Elton Mayo

The Humanist Temper

Richard C. S. Trahair, Abraham Zaleznik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351298704
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The definitive biography of the life and work of Elton Mayo (1880-1949) is the first full, accurate account of the activities and intimate life of one of Australia and America's pioneering social scientists. Mayo, who established the scientifi c study of organizational behavior, was highly infl uential in American social science and business management theory, following his work at the Harvard Business School and the Western Electric Company.

1

Mayo Family in Adelaide, 1880-1893

The moon was full on a summer night in the mid-1890s when the head of one of South Australia’s respected families led his two elder sons into the spacious back garden of their family home. He carried a double-barreled, muzzle-loading fowling piece. The boys were shown how to put gun to shoulder and fire. Each lad took careful aim and fired one shot. But, like their father who had been taken through the same ritual years before, the boys missed their target. It was the moon.¹

The younger son did not forget this ritual of paternal protection and high hope. He pleased his family by studying well at school and university, becoming a prominent lawyer and judge, and being knighted. But Sir Herbert Mayo upon retirement quickly sold all his law books and devoted the rest of his life to the only activity that had deeply interested him, astronomy.²

The elder son disappointed his family. They had hoped he would become a doctor, like his grandfather, but after desultory studies he took to psychology, was made a professor, went to the United States, and became a prominent social scientist.

George Elton Mayo was born on December 26, 1880, in Adelaide, the capital city of the colony of South Australia. He died on September 1, 1949, at Guilford in Surrey, England. Elton was reared in Adelaide, attended St. Peter’s College and the University of Adelaide, and at thirty-eight became the first professor of philosophy at the University of Queensland. In July 1922 he sailed across the Pacific to San Francisco on his way to spend sabbatical leave in England. He had arranged to lecture at the University of California, take a train to the East Coast, and sail to England. The arrangements fell through, and he spent the rest of his academic life in the United States helping to establish the study of human and social problems of people at work. He never returned home.

Elton was born into a respected family in a society that was based on families and that put great store in respectability.³ The family lived in a home beside Nibley House, which had been built for Elton’s grandfather, Dr. George Mayo. As surgeon aboard the Asia in 1839, Dr. Mayo had come from England to the new colony of South Australia. He married Maria Gandy, once the housekeeper of Colonel William Light, who had planned the city of Adelaide. Maria bore three girls and one boy, George Gibbes Mayo, born in 1845. She died of tuberculosis in 1847. In 1851 Dr. Mayo visited American relatives and went to the Great Exhibition in London. While in England he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, attended his father’s deathbed, and, before returning home, married again. His second wife suffered a decline in mental health and lived in seclusion. For thirty years, “Old Doctor Mayo” as he came to be called, was the leading surgeon in the colony, prominent in the administration of its medical institutions, a lieutenant colonel in the Adelaide Regiment, and an active support to Trinity Church.

Doctor Mayo was primarily a surgeon but maintained the warmth, sympathy, and conscientiousness of the family doctor. He was keen on exercise, enjoyed walking and bicycling, and was one of the last doctors in Adelaide to ride on horseback to see his patients. With age he became gruff and blunt, a little eccentric, and developed a retiring manner, a dislike for notoriety, and a rooted objection to being photographed. Upon his death in 1894 the family inherited money, property, and a prominent position in Adelaide society.

George Gibbes Mayo, Elton’s father, did not achieve the same prominence as Doctor Mayo. After Maria died, George and his sisters were reared by servants and friends until 1853, when Dr. Mayo returned from England. George Gibbes Mayo’s childhood was not happy but his adolescence included an amusing potpourri of lost opportunities, curious rewards and boyish adventures, and his stories about them would entertain his own children. At his first school George had been so underfed that he stole food. He was caught, and was enrolled in St. Peter’s College. He ran away, the police tracked him down, and the college authorities made him a prefect. After his schooling he chose to work on a sheep station rather than study at Oxford University; later he went prospecting for coal in a region of West Australia that afterward was one of the country’s richest gold fields. He spent his twenty-first birthday in 1866 as a member of an expedition to find suitable grazing land in northern Australia. The expedition failed in its purpose but introduced George to sharks, alligators, floods, and starvation. The following year George studied engineering under the physicist Lord Kelvin at the University of Glasgow. He spent a year as an apprentice to a shipbuilder on the Clyde, later toured the Continent, and in 1873 returned to Adelaide to live with his father and work as an engineer on the expanding railways. From 1889 until retirement in 1914 he was a real estate agent.⁴

In September 1877 George Gibbes Mayo married Henrietta May Donaldson, daughter of a schoolmaster. They lived in a house on Adelaide’s West Terrace. Hetty, as she became known, bore seven children: Helen in 1878, Elton in 1880, Olive in 1883, Herbert in 1885, William Godfrey in 1887 (he lived only three weeks), Mary Penelope in 1889, and John Christian in 1891.

