The Happiness Industry Read online

  Mayo emigrated to the United States in 1922, firstly to San Francisco, where he took a visiting lectureship at Berkeley. He soon discovered that the Rockefeller Foundation was a source of considerable funds for anyone seeking to pursue business-friendly research, and he won a series of lucrative grants over the next twenty years, which kept him in some personal luxury. These studies took him to the East Coast, where he had the chance to visit a number of factories and consider how his ideas might be applied. His psychosomatic theories assumed that psychiatric problems in the workplace would show up not only in terms of low productivity and industrial unrest, but high blood pressure. Between 1923 and 1925, he toured manufacturing plants in the Boston area in the company of a nurse and a blood pressure gauge, attempting to prove this link between the mental, the economic and the physical, which he was convinced existed quite regardless of the evidence.

  The psychological study of work was an emerging field during the 1920s, led by some of the same scholars who had previously pioneered the psychological study of advertising a few years earlier. But Mayo had some much more far-reaching theories regarding the ways in which the insights of psychology might fundamentally reform and rescue capitalism. By focusing on the entire person in the workplace, including all of their personal concerns and mental well-being, work might provide the labourer with their deepest source of meaning, and offset the risk of industrial upheaval once and for all. In 1926, Mayo was hired by the Harvard Business School.

  The research in Cicero, Illinois, known as the Hawthorne Studies, after the name of the manufacturing plant where they were carried out, quickly became a landmark of management science.24 Mayo was one of the founders of the Fatigue Laboratory, but the impact of his work was to divert attention away from the working body and towards the mental happiness of employees. According to the mythology that now surrounds the Hawthorne Studies, Mayo’s main discovery was accidental. The working women who were chosen to be observed and interviewed were taken off the regular shop floor and into a test room, where they were able to relax and interact in a more informal and convivial atmosphere. This seemed to correlate with improved performance, and Mayo had an inkling of why: the study itself, including the interview process, was what resulted in the productivity increases, because the women had developed a higher sense of group identity with one another. Their enthusiasm for work had grown, as their ability to form relationships with one another increased. The general phenomenon, whereby research subjects respond to being studied, is now known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ for this reason.

  The lesson that Mayo drew from his repeated visits to the Hawthorne plant was that managers had to learn how to talk to their employees if they wanted to extract greater productivity from them. An unhappy worker was also an unproductive worker, and the unhappiness stemmed from a deep-set feeling of isolation. They also had to understand the unique psychological properties of social groups, which were not simply reducible to individual incentives, as Taylorism and neo-classical economics had supposed. A thriving and collaborative group identity could do far more for an employee’s happiness, and hence for the manager’s bottom line, than a pay rise.

  There is some basis to doubt whether Mayo was really reporting on data acquired at Hawthorne or simply repackaging some theories that he’d long held about the future of capitalism. In fact, the productivity of the women did coincide with a pay increase in 1929, but Mayo was absent at the time and chose to ignore this in his analysis.25 Regardless of the scientific validity of his work however, Mayo’s impact on management thinking was profound and long lasting. Whenever we now hear that managers must focus on the ‘whole person’, and not just the ‘employee’, or that employee happiness is critical to the bottom line, or that we must ‘love what we do’ or bring an ‘authentic’ version of ourselves to work, we are witnessing Mayo’s influence. When managers strive for more laughter in the workplace, as some consultants now insist they must, or seek to transform its smell so as to optimize our subjective feelings, they are practicing what Mayo first preached.26

  Therapeutic management

  Within the longer history of happiness expertise, what is interesting about Mayo’s intervention is that he downplayed the more obvious material ways of tweaking the pleasures and pains of the mind. Neither money nor the physical body were deemed adequate for understanding or influencing levels of happiness, once the workplace came to be understood in terms of group psychology. Instead, talking to workers and facilitating their relations with one another became the main instruments for gauging and improving their happiness. Management, which originated as a technique for controlling slaves on plantations, and developed as a means of running heavy industrial corporations, had become a ‘soft’, social and psychological skill.

  While Mayo did not conceive of things in quite this way, this was a form of psychosomatic intervention, like a placebo. The aim of management in the 1930s was, after all, still the same as it was in Taylor’s day: to increase output of physical produce. But now, rather than focusing on the physical and physiological work process, managers would focus on the social and psychological elements, in the expectation that this would yield behavioural, physical, economic improvements.

  The term ‘psychotherapy’ today refers to a range of treatments, ranging from more psychoanalytic, long-term relationships, to the quick fixes such as CBT that are more akin to training or coaching. But the first known uses of the term referred to the ‘talking cures’ offered by medical doctors in the late nineteenth century, who came to recognize that their patients often responded as much to the manner in which they were spoken to, as they did to the medicinal treatment they received.

