Manufacturing Knowledge

Download or read book Manufacturing Knowledge written by Richard Gillespie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What motivates workers to work harder? What can management do to create a contented and productive workforce? Discussion of these questions would be incomplete without reference to the Hawthorne experiments, one of the most famous pieces of research ever conducted in the social and behavioral sciences. Drawing on the original records of the experiments and the personal papers of the researchers, Richard Gillespie has reconstructed the intellectual and political dynamics of the experiments as they evolved from the tentative experimentation to seemingly authoritative publications. Manufacturing Knowledge raises fundamental questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, and about the assumptions and evidence that underlay debates on worker productivity.