Elton lived with his family until 1900. During his youth the colony of South Australia underwent economic, political, and social changes that affected him and from which he drew many illustrations for use in his later work.

The colony depended on rural industry—wool, wheat, copper—but, during Elton’s childhood, the rural population was drifting to Adelaide. By 1900, 45 percent of the colony’s population lived there. People moved to the city because it offered employment, prospects for advancement, shorter working hours, a brighter life, a haven for widows, and the welfare and medical services needed by the aged. Also, because education beyond primary level was not available in the country, boys were sent to Adelaide for their secondary education. When the statistics on the migration became known, the press, public officials, and touring speakers tried to reverse the movement by persuading people in the country to make their style of life more attractive, and to improve farming methods by adopting scientific techniques.⁵ Hetty traveled often to speak to members and friends of the Mother’s Union.⁶ So in his youth, Elton was exposed to the problems of urbanization as well as the arguments in support of using science to help solve them.

During Elton’s early life the colony underwent an economic depression with only slight and temporary recoveries. Rents rose, wages dropped, the labor market swelled with immigrants from the neighboring colony of Victoria, and sweated labor was common. The respectability of colonial life was threatened by the growth of billiards saloons, betting clubs, “two-up” schools, and the appearance of pimps and brothels. Responses to the depression, destitution, and social evils varied, and were often misguided. For example, unions tried to distribute the burden of poverty by demanding that all members work the same number of hours; this simply increased the distress of breadwinners with many dependents. Education, a valued pathway to a respected position in Adelaide society, which was prized strongly in the Mayo household, was found to be no guarantee of a job. Charity inspired relief movements; socialists and anarchists spread their propaganda; and unions tried to teach tolerance, Christianity, and fair-mindedness to all members. But there was not enough charity to go around. Teaching self-help through revolutionary ideology and worker education failed because most of the victims of poverty were uncomprehending and inarticulate people who believed that poverty was self-inflicted; that it originated with alcohol, indolence, and incapacity; and that individuals, alone, had the duty to raise their own living standards. A political solution was needed.

South Australia’s politics became democratized as Elton was entering adolescence. In his boyhood, colonial gentlemen had constituted many short-lived governments, all headed by a member of the Adelaide Club—the Mayos’ club. Before the depression these men had remained in power for many reasons: they had always upheld the progressive liberal policies of the colony’s founders; they had overcome most of the problems involving the ownership of land; they had not been aloof, nor had they maintained a superior attitude to the less-respected colonists; they had been visibly active at the hub of the colony’s political and economic affairs. Nevertheless the consequences of the depression were so great that in 1893 the last government to be formed by a member of the Adelaide Club was replaced by that of the radical Charles Kingston. For six years Adelaide was astonished by Kingston’s demands for higher taxes, his attacks on the legal and medical professions, his demagogic blasts at the interests and privileges of former politicians, and his personal power in the cabinet. Elton saw himself as a colonial gentleman, and believed that self-understanding could be gained through broad education. He came to loathe the demagogues and crowd pleasers who, with subtle propaganda and ill-will, destroyed opportunities for every man to learn and come to terms with the real problems of the day. Political and economic changes in South Australia laid a solid foundation for Elton’s approach to the political problems of industrial civilization.

Enlightened attitudes toward the distress of Adelaide’s poor followed the changes in Adelaide’s political life. At first the government gave food to the starving; later, land was made available for cultivation during periods of unemployment. In the liberal tradition, crime was fought by establishing a criminological society, and then by teaching that environment rather than inherent evil was the main cause of crime. Courts were established for children, prisons were modified, and institutions were introduced for prostitutes and inebriates.

Women’s rights raised a political issue for Elton. In 1880 the University of Adelaide had accepted women; in 1894 Catherine Spence helped South Australia’s women win the right to vote. But the Mayo family was not united on the issue. During Spence’s campaign, in a letter to the daily paper, signed “Suffragette,” Elton pointed to the few opportunities for women in a man’s world. He listed the inequities, then asked, “If men are allowed to mix bathe, why not women?” When his father saw the letter he exploded: “Fancy giving the vote to such silly women. If this is how the majority of them think, then they should not be given the vote.”⁷

Women were expected to marry; five children was the norm. But because more women than men lived in Adelaide, women were accepted in laundries, offices, and shops. Prevailing opinion turned women from attempting to join the professions. A few women fought that attitude and completed medical degrees. Elton’s sister Helen was one; she became a successful specialist in child care.⁸

