The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation

Elton Mayo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317834373
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998. This is Volume IX of eleven of the Economic and Society series. Including an appendix on the political problem, this book includes the thoughts of Elton Mayo, seen initially as a modern social thinker who challenges the basic assumptions of the practical world of industry

The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization

(October 1st, 1945)

Part I: Science and Society

Chapter I

THE SEAMY SIDE OF PROGRESS

I

THE Victorians were very sure of their progress—of its reality and beneficence for humanity. In the 1890’s a small book was published, a “school reader”, entitled The Nineteenth Century; it told with pride of man’s triumphs over circumstance during a century, it implied that at last man was becoming master of his fate. And the sequel for us, fifty years afterward, has all the character of Greek tragedy on a scale hitherto unknown. Man inspired by small success to wanton presumption—ϋβρις—has called down upon himself the wrath of the gods. His fine intentions, his grandiose plans, have in thirty years been reduced to chaos; his magnificent buildings, to dust and rubble. And man himself has done it; by way of those advances in science that were to give him perfection, he has achieved mainly destruction, desolation, misery.

But there were contemporaries who saw that this same progress had its underside, its very seamy side. Artistic protests, for the most part ignored, were numerous. One of the most vigorous statements was made by Mr. H. G. Wells in his New Machiavelli. Writing in the year 1910 of the changes that progress had brought to the village of Bromstead—probably Bromley in Kent—he says:

The whole of Bromstead as I remember it and as I saw it last—it is a year ago now—is a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders’ roads still run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and sculleries gape towards the railway, their yards hung with tattered washing unashamed; and there seem to be more boards by the railway every time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and such like solicitudes of a people with no natural health or appetite left in them. . . .

His general characterization of the change from a pleasant country village to slum and chaos runs as follows:

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or at least an ancient balance, by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father’s intimations, it was manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none of them ever worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion. Each left a legacy of products—houses, humanity or what not—in its wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted; it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.

As one runs by train into Pittsburgh or Philadelphia through country that still suggests pleasant rolling hills and woods with running streams, one can easily lapse into a similar vein of reflective thinking. And this is reinforced by the presence in trains and hotels of strange groups of men that one never meets elsewhere in this great country, except in trains or hotels. Cigar in corner of mouth, each talks incessantly of dollars. To the artist’s eye, something was decidedly askew in the actual Victorian progress; and that something continues to this day. It is as though man himself is not expected to progress, but only his material surrounding, his bodily comfort; and the high gods exact as price turmoil, confusion, chaos—and, finally, internecine war.

Another artist, who was Prime Minister of England, was almost prophetic:

. . . amid arts forgotten, commerce annihilated, fragmentary literatures and populations destroyed, the European talks of progress, because by an ingenious application of some scientific acquirements he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization¹.

But vision of the seamy side of progress was not confined to artists. One might say of recent history that each successive decade has brought a competent observer to warn us of our failure to study man, to consider the effect upon him of all this progress. Such warnings, Cassandra-like, have passed unheeded; it has taken major tragedy—catastrophe, indeed—to call our attention to the realities of the human scene.

Frédéric Le Play, for instance, was a French engineer whose professional work, early in the nineteenth century, took him widely through the length and breadth of Europe. As early as the year 1829, he had come to doubt whether rapid technical and industrial development was altogether beneficial to the various European communities in which he worked. For twenty-five years, with this in mind, he made careful observations of the living conditions, broadly conceived, of the many diverse groups of workers with whom he was associated. These observations extend from the steppes of Eastern Europe to the Atlantic shores of France; they are recorded in six volumes published between the years 1855 and 1879. It is a fact significant of our continued disregard of the human-social problem that these volumes have never been translated into English and are probably known only to those academic students of society who are ill-equipped to assess their practical importance.²

His general finding is that in simpler communities, where the chief occupation is agriculture or fishing or some primary activity, there is a stability of the social order that has ceased to characterise highly developed industrial centres. In these simpler communities every individual understands the various economic activities and social functions, and, in greater or less degree, participates in them. The bonds of family and kinship (real or fictitious) operate to relate every person to every social occasion; the ability to cooperate effectively is at a high level. The situation is not simply that the society exercises a powerful compulsion on the individual; on the contrary, the social code and the desires of the individual are, for all practical purposes, identical. Every member of the group participates in social activities because it is his chief desire to do so.

Le Play’s finding with respect to the modern and characteristically industrial community is entirely contrary. He finds in such communities extensive social disorganization: the authority of the social code is ignored, the ties of kinship are no longer binding, the capacity for peace and stability has definitely waned. In these communities, he says, individuals are unhappy; the desire for change—“novelty”—has become almost passionate, and this of itself leads to further disorganization. Indeed, Le Play feels that the outstanding character of an industrial community is a condition of extensive social disorganization in which effective communication between individuals and groups has failed, and the capacity for spontaneous and effective co-operation has consequently failed also. These observations were made by a trained engineer—himself a competent technician. His own country, France, and, for that matter, every industrial society chose to ignore his warnings.

