-report — the same distrust seen in his work on the authoritarian personality and his critique of opinion research. — connects to: Accusations of workers’ illusions presuppose workers can have no autonomous class conception — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 514; Factory councils broke from top-down technocratic knowledge and empowered workers as thinkers. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 579
• DEEPTHINKING: The Institute’s methodological position — that respondents cannot directly know the decisive factors governing their own attitudes — sits at the heart of critical theory’s uneasy relationship with empirical social science, anticipating later debates about tacit knowledge and the authority of first-person accounts.

Broader Connections

• Accusations of workers’ illusions presuppose workers can have no autonomous class conception #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 514