West German industry hired critical theorists to excavate the hidden roots of worker opinion

Evidence

The executive board of Mannesmann wanted an answer to the questions `What does our company’s workforce think and what does it want, and why does it think and want this?’ They wanted information on the social atmosphere in their workplaces and on the factors that were decisive in producing this atmosphere. According to a lecture given at a company conference by Hermann Winkhaus, a member of the executive board at Mannesmann Ltd at the beginning of 1955, what really mattered to management was information about the deeper reasonsthe roots and causes in ideas and feelingsthat lay behind the formation of opinion, because it was only on this basis that the research results would be able to be used effectively in solving company problems. … It was precisely in this respect that the Institute of Social Research, with its experience, the technique of group discussion it had developed and its programmatic claim to be able to penetrate beneath surface opinions seemed to be a promising choice. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 507

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the reader’s existing note that survey data on worker attitudes served management, not workers. — connects to: German industrial management commissioned social research to uncover workers’ underlying opinion formation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2059; Postwar German empirical social research trained a new sociological generation through practical field work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 462
• DEFINE: The Mannesmann study is the concrete case behind the Institute’s postwar ‘Group Experiment’ and its group-discussion method.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: German industrial management commissioned social research to uncover workers’ underlying opinion formation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2059; Postwar German empirical social research trained a new sociological generation through practical field work — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 462

Broader Connections

• German industrial management commissioned social research to uncover workers’ underlying opinion formation #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2059