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- [00:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this guy sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified haters. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Eric Baker, a lecturer in history at Harvard and editor at the Drift magazine. You might also have seen his work in the Baffler, the Nation, Chronicle of Higher Education, Twitter, all kinds of places. His new book, make your own how the entrepreneurial work ethic exhausted America, just came out like a month ago with Harvard University Press. So congratulations on that and thank you for giving me some reading material ahead of this. And welcome to the show.
- [01:06]
Dr. Eric Baker
My pleasure. Yeah. Really great to be on here.
- [01:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is kind of a weird time for work. Like that's the case always. Right. I mean, your, Your book would argue that's the case always. Unemployment is crazy. People in federal jobs are being fired for all kinds of stuff. We have influencers and influencing off the charts in terms of these sort of individual entrepreneurial work styles. Like, what the hell?
- [01:31]
Dr. Eric Baker
Right. Yeah. I was hoping, I guess, and anticipating that my. That my book would be relevant, but I must say that I am a bit horrified by exactly how relevant it has proven to be in publication. I mean, it's, it's. I couldn't. I couldn't ask for a better illustration of why the intellectuals and managers and executives that I write about in this book, in fact sucked then by seeing their extremely shitty legacy laid out in front of us in plain sight.
- [02:13]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. And also things like, you know, the classic case of car manufacturers becoming the HR managers of the entire federal government. And, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that I think is. It's, I think also with your kind of work. And this is the case for me, obviously, because I researched Nazis. But there's. It's a weird moment to say, like things are. Seem kind of bad professionally. My work is very relevant. All of a sudden. It's a very weird thing to be like, I don't know how to, how to navigate that feeling.
- [02:49]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, it's there, There are times where I feel like a profiteer. And then I check, I check my bank account and remember that in fact, the profit part has yet to materialize.
- [03:03]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, definitely. When people are sort of like. And you're. You're grifting off of this and it's sort of like it pays terribly if that's the case, being. At least I get accused of being like a Soros shell a lot. And I'm like, if I am a sort of shell, I need to. Or I've also been called the Kremlin asset, which I think is very funny every time that happens because I studied in Russia. But whenever that happens, I'm always like, can someone call my manager and tell them to pay me, like, way more than they are if that's the case? Because this is a terrible gig if I'm doing it for free.
- [03:33]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, being. Being an asset or a stooge or a grifter is yet one more job in America that. That doesn't. Doesn't pay the way it used to.
- [03:41]
Dr. Claire Aubin
We're actually entrepreneurs.
- [03:43]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yes.
- [03:45]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Great segue. Let's get into what we're all really here for. Who are we talking about today?
- [03:52]
Dr. Eric Baker
So today we're going to talk about a guy called George Elton Mayo who taught for many years across the river from me at the Harvard Business School. He is best known probably for being the kind of ringleader of a group of Harvard Business School guys who developed what's often known as human relations management. And this is a kind of body of management theory that was extremely influential in the mid 20th century, but definitely persists till today. And it's often kind of associated. Was often kind of confused with human resources, HR and this kind of like, whatever the sort of bureaucracy that comes along with that. But really it was, I argue in the book, it had a lot of kinship with contemporary thinking about entrepreneurship. These guys were obsessed with leadership and the sort of turning the. Making the company run like a family or, you know, a kind of exciting sort of cult almost. And so there are, this is, I think, an important, you know, less boring than it may seem chapter in business school intellectual history.
- [05:14]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Business leaders running things like a cult. I can't imagine that that's so far outside the realm of possibility. So he was alive from 1880 to 1949. Right. So this is like. But he doesn't start becoming popular or not popular, but start making waves until the 1920s, is that right?
- [05:34]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, he was a late bloomer. He failed out of medical school twice. He got his bachelor's degree finally at age 30. But he was in quintessential fashion, just an impeccable self promoter. And so he initially, he was Australian. So he talked his way into a lectureship at the University of Queensland. Despite only having an undergrad degree. He chronically embellished his educational credentials throughout his career. So he spent about a decade at the University of Queensland and then kind of charmed himself into the American social scientific elite and kind of just kept failing upwards. But yeah, he was in his 40s definitely before he, his career really started to take off.
- [06:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You know, he could be sort of held up. You know, when people are like, Oprah didn't become famous until she was 45 or whatever, he, you know, we're missing the main guy, which is Elton Mayo in the category of people that say, never give up on your dreams to become a grifting fake doctor working at Harvard Business School.
