Abstract

"Fit under Fire: Industrial Psychology in Wartime China"

Victor Seow, Harvard University (seow@fas.harvard.edu)

How did the science of work adapt to the conditions of war? This paper examines industrial psychology in wartime China, focusing on how this field provided a mobile means of matching people to tasks through testing for placement, short-course instruction tied to shop-floor problems, and structured evaluation. Taken up in China in the 1930s, industrial psychology, which defined itself as an applied study of the relationship between people and work and organized practice into selection, training, appraisal, transfer, compensation, and supervision, supplied techniques that replaced intuition with procedure in staffing and training. My analysis here follows three episodes: a Kunming factory program that addressed fatigue and error through targeted teaching; technician placement organized by a personnel psychology group using simple tests and observation; and assessments that applied the same evaluative repertoire to rank military recruits under field constraints. Throughout, wartime psychologists exercised methodological caution, rejecting simple equivalence between individuals and organizations and urging that techniques be reshaped to fit local conditions while remaining informed by international examples. Together, these instances point to a form of rationalization suited to crisis, in which repeatable procedures moved between civilian and state domains, providing a low-capital way to manage variance and speed ramp-up, while building managerial capacity amid shifting institutions and scarce resources.