  What Mayo was recommending was the industrial parallel to this. An open, conversational relationship could be conducted in such a way as to bring about a change in the worker’s mentality, and a consequent change in their physical performance. Speech was instrumentalized, to make people feel better, and as a result, behave better. As a tonic to the harsh mechanics of Taylorism, this made perfect sense. It could even be taken in some more emancipatory directions, to investigate groups as autonomous entities, which might allow firms to be more democratically managed in future. Research on group psychology was put to various uses over the 1940s and 1950s, from the analysis of tank commandment during the war, to the analysis of consumers via focus groups.27

  Mayo personally hoped to anaesthetize political sentiments. Therapeutic management would reduce unhappiness and, with it, resistance. Other avenues were possible, however. Once dialogue and co-operation become viewed as an essential element of economic production, one sees the glimmer of a more transformative economic democracy. Once the woman working on the shop floor is asked what her three wishes are, might the next step not be to invite her to have a say in how the business is managed? And might things not progress politically from there? Mayo would have scoffed at the idea. But the critique of management oligarchy cannot discount the emancipatory potential of social psychology altogether.

  Yet the analogy to psychosomatic medical treatments would gradually become more telling as the post-war period progressed, for a couple of coincidental reasons. Firstly, the nature of work in the West became progressively less physical over the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, an employee’s customer care, service ethic and enthusiasm were not simply mental resources, which existed to help churn out more products: they were the product. The importance of employee happiness and psychological engagement becomes all the greater once corporations are in the business of selling ideas, experiences and services. Businesses speak of ‘intangible assets’ and ‘human capital’ in the hope of capturing this amorphous workplace ethos, but in practice it is nothing which resembles either an asset or capital. Some other way of conceiving of work is required.

  Secondly, the concept of health started to undergo some profound changes. In 1948, the newly founded World Health Organization redefined health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social
well-being’ – an almost utopian proposition that few of us ever attain for very long. Intangible aspects of health and illness came to the fore. In particular, the notion of ‘mental illness’ emerged concurrently with the decline of mental asylums, a category that could be applied liberally to people living relatively ordinary lives in the community, not unlike sufferers from common bodily illnesses.

  The awareness that mental processes were a crucial component of health exerted a profound influence across health policy and medical practice, altering the nature of medical expertise as they did. This was sometimes known as ‘experience medicine’, as it brought the experience of the patient, and not just their body, into the medical assessment for the first time. By the 1970s, there was a range of quality of life measures that were used to assess health outcomes, which took into account the subjective perspective of the sufferer, and not simply their physical condition.28 In place of binary analyses, between life and death, health and disease, new sliding scales of wellness were emerging. This is partly a symptom of medical progress: as medicine becomes better at preventing death, so attention turns to the question of how well it is able to support life.

  What does any of this have to do with management or work? The problem confronting managers and policy-makers over the second half of the twentieth century was that everything seemed to be evaporating into thin air at the same time. Work was becoming intangible as manufacturing went into decline. Illness was becoming intangible as mental and behavioural problems increased. Money itself was becoming intangible as the financial system globalized from the late 1960s onwards. Problems of activity and enthusiasm moved elusively between the domains of medicine, psychiatry, workplace management and economics. The challenges of health care and those of business were becoming harder to disentangle, with the issue of mental health at the interface between the two. The job of management increasingly came to resemble psychotherapy in that original sense of ‘talking cure’, of propping up the well-being of individuals, in order to keep their enthusiasm for service-based jobs as high as possible.

  And as the nature of work and management changes, so too does the nature of resistance. Opposition to management typically takes a form other than that preferred by the manager himself. The classical mode of opposition to Taylorism, which seeks to reduce human beings to physical capital, is for the worker to speak back or strike via a trade union. The manager, having ignored the feelings or desires of the worker, is told that they cannot do so any longer.

  As Mayo’s style of therapeutic management expanded over the post-war period, opposition to it began to take the opposite form. Gradually, as post-industrial workers were encouraged to be ‘themselves’, speaking ‘openly’ and ‘honestly’ to their manager, the sole remaining form of opposition was to return to the physical body once more. The only escape from a manager who wants to be your friend is to become physically ill. With the list of available diagnoses growing, and complete ‘health’ becoming idealized, sickness became one of the dominant ways in which refusal to work came to manifest itself, especially from the 1970s onwards. Evidently, management could not only focus on relationships and subjective feelings, any more than it could only focus on the productive body. What it needed, if it was to ensnare employees thoroughly, was a truly psychosomatic science that could treat the mind and the body as an integrated part of a single system to be optimized. This brings us to a final character in the story of psychosomatic management.

  Holistic work and well-being

  In 1925, a nineteen-year-old Austrian medical student at Prague University named Hans Selye noticed something so obvious that he almost didn’t dare report it to his teacher. As his class was observing various patients with a range of different maladies, it dawned on Selye that all of the patients bore some resemblance to each other, regardless of their medical condition. They each reported aches and pains in the joints, loss of appetite and had a coated tongue. In short, all of them looked ill.