- [06:54]
Dr. Eric Baker
It's the American dream, really.
- [06:57]
Dr. Claire Aubin
It's also funny because I did write. It's funny that you said he talked his way into all this stuff, he was Australian, because I also had written on my notes, Australian parentheses, already untrustworthy.
- [07:11]
Dr. Eric Baker
Well, I mean, you know, it's funny, but I think there's a germ of truth in that, in that, you know, I mean, this is. Especially these early 20th century Australians, I mean, had an. White Australians had just an extremely profound imperialist mindset and, and kind of fundamentally sort of like racist view of the world. And that was absolutely the case for Mayo. I mean, I was struck again and again in reading his archives, you know, his private correspondence. You know, he's just, he's dropping all kinds of slurs, you know, real kind of old timey slurs, learn some new ones in his correspondence. And you know, he very much is a kind of, you know, despite, despite his, you know, I think pretty obvious lack of talent or intellect or you know, really almost anything admirable, you know, he clearly felt a profound sense of entitlement to kind of influence the highest echelons of society. And I think that, that, that also kind of comes from this, you know, his, his status as a scion of empire.
- [08:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and it makes sense, the idea that one could move intercontinentally in the early 20th century. Move intercontinentally and say, you know what? I'm going to become the go to guy on business psychology with my no real psychological training, no medical training. Although he dropped out of medical school like you said. But like, and what I saw online is that JB Minor says he had practically no training in the conduct of scientific Research. So this guy has no credentials other than a lot of hubris and the belief that he deserves this level of influence and power.
- [09:13]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, and early on you can really see him kind of overcompensating. You know, he's, he's obsessed. I mean, I think we all, we all know what it's like when someone is trying to perform scientific respectability. And he's very, I mean, it's like a costume for him. So he's obsessed with. Anytime he can measure something or give you a figure or name drop some sort of jargony concept from biology at the beginning of his career, when he's sort of establishing his foothold, he's clearly kind of obsessed with, with this, his ability to sort of reinvent himself as a real scientist. By, you know, I mean, some of his writings from the 1920s, there's a kind of like technobabble feel, you know, in like a sci fi show or something. You know, he's just like rattling off all these different physiological measurements that they're taking of the workers they're studying to try to figure out why they're unhappy monitoring their blood pressure. They become very obsessed with blood pressure and homeostasis and all of this. And it's, you know, to me, it's just so, you know, I have such a clear image in my head of this guy, you know, saying homeostasis, you know, in a way that sort of makes him feel, feel really smart. I mean, and that's, that's kind of what his, his act is about.
- [10:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
At first, I'm not even going to attempt an Australian accent, but I can, I hope all the listeners, all of you, listeners at home are imagining an old timey Australian racist saying homeostasis. And then we'll, we'll, we'll all have the same sort of mental image just to sort of like give some of his background as well in terms of how he gets to the point where we're like, wow, this guy sucked. He starts his career or early in his career, he starts with like World War I shell shock research and somehow becomes the father of H R later.
- [11:11]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, well, so his, the essential question that gripped him throughout his entire, his entire adult life really was, you know, why, why are the masses so unhappy? Why are they trying to rise above their station and you know, meddle with the order of things?
- [11:30]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And how dare they.
- [11:31]
Dr. Eric Baker
Especially this, this becomes especially, you know, laser focused eventually on, on the labor movement and workers. But his intuitive answer to this question is essentially, well, they're crazy. And so this really Drives his interest in psychology. And he sort of develops this theory built on his reading of psychoanalysis, where the kind of physically dysregulated person, someone who's experienced some kind of trauma or sort of shock to their system, they kind of construct a different mental world for themselves to live in, so they stop actually kind of responding to the actual reality around them, and they just respond to this sort of imagined world that they're living in for themselves. And this is a conclusion that he draws from, in part from the study of World War I shell shock victims. And so he essentially comes to the conclusion that people trying to organize a union must be experiencing something similar that how could they be doing something so obviously irrational, so obviously disconnected from the realities of how to have a good working life meddling with a good thing, the good thing that they've got going? And so the answer is that there must be something about. Something about the nature of industrial work that's sort of causing this almost sort of like trauma reaction, but not, I mean, so there's a great deal of paradox here. The whole idea is that there's something so physiologically dysregulating about industrial work. And yet the upshot of the theory is to totally delegitimize any grievances that, that workers have that they try to organize around.
