Perfecting the Factory-Machine Through Cultivating Healthy Habits: Scientific Management, Mental Hygiene, and the Turn Towards “the Human Factor” in Industry During the 1920s

During the 1920s, a group of American “corporate liberals” associated with the Taylor Society advocated for extending the interventionist scope of scientific management from the technological to the “human factors of production.” Figures like New England-based industrialist Henry S. Dennison (1877-1952) recognized that improving tools and machinery, standardizing individual work tasks, rationalizing workers’ movements, and introducing piece rates were effective means to increase productivity and reduce waste. However, what the classic techniques of scientific management largely failed to do was to positively affect such crucial things as the availability of a stable workforce, harmonious labor-management relations, or the effort employees put into their work. Turning to the social and the life sciences, Dennison and fellow corporate liberals sought to change that. They created an augmented vision of scientific management which centered on teaching workers and managers how to better care for themselves, each other, and the company through developing healthy habits.

In my paper I outline how, in the aftermath of World War I, Dennison turned the Dennison Manufacturing Company’s main factory in Framingham, Massachusetts, into a laboratory where he sought to demonstrate the advantages of focusing on habits as an interventionist field of scientific management. Functioning as the centerpiece of Dennison’s vision of “organization engineering,” the cultivation of healthy habits was meant to do two things: making employees more productive by having them take charge of their health, wellbeing, and education, and helping workers and managers develop a cooperative mindset that allowed for constructive conflict resolution in industry. My paper seeks to demonstrate how corporate liberals like Dennison made use of the social and life sciences to extend the engineering logic of scientific management to the minds and social behaviors of workers and managers, laying the foundation for the “human relations” approach in management thought during the 1930s.