There is some danger that people reading this book could make the error to which Churchill refers. Critics of this experiment will say this is ‘nothing but the Hawthorne Effect’. There are indeed parallels.

In the famous Hawthorne Experiment in the late 1920s, a group of female factory workers were placed in an experimental setting and there assembled telephone relays. It was a formal experiment in which key changes in their environment, ‘independent variables’, would supposedly alter the women’s output, ‘dependent variables’. Changes in illumination, the height of seats and tables, rest periods, food and money were all tried, but the women’s productivity steadily increased over time regardless of the variables and remained as high when all the variables were removed. The conclusion was that the women were treated with greater courtesy and consideration than usual, that they had grown to like the researchers, had guessed that these wanted higher productivity and had given it to them.

While Hawthorne has been extremely influential in management studies and is regarded as having (accidentally) shown the way to improved practice, it has fared nothing like as well as a piece of research. Among those concerned with the methodology of experimentation it is thought to be a ‘bad experiment’. Its failure as an experiment stems from two sources. The subjects of the experiment came to like the researchers. The academics treated the women as they would colleagues at their university of junior status. However, this was not at all how immigrant working women and factory hands were usually treated in American industry.