Remarkably similar observations were made toward the end of the nineteenth century in France by Emile Durkheim, founder of the French school of sociology. In his study of suicide published in 1897, he showed that, in those parts of France where technical industry had developed rapidly, a dangerous social disunity had appeared that diminished the likelihood of all individual or group collaboration. He says that the difference between a modern and technically developed centre and the simple, ordered community is that in the small community the interests of the individual are subordinated, by his own eager desire, to the interests of the group. The individual member of this primitive society can clearly anticipate during infancy and adolescence the function that he will fulfil for the group when adult. This anticipation regulates his activity and thinking in the adolescent period and culminates in a communal function and a sense of satisfaction when he is fully grown. He knows that his activities are wanted by his society, and are necessary to its continued life. He is throughout his life solidaire with the group.

During the nineteenth century, the rapid development of science and industry put an end to the individual’s feeling of identification with his group, of satisfaction in his work. Durkheim develops this in some detail: no longer is the individual solidaire with a geographical locality and with the people in it. He leaves the family for school and education. It is unimportant whether this involves geographical movement or no; the significant modern innovation is that the family tie is weakened and, more often than not, no new or developing group relation is substituted for it. An improved standard of general education is a wholly admirable achievement; but to improve such a standard at the cost of personal and group relationship is of doubtful value.

After this first disruption, Durkheim points out, yet another is customary; the individual is compelled to remove himself again from developing group associations in order to find work. The quest may not be immediately successful, and the social disruption grows. In extreme instances, we may find individuals who have lost all sense of social relationship or obligation—the melancholic, the suicide, the “lone wolf”, or the criminal. Even in those instances where the quest for group relationship finally succeeds—fortunately still a majority, although diminishing—the individual is not equipped by experience immediately to understand the nature of social relationship. And his group consequently represents a lower level of unity and obligation to the common purpose than the primitive.

In a modern industrial society we consequently find two symptoms of social disruption.

First, the number of unhappy individuals increases. Forced back upon himself, with no immediate or real social duties, the individual becomes a prey to unhappy and obsessive personal preoccupations. Long ago, Bishop Butler said, “. . . a man may have all the self-love in the world and be miserable”.

Second, the other symptom of disruption in a modern industrial society relates itself to that organization of groups at a lower level than the primitive of which I have already spoken. It is unfortunately completely characteristic of the industrial societies we know that various groups when formed are not eager to co-operate wholeheartedly with other groups. On the contrary, their attitude is usually that of wariness or hostility. It is by this road that a society sinks into a condition of stasis—a confused struggle of pressure groups, power blocs, which, Casson claims, heralds the approach of disaster.³

In the last part of his book, Durkheim concedes that the successive creation of larger economic units by the coalescence of smaller units has enabled civilization to give its citizens greater material comfort. But he echoes Le Play’s insistence upon the compensating disadvantage; step by step with our economic progress there has been a destruction of individual significance in living for the majority of citizens. “What is in fact characteristic of our development is that it has successively destroyed all the established social contexts; one after another they have been banished either by the slow usury of time or by violent revolution, and in such fashion that nothing has been developed to replace them.” ⁴ This is a clear statement of the issue the civilized world is facing now, a rapid industrial, mechanical, physicochemical advance, so rapid that it has been destructive of all the historic social and personal relationships. And no compensating organization; or even study of actual social or personal relationships, has been developed that might have enabled us to face a period of rapid change with understanding and equanimity. Durkheim is of the opinion that the French Revolution operated to destroy the last traces of what he calls the secondary organization of society—that is to say, those effective routines of collaboration to which, far more than to any political agency, the survival of the historic societies has been due. He points out that a solitary factor of collective organization has survived the destruction of the essentials of French society. This is the political State. By the nature of things, he says, since social life must organize itself in some fashion, there becomes manifest a tendency for the State to absorb into itself all organizing activity of a social character. But the State cannot organize the intimate daily life of its citizens effectively. It is geographically remote from the majority, and its activity must be confined to something of the nature of general rules. The living reality of active, intimate collaboration between persons must forever lie outside the sphere of political control. The modern industrial society consequently moves always in the direction of an ineffective State authority facing “a disordered dust of individuals”.⁵ I shall return to this topic in Chapter II.

Let me comment again that neither the six volumes of Le Play nor Durkheim’s volume on suicide have been translated into English. Their warnings have been ignored; their findings were too remote from the naive exuberance of physicochemical and technical development. Yet, if we look at the civilized world since the fateful year 1939, we cannot feel that this neglect was wise. These earlier studies tend naturally enough to look back at the life of simpler communities with regret; they tend inevitably to the conclusion that spontaneity of co-operation cannot be recovered except by reversion to the traditional. This, however, is a road we cannot travel in th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword To The 1975 Edition The Significance Of Elton Mayo
• Introductory
• Index