Hawthorne Experiments

As we know, many scholars focused their studies on workers s activities. Social scientists and management experts proposed various theories to interpret workers s activities. A good example is the Hawthorne experiments of Elton Mayo (1933 [I960]). 

Admittedly, different researchers have given different interpretations to the same results by approaching them from different perspectives. Some scholars interpreted the Hawthorne experiments from a humanistic perspective. From this perspective, workers should not be regarded merely as economic men but also as social men . It was argued that after the Hawthorne experiments, management theory entered the era of social men . To a certain extent, this can be thought of as a human nature oriented theory. 

But there is another, context-oriented theory that differs from the human nature oriented theory. Although the interpretation that focuses on the social nature of human beings is to a great extent justifiable, it would be a mistake to believe that the Hawthorne experiments demonstrate only the importance of human nature in engineering action and that the context of the workplace is of little importance. 

Roethlisberger, who participated in the Hawthorne experiments as an assistant of Mayo, generalized their findings in The Elusive Phenomenon as follows ... 

Obviously, the Hawthorne experiments never denied the importance of context. But they definitely reject any view that regards context as only the physical work conditions or the material environment. And the experiments fully revealed that workers work in contexts with various factors. 

When mentioning the content and research method of context, Andrew Jamision (2009) indicated that the context of engineering includes economic, social, and cultural contexts, and Sylvain Lavelle (2009) pointed out that context may be studied from analytic, phenomenological, and pragmatic perspectives. The Hawthorne experiments do not mean that only humanity or morale is important while context is unimportant for practitioner s activities. From the contextualist point of view, the Hawthorne experiments have two important theoretical implications ... 

The Hawthorne experiments demonstrated that worker morale is affected by the cultural context. It is the special cultmal context created in the experiments by Mayo that inspired the worker morale. Without the special cultural context created in the experiments, the results would not have been obtained. 

The Hawthorne Experiments at Western Electric, excellently explored in Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge, were famous and exemplary instances of this style of experimentation on the relationship between environment and laboring bodies. 

The best account of the history of the Hawthorne experiments is GiUespie, Manufacturing Knowle e. 

GiUespie, Richard. Manufacturing Knowledge A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1991. 

Destruction of the explosives RDX, HMX, and TNT has been examined using subcritical water in both laboratory- and pilot-scale experiments. In contaminated soils at 150°C, considerable amounts of TNT remained in the soil after reaction for 5 h, and of HMX for 2.5 h. In the pilot-scale experiments, heating at 275°C for 1 h accomplished complete destruction of RDX and TNT, and ca. 98% destruction of HMX (Hawthorne et al. 2000). 

Hawthorne et al. (1991) used a wide variety of analytical techniques (EMPA, TGA, powder XRD and IR, single crystal XRD, Mossbauer spectroscopy, Si MAS-NMR, EXAFS/XANES spectroscopies and HRTEM) to determine the stmcture of a-decay damaged titanite. The metamictization process was proposed to begin with the formation of isolated defects caused by a-particles and amorphous domains caused by a-recoil tracks which, with increasing dose, overlapped to produce the metamict state. Fe" was reduced to Fe with increasing a-decay dose. In a set of annealing experiments of... 

Hawthorne wrote, when the comparatively recent discovery of electricity, and other kindred mysteries of nature, seemed to open paths into the region of miracle. Since amber electricity was aheady known in antiquity, I suppose that he referred to either Galvani s experiments (1786) or Volta s pile (1799). 

W. Pfenniger, Experiments with Laminar Flow in the Inlet Length of a Tube at High Reynolds Numbers With and Without Boundary Layer Suction, technical report, Northrop Aircraft Inc., Hawthorne, California, 1952. 

Some experience suggests that the dose of cardiac drugs may be reduced when hawthorn flower and leaf are taken concomitantly (Ammon and Haendel 1981 Bauer and Holscher 1992 Blesken 1992 van Hellemont and Delfosse 1988). No interaction with digoxin was observed in a human study (Tankanow et al. 2003). 

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