Papers presented by Eli Cook since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"The Whip and the Mirror: Walter Dill Scott and the Rating of the Modern Self"
Eli Cook, Haifa University
Abstract:
In our contemporary digital lives, nearly every worker is judged and graded by the all-seeing 5-star rating scale, be they an Uber driver, a college Professor, or the faceless janitor whose livelihood depends on whether you press a green or red smiley face as you leave the bathroom. Before the early twentieth century, however, the idea of subjectively rating workers did not exist. Yet by the 1930s, many American workers – especially those working in sales or department stores - found themselves being rated by their bosses on a monthly basis. They had one man to thank for that: Industrial psychologist and corporate consultant Walter Dill Scott. This paper focuses on Scott, the Northwestern Professor who invented and institutionalized the employee rating scale during the Progressive era. While Scott wrote some of the first works ever on the psychology of advertising, labor motivation, and personnel management, by far his most influential innovation was a 5-point rating scale which required bosses to rate their workers’ “appearance,” “loyalty,” “manner” “tact”, “energy”, “neatness” and “personality.” After implementing these rating scales on hundreds of army officers during World War One, Scott’s ratings scales took off in the 1920s and 1930s – despite constant pushback from unions. Unlike industrial laborers whose productivity could often be tracked by how many widgets they made or bricks they lifted, disciplining white-collar and service industry workers required a new form of Taylorism which relied not on objective measures but subjective opinion. Moreover, in rating the workers themselves and not their labor, Scott also sought to change the way these laborers saw themselves. In an emerging consumerist society in which smiling, energetic, loyal and clean-cut salespeople were not really selling goods as much as they were selling a part of themselves, Scott hoped the five-star rating would become not only a whip but a mirror.