HAWTHORNE RESEARCH

socioeconomic experiments conducted in 1927 among workers of the Hawthorne Works factory of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Ill. Principally, a group of female workers over a period of almost a year were subjected to measured changes in their hours, wages, rest periods, organization, and degree of supervision and consultation in order to determine the effects of the several factors on their performance or work output. The major deduction was that social and psychological influences gave more marked results than changes in wages and hours, which had long been the chief concern of most managers and economists who had assumed that labour was simply a commodity to be bought and sold.