- [13:30]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So this guy's not, you know, reading Instagram infographics and the body keeps the score and whatever and becoming like a guy who's ready to talk about trauma.
- [13:40]
Dr. Eric Baker
No. Yeah, well, he did, he did, he did think that the body, he did think the body kept the score, you know, but for him, this was a weapon to be wielded against organized slavery.
- [13:51]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Look, you know, he had a vision for who knows something. But it is. I mean, I think it's interesting to the. That the shift, like they're already. Before we even really talked about, like why he sucks so much. I think, you know, everyone's got a hint of it by now, but there's like this rapid sort of shift from I'm have no credentials to I study this one hyper specific thing to. I can apply this hyper specific thing to anything I want, essentially. That really, I think paints a picture of who this guy is in terms of how he's thinking and the sort of like belief or confidence he has in his ability to just do whatever he wants and be believed for it.
- [14:35]
Dr. Eric Baker
And what makes him such a type? I mean, you know, he's. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this guy is because I think that he is he is such a type, you know, consciously or unconsciously. There are, you know, so many kind of self styled business and management experts are, you know, really following in his footsteps, not just intellectually, but in terms of their, their sense of themselves and their, the way they navigate the world.
- [14:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. Now he'd be the guy who like, sells a PDF of his course on how to be, you know, like that, who's like, you can take my course online and. Or he's having these seminars in a, in a Hilton ballroom, talking to people.
- [15:13]
Dr. Eric Baker
Tom Cruise and Magnolia. Yeah, for sure.
- [15:17]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And you know, there are probably. I can't. I don't. You don't have to agree with me because you work at Harvard, but there are probably still people at Harvard Business School essentially doing this same thing. But I mean, it's. We all know the type. It's not. It. This. He really is, it seems like from the small amount I know already, this sort of caricature or like archetype that very much persists and we can't. We all have a sort of mental image of the guy doing it. Hello, everybody, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're currently listening to the free version of our show. Because we're trying to make accessible, engaging history independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts and it's in the budget for you, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means that everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pint of beer, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the biweekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal. Just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in our episode description to sign up. So let's. I think this is a good time to move towards the specific reasons why he sucks. What? We'll start with your sort of main issue with him.
- [16:47]
Dr. Eric Baker
Well, I mean, my. So my. It is. It is. It's hard to pick out just one kind of axis of. Of. Of beef. I mean, if, you know, if I had to sum it up, it's like the, in. In the movie the Big Lebowski, the Dude is, is roughed up by this, the. The sheriff of. Of Malibu. And he's. He's describing him after the fact, and he says, you know, it's a real reactionary. And there's something, you know, I mean, it. It like, to me, it's something that I knew intellectually. I mean, you know, I. I didn't think that any of these management experts were like people who I was gonna especially admire or relate to. But just the fact that this guy who was so monumentally, personally and politically unpleasant had this kind of momentous role in shaping the thinking of the entire American business class. I mean, to me, this is like. What most aggravates me about him is just the way that, you know, he got away with it. I mean, there's still. There's still a lot of hagiography that surrounds him at Harvard Business School and, you know, in management textbooks and all of this. And, you know, this is a guy who, you know, at the. At the end of his career, he decides to try to. He decides to try his hand in consulting in Hollywood. The film industry calls him up and they try to get him to serve to whatever, help them.
- [18:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
A classic move.
- [18:35]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yes, exactly. Of course, again, very much of a piece with his operation. But he quits this job in the 1940s, and. And he remarks that he did this because in Hollywood there was a systematic attempt to destroy the social order. Most filmmakers preferred Hebrew folklore to any other and would not, in any case, give his proposals a second thought.
- [19:00]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Man, all of the people we talk about on this show at some point do something anti Semitic. It's crazy how every person I've talked about thus far, we've been like, oh, and by the way, here's this anti Semitic screed he wrote at. Like, yes, it's really the thing that unites everyone we've worked on so far.
- [19:20]
Dr. Eric Baker
At one point, there was a letter in his archives he wrote to one of his collaborators where he's writing about an admirer of his, someone who was trying to apply his principles in England. And he refers to her as a fat Jewess.
- [19:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
You guys can't see this, but the face I just made. Oh, my God. What?
