Elton Mayo

Born Dec. 26, 1880, in Adelaide, South Australia; died Sept. 7, 1949, in Polsden Lacy, Surrey, Great Britain. American sociologist; professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. One of the founders of American industrial sociology and the originator of the doctrine of human relations.

In Mayo’s conception of industrial relations, the personal and emotional relations of individuals to one another are substituted for objective socioeconomic relations. Mayo denied the existence of a contradiction of class interests between entrepreneurs and hired labor; instead, he focused his attention on breakdowns in communication and in mutual understanding among individual members of both groups. He considered improvement in worker-management relations to be the means of dissolving conflicts between labor and capital.

Beginning in the 1920’s, Mayo and a group of associates were commissioned by several corporations to develop a system of measures designed to improve the social atmosphere in enterprises and to ease the conflicts between superiors and subordinates at different levels of the corporate hierarchy. Mayo was one of the originators of the idea that workers can be more effectively stimulated by noneconomic factors (signs of respect from management or high prestige among fellow workers) than by the size of their salaries or the prospect of salary increase. Based on this idea, he proposed a number of specific methods for raising labor productivity. According to Mayo, sociology should offer practical help for the establishment of harmony in industry. Mayo’s theories sought to subordinate the consciousness of the workers to existing bourgeois relations.