In business, Taylor’s scientific management prevailed, but he had his critics, who were concerned about issues that interior designers still find themselves dealing with a hundred years later. They included Mary Parker Follett of the Harvard Business School,whose humanist, behaviorist approach to the management of organizations represented the opposite side of Taylor’s machinetooled coin.
In the 1910s she championed such far-sighted approaches to work, and the workplace, as “the law of situation” and cross-functional teams. She also insisted that individual workers, rather than being merely static units of work with a prescribed place on a linear assembly line, as Taylor would have it, contributed to the strength of the organization as a whole. She believed that, within the organizational structure, men and women should be free to experiment until they found ways of working that were effective for the tasks at hand and for themselves as individuals.
In the 1920s, Harvard was also the academic home of Elton Mayo and his colleague Fritz Roethlisberger, who are the acknowledged creators of the human relations movement and whose work also has contemporary implications.
They conducted their famous Hawthorne experiments over a period of more than 30 years—from the 1920s to the 1950s—at theWestern Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.