- [19:42]
Dr. Eric Baker
This is someone who's ostensibly on his side. And so it's just the degree of egregious petty cruelty that this guy regularly displayed. It's so much above and beyond the call of duty. If you're going to try to set out an intellectual theory for how to keep workers in their place, again, you're going to suck to some extent. But he just sucked so much more than he had to.
- [20:11]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Like we've talked about a lot of people who are like, they sucked for their political beliefs or the things that they engendered politically. They sucked for the way they treated their partners. They sucked for, you know, the consequences of all of the things that they've done. There are like so many reasons people have sucked, but they tend thus far. And for the people listening, we've recorded a lot of episodes, but this will be coming out like earlier amongst them. So I'm referring to episodes that you haven't heard yet. Maybe that's bad for them, but whatever. But in a lot of these, like someone sucks for a specific reason that has one sort of, it's within one segment of sucking. And he's one of the first ones we've had where it's like, no, as a person sucked, as a professional sucked, political beliefs sucked. Like he really brings together all of the kinds.
- [21:05]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, he was, he was a polycrisis of sucking. You know, it was, you know, it was almost kind of like fractal, you know. However, like wherever you zoom in, you know, you find the same, the same degree of sucking sort of reflected on the micro level. I mean, I could go on and on. You know, he basically like once he was ensconced, you know, in his kind of fiefdom at hbs, he, I mean, he basically, he actually published very little under, under his own name because he basically just thought it was kind of beneath him. So he published a couple of influential, well respected books, but he basically outsourced the task of actually writing to his underlings. While nonetheless, he would often sort of append a preface to these books to let everyone know that they were really expounding his ideas and his work. And meanwhile he would just have these luxurious three martini lunches in Harvard Square. And I mean, he just lived this life of almost kind of comical indulgence while making his postdocs do all the actual work. And so again, it's hard to feel too bad for these, these guys who were like publishing these manuals essentially about, you know, how to, how to preempt unionization, how to get your workers to like love love you and love the company. But I do also kind of feel, you know, I imagine them, you know, whatever asking him to, to look over a draft or something. He says, you know, oh no, sorry, 11 to 5pm today is booked for, for lunch. Yeah, it's, it just, it goes on and on.
- [22:59]
Dr. Claire Aubin
So he was doing like what people imagine we do instead of like, oh, I'm teaching seven classes this semester at three different campuses. Lunch haven't had that in three weeks. Like, whatever people imagine academics to be doing now is what was actually happening. And he didn't even have to get a doctorate to get to do that. He just had to just lie. I also saw people would regularly call him Dr. Mayo and he just did not correct them.
- [23:27]
Dr. Eric Baker
No. Oh, yeah, no, he, he. He definitely welcomed this, this impression.
- [23:33]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I mean, also, one of the things that I thought was kind of wild while looking at this was it seemed very clear to me while I was reading some of his bios online that he sucked. However, all of these bios and all of these websites and all these places that talk about him are like, admiring him. Like, they're all saying, and this is why Elton Mayo changed the world and changed business. And like, there's no critical discussion of him in any of it.
- [24:00]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, well, I mean, this is a common feature, I think, of the kind of intellectual history of business and management. I mean, if you're not aligned with that perspective, you know, if you're someone, you know, like me, you know, coming out of the labor movement and doing this work, it requires a kind of strong stomach to sit with all this material and, and sit with these guys for, for years and years. So you're welcome everyone else, I guess.
- [24:30]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah. This, this is, I feel like one of those people who's like, everyone needs to know about this man. Everyone needs to know about this. That this guy is essentially some old timey snake oil salesman who's like, standing on top of a box at the county fair. And someone was like, you know, we should do give that man a job at business school like it's a cartoon.
