Richard A. Bachmann

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: After World War II, social and behavioral scientists frequently used large-scale industrial organizations like General Motors as laboratories to study the effects of technological change on human behavior, the labor process, and worker wellbeing. The researchers of the Yale Technology Project (YTP) were trailblazers in this regard. Between 1946 and 1959, the YTP’s Charles R. Walker and his small team of scientific field workers conducted several pioneering studies in two GM auto plants. Among other things, these studies sought to discover remedies for high levels of dissatisfaction that Walker and his colleagues found among GM mass production workers. In the aftermath of the Great Strike Wave of 1946, finding ways to curtail worker dissatisfaction became both a corporate and a national matter of concern. By cooperating with autoworkers, foremen, and managers at GM, Walker and his collaborators established job design interventions as viable remedies for worker dissatisfaction caused by new production technologies and the altered labor process in the postwar auto plant. During the following years, other social and behavioral scientists in the US picked up and further developed the YTP’s ideas, a process which culminated in the Quality of Work Life movement of the 1970s. My roundtable contribution asks to what extent did the YTP’s recommendations to tackle dissatisfaction with mass production work by enhancing the “quality” of jobs through “job enlargement” and “job enrichment” end up limiting the scope of addressing worker wellbeing on the postwar shopfloor? By "naturalizing" technology as an autonomous, apolitical force, job quality-focused interventions reinforced established hierarchies of power in the workplace and made “adjusting men to machines” (Daniel Bell) the only viable horizon of damage control.