At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present

Although many writers have bemoaned psychology’s indifference toward labor unions, there has been little critical analysis of why this indifference exists. In this article, several explanations that have been offered to explain this indifference are identified and evaluated. These explanations are: (i) limited access to relevant data; (ii) limited financial rewards;(iii) early psychologists’ attitudes toward unions; and (iv) the failure to appreciate power differences between workers and management. The history of psychology in the US is compared with the history of sociology and economics in order to investigate the viability of these hypotheses. It is concluded that the two crucial reasons for the neglect of labor union issues by applied psychologists are the psychologists’ reluctance to address the presence of conflict between employers and employees and the dearth of early, pro-union psychologists.

An Analysis of Industrial-Organizational Psychology’s Indifference to Labor Unions in the United States

(1971). The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike by Geraldine Joncich. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. 634 pp. $12.50. The Educational Forum: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 552-554.

The Sane Positivist: A Biography of Edward L. Thorndike by Geraldine Joncich. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. 634 pp. $12.50.

Between 1880 and 1930, entrepreneurial individuals in academic psychology and engineering converged on a common interest in the human side of enterprise. Both disciplines subsequently overlapped in marketing their professional business services. Separating from academic psychology, applied psychologists alluded to being "human engineers" offering a personnel selection technology to industry. Conversely, scientific management diverged from engineering with psychological claims of fostering a "'mental revolution" of management-labor cooperation. Although psychology's testing technology was accepted, scientific management's psychological claims were challenged. This article details the entrepreneurial individuals (e.g., F. W. Taylor, H. L. Gantt, H. S. Person, H. Munsterberg, W. D. Scott, and W. V. Bingham), disciplinary marketing, and historical context surrounding these developments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) Cited in: Burnham JC (2009). Accident Prone: A history of technology, psychology, and misfits of the machine age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08117-5. The book was favorably reviewed by David Hemenway in Injury Prevention (2011), doi: 10.1136/ip.2011.031658. Special Thanks to Dr. Burnham for providing an electronic copy of the bibliographic notes that accompany each chapter. This greatly facilitated adding previously unidentified records to the SafetyLit database. SafetyLit users may obtain a listing of the book's references by searching using the following Textword(s) Exact query: "Burnham-Accident-Prone".

Psychology's entrepreneurs and the marketing of industrial psychology.

Lewis M. Terman is well-known in the history of American psychology for the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon intelligence tests and the Genetic Studies of Genius project. The same assumptions informed the genius project and Terman's work in intelligence testing: the notion of the fixity of the IQ at birth and the maturation theory. According to the maturation theory, individuals developed only within the range of differences made possible by the genetic endowment of the "group"--natural, cultural, or both--to which they belonged. In this article the historicity and nonuniversality of Terman's work is discussed.

A scientific project locked in time. The Terman Genetic Studies of Genius, 1920s-1950s.

A FORCEFUL ANSWER to the question why anyone should be interested 1A1. in the history of the social sciences in America was provided three decades ago. In his classic The Organization Man (1956), William H. Whyte, Jr., instructed an entire generation in the realities of organizational life in America. Whyte insisted that the organization employed the ideas and techniques of the social sciences to resolve tensions between the group and the individual. With equal measures of paternalism and insidiousness, the organization established its hegemony in society and culture. The organization and its social ethic were everywhere: in grade schools and colleges, neighborhoods and suburbs, houses of worship and places of recreation, factories and offices, mass culture and popular government, even in the private worlds of family relations and personal friendships. Whyte argued that the organizational ideal demanded the individual's conformity with and acquiescence to the larger group or collective. The organizational ethos branded individualism as subversive. The organization throttled individuality. The individual had no meaningful existence outside the organization or the group. Thus Whyte attributed much of the responsibility for this crisis of American culture and society, not simply to the organization, but to its appropriation of social science thinking for its own purposes.' Whatever the merits of the particulars of Whyte's indictment, his general thesis provides a useful and exciting point of departure for historical inquiry. The social sciences have played an enormous role in science, society, and culture for much of American history. The social sciences have been concerned with people, not things. They have been concerned with us, our society, economy, polity, and culture. Ultimately they have been invented and formulated as responses to the most profound questions of the relations among human beings, above all of the implications of group identity for individuals in the national population. This does not mean that the social sciences have not been sciences, disciplines, and professions. It does, however, signify that much more has been involved. As useful as a traditional disciplinary focus is, scholars should be prepared to use broader perspectives as well. In the last quarter century the history of the social sciences has slowly become a recognized field for historians of science and American historians. Within the field there are several journals, a newsletter, and a scholarly organization. Increasingly contributions to the history of various disciplines have appeared with the full apparatus of professional historical scholarship. Today it is not uncommon for historians to write about eugenics, sociobiology, mental testing, and the so-called helping and manipulative professions, for example, topics that bid

Hamilton Cravens

Papers

History of the social sciences.