- [24:50]
Dr. Eric Baker
And kind of coronate him as the, the leader of a new kind of vanguard in thinking about. About business and management. Because eventually, you know, I mean, so the. The idea of human relations, again, it kind of. It quickly goes beyond this stuff about, you know, just measuring blood pressure and homeostasis and some of this, you know, more kind of comically quackery, it becomes this theory about the properties of leadership, about the importance of leaders. I mean, this word which feels like such a contemporary buzzword. Everyone's obsessed with leadership. I won't say that he invented being obsessed with leadership, but he was definitely the most obsessed with leadership in the business context that anyone in American academia had ever been. And this, sorry. And this idea, you know, he had this idea as well of, you know, workers themselves as sort of, you know, naturally forming These communities, I should say this is the other reason why I don't know what we're up to now. The 10th reason why he really aggravates me is because his whole theory was essentially his mature theory. The theory that he became best known for in the 1930s was essentially a strategy to hijack worker solidarity for management purposes. He and his associates observed that workers formed communities organically on the shop floor. They cared about what their co workers thought about them. You know, they, they sort of, you know, wanted to, to have each other's backs. And in, in the Great Depression, this, this became a very potent tool of organized labor. You know, often without calling an official strike, small groups of workers could, you know, shut down production if, if they were being mistreated or something like this. And, and this was, this was really aggravating to, to managers. And so, you know, Mayo's idea was essentially, well, you know, what if you could, what if you could harness that force but add a managerial leader on top? And so then these forces of cooperation, of belonging, of sort of the workplace feeling like a community, it's not just you having your other workers backs, but it's like we have this guy, this sort of charismatic creative leader who we're inspired by. And so we're all in this together. We're going to redirect these feelings of loyalty we have to the company as a whole, to the leader. And there's just something to me that's so perverse about this impulse, in part because it's effective to some extent. I mean, this idea of kind of, again, sort of transforming the workplace into a charismatic community or, you know, almost a kind of charismatic cult. You know, this, there, there are lots of examples, you know, in the, in the aftermath of Mayo's work, obviously into the present day, where, where this, this stuff works. And it's, it, it depresses me so much because it takes, it takes these, these impulses that I, I think are, are so, you know, so dignified and so essential to, you know, making the, the labor movement work. And it turns them into a weapon of, of the managers.
- [28:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Hi everybody, it's Claire here with a quick mid roll shout out to another Multitude podcast. If you don't remember or haven't heard already, this guy sucked is a part of Multitude, which is a really cool podcast collective. And sometimes I like to tell you about other Multitude shows that I think you might be interested in. So this week I want to talk to you about Big Game Hunger. Big Game Hunger is a weekly comedy show where Jenna Steber and friends come up with the next big video game every single episode. Jenna and a variety of funny and game obsessed guests make a different game. And it's extremely fun and usually quite wholesome, but also kind of off the walls and vaguely insane on occasion. They start with a randomly generated genre as well as a concept and a vibe, and then they take it as far as they can. By the end of each episode, they have essentially honed an IP that they're hoping is so irresistible you'd be ready to risk approximately 5 to $25 for it on Steam. Get ready to laugh about games that you love, learn about game trends, and yearn for titles that will absolutely never be released. Big Game Hunger is available wherever you listen to podcasts and has new episodes every Monday. So what are you waiting for? Go check it out. So it like takes sort of these workplace communities that occur organically and are. Are part of the sort of general human experience, human labor experience, and it turns them into corporate assets, which in turn makes it harder to organize, which is. Yeah, I think that's a very sad thing when you think about it that way. And I think it's also interesting how much that has sort of continued on and persisted. So much so that now you can have the shittiest middle manager in the world in charge of you and a terrible corporate leader, but there's still an expectation that your workplace is. There is an asset for them rather than. Or your workplace community is an asset for them rather than it being a space for strength and solidarity and organization. And he did that. And that makes me sad and mad.
- [30:30]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, totally. I mean, this is partly. This is one of the paradoxes associated with human relations is that the actual. One of the consequences of this idea was a real kind of proliferation of these sort of middle management types. And they had all kinds of ideas about the techniques that you could implement in order to sort of work this kind of alchemy in the workforce. And, you know, so many bosses had the idea, you know, you know, okay, well, I can hire someone to just sort of implement these techniques. You know, whether it was, I mean, one that they were into was the dreaded survey. You know, there would be these surveyors who would go around and ask workers how they felt about how things were going at work. And Mayer was very clear. This survey should not be taken as actually informative about what's going on with the work. You know, if the workers are complaining about something on the survey, again, like all workers are crazy in his view, but rather the act of like, doing this survey, making them feel like management is interested in them. You know, this is what this technique is all about. It's just, it's so cynical, it's so paternalistic and, and it's everywhere. It's everywhere.
- [31:48]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I mean, ultimately it turns into this sort of HR machine that we know now where there's sort of a nice space in terms of like, we're interested in your experience. But the, ultimately, it's like these surveys. Ultimately the goal is exclusively to protect, you know, corporate or workplace interests and not yours as a worker at all. But it has the sort of similar sympathetic face as this survey where it says, we're interested in you and your experience, your needs, what we can do. But there's actually no interest whatsoever in that.