  He later recalled this moment as follows:

  Even now – after half a century – I still remember vividly the profound impression these considerations made upon me at the time. I could not understand why, ever since the dawn of medical history, physicians should have attempted to concentrate all their efforts upon the recognition of individual diseases and the discovery of specific remedies for them, without giving any attention to the much more obvious ‘syndrome of just being sick’.29

  When he did share the insight with his professor – namely that sick people look sick – he received the sarcastic reply that, indeed, ‘if a man is fat, he looks fat’. But Selye refused to abandon his insight. As a child he had accompanied his father, one of a long line of doctors in the Selye family, on his visits to poor households in Vienna, and had a strong vocation towards a traditional, somewhat holistic, understanding of the healing process.30 As the medical ‘psychotherapists’ had realized, the doctor’s personal interaction with the patient was a crucial ingredient in how they responded to treatment.

  The history of utilitarianism is littered with dashed hopes that there might be a single measure of human optimization which could serve as the instrument through which all public and private decisions might be taken. This ideal rests on the hope that the ambiguity and plurality of human culture might be overcome through knowledge of a single quantifiable entity. Whether it is via the idea of utility, energy, value or emotion, the project of monism always involves this form of simplification. In his apparently banal observation that ill people look ill, Selye had hit on another version of this. It took him another ten years before he had developed this into a scientific theory, which he termed ‘General Adaptation Syndrome’.

  The novelty of this idea, from the perspective of medicine, was that the syndrome Selye was describing was non-specific: it had a common set of symptoms, but these were not tied firmly to any particular causes or disorders. He explored this doing various experiments on animals, plunging them into cold water, cutting them, implanting poisons into them, to see how quite disparate forms of brutality could prompt the identical modes of biological response.

  Like any biological system, an animal body experiences various external stimuli, intrusions and demands which it has to respond to. What Selye was interested in was the nature of this response, which could sometimes become a problem in its own right. Biological systems which are overstimulated start to shut down; the same also happens when they are under-stimulated. The health of any organism depends on an optimal level of activity, not too much, not too little. Humans were no different, as far as Selye was concerned. The patients who simply ‘looked ill’ in his medical class that day were all displaying a common form of physical reaction to a very diverse set of illnesses. A monistic theory of general wellness was emerging.

  Until the 1940s, the term ‘stress’ was used principally in reference to metals and was virtually unknown outside the worlds of engineering and physics. An iron bar becomes ‘stressed’ when it is unable to cope with the demands that are placed on it. Selye recognized that what engineers saw as ‘wear and tear’ in, say, a bridge, was the same problem as what he had termed ‘General Adaptation Syndrome’ in the human body. General Adaptation Syndrome was effectively an indicator of the ‘rate of wear and tear in the body’.31 In the aftermath of World War Two, he re-christened the syndrome as ‘stress’. By the 1950s, this was a distinctive new field of medical and biological research.

  Like Mayo, Selye never saw himself as an academic only: he was on a mission. According to his holistic understanding of illness, entire societies and cultures could become sick if they lost the capacity to cope with external stimuli and demands. Equally, they could slump into passive inactivity if they were never stimulated sufficiently. As he grew older, Selye developed this idea into something approaching an ethical philosophy, though a frighteningly egocentric one. A healthy society, he argued, is built around ‘egoistic altruism’, in which every individual sets about doing his utmost to win the adoration of others. Th
is produces a form of natural equilibrium, in which the egotist becomes integral to his own social system:

  No one will make personal enemies if his egotism, his compulsive hoarding of valuables, manifest itself only by inciting live, goodwill, gratitude, respect, and all other positive feelings that render him useful and often indispensable to his neighbours.32

  Despite his aspiration to offer a science capable of diagnosing every social problem, Selye stuck firmly to biology when it came to seeking explanations. His characteristically monistic assumption was that any society or organization was merely a larger, more complex biological system, whose behaviour could be reduced back to the actions of organisms and cells.

  Away from Selye’s own biological research, and his macho libertarian politics, the non-specific nature of stress represented an opportunity which would eventually permeate into the world of management. Stress, as Selye had argued, is simply a particular type of reaction to any excessive demand. This was equally amenable to psychological or organizational forms of exploration. In fact, without using the term ‘stress’, the US military had become aware of the same syndrome during World War Two, in the common forms of psychological collapse experienced by soldiers who had spent too long in battle. The stressful demands placed on a human being are not merely physical, but social and psychological too. What went on between the demand and the response was open to a range of different scientific explanations beyond merely biological ones. The study of stress became an expressly interdisciplinary field.

  As the study of how humans cope with physical and mental demands, it also lent itself perfectly to the study of work. By definition, stress is something we encounter without having chosen to, but cannot avoid. It often occurs when we are trapped in a certain situation, simply forced to react to it. The field of occupational health emerged during the 1960s to understand precisely how work impacts upon us, physically and mentally. Studying how different types of job demand produce different hormonal and emotional responses yielded a number of potentially transformative findings. It wasn’t simply that excessive demands were bad for people; insufficient workplace demands – or boredom – could also be unhealthy, as Selye had recognized. Our current concern with unemployment as a potential health risk is one manifestation of the latter anxiety.