Workplace atmosphere results from conflicts between workers’ social expectations and objective factory conditions.

Evidence

It was necessary, he held, to see the atmosphere in the workplace as being a product of the conflict between the subjective expectations of the employees, which were produced socially, and the subjectively mediated objective conditions of the factory, and not merely to register the various elements of the atmosphere in the workplace, but to explain them on the basis of the social process as a whole. This point of view also made it possible to clear up the contradiction, which had remained merely an observation in the Mannesmann study, between the fact that workers generally saw higher pay as the most important objective and the fact that conditions in the immediate vicinity of the individual workplace took priority in forming their attitudes to the factory. `In both cases, the conflict of interest between management and employees is manifested in forms which at the same time conceal that conflict.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2093

Categorization

• DEFINE: von Friedeburg’s theoretical resolution of the Mannesmann paradox: workplace atmosphere must be explained through the social process as a whole, not registered element by element.
• XREF: The ‘conflict concealed in its own manifestation’ formulation echoes Marxian ideology-critique and the Frankfurt School’s dialectical method. — connects to: Analyzing only subjective workplace reactions obscures the underlying management-labor conflict — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2094; Business-ideology sociology treated the factory as a convivial community and ignored management-employee conflict — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2095; Business-ideology sociology reframed the factory as collaborative convivium — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2095 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Analyzing only subjective workplace reactions obscures the underlying management-labor conflict #corroborates (0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2094
• Working-class culture emerges from its material conditions combined with class struggle #corroborates (0.80)
• Business-ideology sociology treated the factory as a convivial community and ignored management-employee conflict #corroborates (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2095
• Business-ideology sociology reframed the factory as collaborative convivium #corroborates (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2095
• Gender expectations spill into work roles and cost women authority #expands (0.71)