- [32:17]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, and when the rover hits the road, the veneer drops. I mean, this is kind of the story of Silicon Valley in the last 10 to 15 years, when in the late aughts, the early2010, Silicon Valley was known for how much work they put into making the, the startup feel like a family or a summer camp or something like this. This attempt to sort of make it a real kind of emotionally charged community, to make people feel like their home was at work. All of this was classic human relations. But as we've discovered, some workers internalized. They took the wrong message away from that. They thought that this meant that they actually deserved to have a good working life. And they got interested in other kinds of organizing. And so now the charade has been dropped and it's become clearer than ever that all of this was designed again to sort of make the ultimate leader at the top of the firm. The Zuckerbergs and the Musks and the Bezos, this was the guy. The idea was to transform workers into like, you know, minions, loyal servants of the dear leader. And, you know, if it doesn't seem like that's working, then all of the, all of the, you know, supposed kindness and the platitudes about, you know, how we want you to feel at home here, that goes away pretty quickly.
- [34:02]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Um, even the title of his 1933 book, the Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, displays a real level of cynicism for the idea of like, humanness in work or humanity in work. The human problems to me suggests that the, the problems of an industrial culture or an industrial civilization, the, the workplace, all these places that he's thinking about, the problems of those of those places are not inherent to the workplace. They're inherent to the workforce. And if we, if we Change the relationship we have to the workforce even in these really like sort of fake ways. These ways that are just a veneer over what we're actually wanting them to do and what we're actually hoping will happen for our interests whenever that happens, like that veneer falls and these, all of this is clear that it's just about like, there's no real like love for the well being of workers at all.
- [34:59]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, they're problems. No, that's, that's exactly right. The human problems of an industrial civilization. And it's basically code for like workers. You know, it's all of this, all this industry is great, but it's, you know, unfortunately there are people with like wants and needs and desires and stuff. And so, you know, that's. That that tends to muck it all out.
- [35:19]
Dr. Claire Aubin
There's also sort of a shift away from fixing the problems of work. Or at least this is what I kind of saw in the research I was doing. And from reading your, your book that you sent me, there's shifts away from fixing the problems of work and towards encouraging eagerness for work. So it's not about fixing the problems, it's about making people just want to work. A lot of these things like, are about creating motivation for work outside of like fair compensation or improved compensation. All of these ways that the material conditions of the lives of workers could be improved are kind of pushed aside instead in order to create this sort of cult like atmosphere where people want to be working and want to be together and doing things for you.
- [36:03]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, so people like Mayo were kind of reacting against or trying to go beyond the sort of first wave of scientific management associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 20th century, where the idea was, okay, you let us kind of re engineer the production process, tell you exactly how to move your arms and your legs and in some cases use new machines and whatever and we'll make a bunch more money and you'll get your fair share of that. And so that's why you should do what we tell you. And Mayo, and not just Mayo, but the kind of people in his world, people who became very interested in, who started to speak the language of entrepreneurship, imbibing this from contemporary German language social science. They thought that that was actually opening Pandora's box a little bit. That once you let the workers know that higher pay was on the table, they wouldn't stop. This would do something to their motivational structure. It would teach them that work was just a kind of exchange of something unpleasant for material gain. And so if that's how you think of it, then your goal becomes to do as little of the unpleasant thing as possible for as much money as possible. And of course, that's not how the managers want their workers thinking. So instead they start to think along these other. How can we get workers to really love what they do? How can we get them to do it for the love of the game and therefore not demand higher raises? There are different ideas that people come up with to the solution at the time, but the most enduring one is that the answer to this problem has something to do with leadership. That people. You need to convert people from workers selling their labor to a boss to people who feel like they're followers of a leader.
- [38:09]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I saw sort of when I was looking into his ideas around leadership, because I think this is something that I'm particularly interested in and that I find really, really, like, key to all of this also is this obsession with leadership is really like the thing that has persisted or one of the major things that has persisted. But it's really built at least in part on this sort of intense misogyny also, um, which I, I was, I mean, not. I'm never shocked by, but this sort of openness of it I found interesting. He talked about the feminizing effect of modernity. Um, he said he wanted to combat that by believing in the, quote, downward movement of the effete and the upward movement of the vigorous and capable. Um, so he's very much a proponent of the sort of vigorous, energetic, masculine image of primarily male corporate leaders that we still have now, where you have CEOs posting about their cold plunges in order for you to see them as good at business.