Social status in Adelaide was determined by success in both rural and urban industries. Merchants and professional men invested in grazing land, pastoralists took seats on the boards of banks and insurance companies, and wool brokers and shippers capitalized mining ventures. Social status and influence were reinforced by the interlocking of family and business. Two strata were at the top of Adelaide society: the first included pastoralists, then lawyers, and merchants; the second included land agents, brewers, flour millers, and doctors. Status was dictated by wealth—providing it was not acquired in shopkeeping—and, to a lesser extent, by education and profession. The gentlemen of Adelaide built substantial mansions in the city; they enjoyed such refinements as ventilation, bathrooms, potted ferns and flowers, fashionable bric-a-brac, and a piano. To avoid the city’s hot summer, they drove their families to their country homes, or to cottages of friends, or guest houses by the sea. Although Elton’s family had a substantial mansion in Adelaide, it did not have a country home; so, in terms of wealth, residence, and occupation, the Mayo family was of the second level in Adelaide society.

The cultural life of Adelaide developed during Elton’s youth. Good taste and intellectual achievement, which the Mayos enjoyed, were everywhere congratulated and celebrated. People from the governor’s associates down to bank clerks and schoolboys attended local and imported productions of Shakespeare, musicals, and opera. The literary associations of prominent local churches organized lectures, recitations, concerts, and intellectual discussions on social issues. A club life developed for deerstalking, yachting, polo, and archery. The Mayo family and friends patronized, administered, and subscribed to the public library, university, botanic gardens, zoo, geographical society, and charities. Lighter popular pursuits were tea and tennis parties and “conversaziones,” Adelaide’s precursors to cocktail parties. Elton drank tea, played tennis well, and enjoyed—and would lecture on—the art of conversation.

South Australians were proud and jealous of their public image. Adelaide was known as the “Queen City of the South,” a garden city that boasted astounding refinements and encouraged its inhabitants to imagine they lived in the Philadelphia of Australia. But they still called England “home.” Elton’s career as an industrial social psychologist was to begin in Philadelphia; throughout his life he would idealize England; he retired and died there in 1949.

George Gibbes Mayo and Hetty Mayo raised a close and affectionate family but on some points they differed. Few professional families lived in the west end of Adelaide, so in the neighborhood were no playmates of appropriate background. The Mayo children felt isolated, and had to ask their mother to invite companions from other parts of town. Hetty was troubled by this, but George could see no disadvantages. His sister Helen believed that residential isolation had put severe limitations on the children’s social development; Elton would emphasize the same point in his study of child psychology many years later.

The Mayo children were both seen and heard; to this extent their family life was far from the authoritarian image of the mid-Victorian period. George, who had been lonely as a boy, objected strongly to leaving the children with servants. Hetty did not want the children to hear everything parents said, and preferred that the little ones be shielded from the burdens of adult talk. She had a strong influence on Elton’s emotional life. She did not comfort him as a close, warm, and touching mother but was a cool, distant, strong person to imitate. But she was an ambiguous figure, and therefore Elton would never know whether or not he had pleased her. She frowned upon his assertiveness, thought him “cock-sure” and overconfident, and did not congratulate him for his initiative. At the same time she held high aspirations for him; when he achieved a degree of success, she expected him to do better. This relationship prepared Elton for an adulthood dominated by swings of mood from excitable, aggressive thrusting to melancholic withdrawal, a conviction of sin, and obsessive reve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: The Promise of Elton Mayo
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Sources
• 1. Mayo Family in Adelaide, 1880-1893
• 2. Early Failures, 1893-1904
• 3. Education and Career, 1905-1911
• 4. Early Years in Queensland, 1911-1913
• 5. Career, Family, and Friends, 1914-1919
• 6. War, Politics, and the New Psychology, 1914-1919
• 7. Professor, Clinician, and Lecturer, 1919-1921
• 8. Crises and Career, 1919-1921
• 9. To America, 1922-1923
• 10. Industrial Studies in Philadelphia
• 11. Philadelphia to Harvard
• 12. Harvard 1926-32: Early Research and Associates
• 13. Harvard 1926-1932: Teaching, Clinical Work, Writing and Travel
• 14. Mayo at the Hawthorne Works: 1928-1931
• 15. Collaboration at the Hawthorne Works: 1929-1932
• 16. Hawthorne Reported and Early Criticism: 1932-1942
• 17. Family and the Clinic: 1932-1942
• 18. Collaboration: 1932-1942
• 19. Personal and Political Problems: 1932-1942
• 20. Last Years at Harvard: 1942-1947
• 21. Retirement and Death in England: 1947-1949
• 22. The Character and Contributions of Elton Mayo
• Photographs
• Writings of Elton Mayo
• References
• General Index
• Elton Mayo Index