- [39:12]
Dr. Eric Baker
Totally Zuckerberg's whole kind of like gold chain shtick that he's on now. Yeah, it's really baked very deep in there. And I mean, in the book I go into more detail into some of the. The kind of intellectual influences that people like Mayo were drawing on. And this is embedded in a whole social theory about the feminizing effect of modernity that in some ways goes back to late 19th century Eugenic ideas about degeneration and I mean, some pretty nasty ideological territory. And people did pick up on this at the time. I mean, people understood that there was a real kind of affinity here in these views with some pretty extreme right wing ideas. One of my favorite reviews of one of the. So again, Mayo himself often was not publishing, but he had his subordinates to it. And there was a sort of left wing kind of New Dealer sociologist who reviewed one of these books and called it a rationalization of a fascist America to be run by and for businessmen. And I have to say he hit the nail right on the head with that one.
- [40:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of the things I saw also is a critique from Daniel Bell, who is a sociologist and an intellectual also at Harvard. So there's some inter Harvard fighting happening here. We love a little bit of workplace drama. But he strongly criticizes Mayo. And he said that he and other people in his business school cohort were, quote, adjusting men to machines. So there's already at the time, there are contemporaries who are looking at him and saying like, wait a second. That, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on. This isn't. This is not good. We should not be doing this. So it's not as though this is being accepted uncritically by everyone around him, but because there's also this cult around places like Wharton or Harvard Business School as the leaders or the thought leaders in the future of business that I think there's kind of a willingness to ignore criticism when it comes to them and to sort of incorporate their ideas into workplaces uncritically, regardless of the fact that there are people who are pushing back against them.
- [41:42]
Dr. Eric Baker
Well, and there's. There's one more interesting kind of twist to his. His reception history, which is that in the. In the end, his reputation, you know, almost. He almost becomes sort of ritually sacrificed to the entrepreneurship gods that he helped to usher into existence. Because in the 1950s, again, a lot of people tried to implement his ideas. They do it by, you know, they think that they can sort of take the shortcut of hiring a bunch of bureaucrats to just sort of do this stuff. And so in the 1950s, like in the book the Organization Man, Mayo comes in for a ton of criticism for sort of encouraging conformity, being associated with this sort of culture of mid century big bureaucratic organizations, personality testing and. Yeah, this idea of sort of like adjusting people to sort of be normal and compliant and all of that. And that is, I think there's clearly a lot of truth to that. But the irony is that someone like William White in that book, he juxtaposes that value scheme with entrepreneurialism. So we need to sort of slough off this kind of bureaucratic regimentation and sort of turn the company more into sort of dynamism, appreciate the value of creative leaders and all of this. So ironically, this is actually what Mayo himself imagined that he and his group were advocating for. They definitely were very critical of the sort of bureaucratic planning impulse because they thought that this element of keeping the firm sort of alive, often they use the metaphor of an organism. The firm is an organism and the leader kind of keeps it growing or sort of evolving in this kind of dynamic way. So in the end he becomes. Even the criticism of him that does begin to circulate in the mid century period, you know, ultimately has this weird way of in the long run kind of re. Entrenching his preferred approach to management.
- [44:08]
Dr. Claire Aubin
One of the things I also found really interesting in this is that a lot of this comes out of the fatigue laboratory, which we didn't even get a chance to talk about yet. But like so much of this thinking comes out of the belief that fatigue is more of a psychological state than a physiological one. And that what we should do is apply that thinking and our rigorous studies, which are not rigorous at all, that we should then apply that to the workforce. Because if we figure out the problem of fatigue, then we'll solve worker problems.
- [44:45]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah. And again they, they go further and further in this direction over time in part because they're trying to get the business school off the ground. And so there's a question of okay, well so why are you going to go to business school instead of going to graduate school in biochemistry, for example? And so the more you can say that what appear to be sort of physical or biological or whatever biomedical problems are actually they have these, they're caused because there's something wrong with the way that a worker is being managed or led or there's something wrong with the sort of social dynamics of the company that gives you a reason to develop an expertise in a sort of autonomous field of business administration. So there's. Yeah, I mean it's a kind of the sort of like careerist calculations never are never far from the surface.
- [45:46]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And there's also to me like reading that I was sort of taken aback or I was just sort of taken by the idea that it seems like in this merging of the fatigue laboratory with the business school or their ideas, you end up with these people who are kind of progenitors of this pseudo scientific approach to management where you're like, it's, you get this sort of atomic habits self help book thing where someone's like I'm a biochemist and as a biochemist this is how you should be treating your workers. This like thing where like a, A, a harder science, harder in, in quotes it is merged with sociology or psychology or whatever in order to create management styles based on data that doesn't. Isn't always you know, applicable to this stuff or doesn't always fit.
- [46:42]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, totally. And again, I mean, Mayo is not the, not the first one by any means to sort of claim the, the scientific stamp of approval for his management ideas. But he's definitely a major force in, in popularizing that, and that's, that's everywhere. Later in my book, I talk about a book by Charles Koch of, of the Koch brothers called the Science of Success, which is about his own management philosophy. Speaking of a guy who sucked can do another episode on him. But, you know, this, this idea that there. Yeah, that, that there isn't just that management isn't so much about wisdom as it is about science. I mean, this is, this is a very, a very distinctive 20th century, a phenomenon that of course is, is totally ubiquitous.
- [47:34]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, now you have every LinkedIn post being someone saying, did you know, insert random data set from one study that's not replicable, that this is how you should get people to sell used cars better based on this random academic in a country I've never been to, who said this one time. And also their summary of their article was very clearly written by ChatGPT because it says, certainly here is a study on whatever. Like there's, it's, it's extremely real now. And I think it, it goes to the idea that we, that ideas get spread dispersed throughout sort of the general public and there's no real check on them because we have. We're so willing to just believe someone that we think is credentialed in some way or that we believe is qualified by virtue of them saying that they're qualified by virtue of the people around them asserting that they're qualified. And he's very much this sort of like house of cards that when you pull one of them and go, hold on, this guy doesn't even know what he's talking about, the whole thing falls apart.
- [48:46]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, he's, he's really the father of faking it till you make it. But the irony there is that he was so profoundly elitist and did have a kind of reverence for these powerful elite institutions. So the idea that he sort of helped to pave the way for the sort of almost like the cheapening of this kind of expertise that, that anyone can just sort of pop off without having to put in the legwork of kind of tricking the establishment into thinking that you are an extremely, well, credentialed person. I think that this would probably annoy him a little bit. And so maybe we can get some.
- [49:35]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Comfort from that he didn't have to work for the credentials, but he did have to work to make people like him enough to believe his credentials without them. He did have to like, convince people that they could overlook the sort of lying in order to, to really believe his, his management philosophies. It was also funny looking this up and seeing how many things call him a psychologist slash philosopher, where I'm like, I guess, I guess he had management philosophies. I guess.
- [50:05]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, well, he did, you know, he did definitely think like as much as he claimed the mantle of scientific expertise, he did also, I mean, really think that, you know, if we could solve this management thing, this was, this was the sort of centerpiece of the entire civilizational crisis, you know, of the, of the early 20th century. And so this is partly why, again, some critics looked at this and they saw this isn't just a plan for, you know, to manage in a particular workplace, but this is a, this is a total vision for how society should operate. And it is a disturbing one at that. So, you know, he is, he is definitely a philosopher of a sort.
- [50:53]
Dr. Claire Aubin
And I mean, even you can even say in, like I said, what he called his book, it's not the Human Problems of Industry, it's the Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Like, he. There is some big picture sort of big brain thinking happening here. He's like, there is definitely some galaxy brain here where he thinks if we solve the problem of people not getting paid enough and not being happy at work, then we can tackle whatever else he imagines to be the problem of civilization, one of which is modernity makes people too feminine. But, you know.
- [51:26]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yes, sure.
- [51:28]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Well, thank you so much for coming on. Normally I would say, well, did. I think you convinced me that they sucked, but I think this one is pretty. I think we're pretty clear on this one.
- [51:38]
Dr. Eric Baker
Yeah, a bit of a slam dunk.
- [51:40]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Yeah, this is a pretty easy one in terms of convincing anybody. Dr. Baker can be found on Twitter @EricMBAKER. BlueSky is also Eric M. Baker and you can get yourself a copy of his wonderful new book at the link in our episode description.
- [51:54]
Dr. Eric Baker
Thank you so much.
- [51:56]
Dr. Claire Aubin
Thanks for tuning into this episode of this Guy Sucked, a member of the Multitude Podcast collective. This episode was hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dr. Eric Baker, and produced and edited by Tom Omani. All of our theme music was written and produced by my good pal Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, you can subscribe at patreon. Com this guysuck. See you next week.