Richard A. Bachmann

My dissertation examines how corporate executives, personnel managers, and university-based industrial relations researchers used American factories as laboratories to develop what we now call Human Resource Management (HRM). Drawing on the human sciences, these actors sought to solve a succession of labor problems attributed to “the human factor” in industry. I argue that the concept of adjustment—elaborated by biologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and anthropologists during the early twentieth century—anchored the development of HRM. Adjustment carried a eugenic inheritance into the field: a logic of sorting the fit from the unfit that management retained long after it abandoned the language of heredity. In contemporary HRM, that logic continues to locate workplace dysfunction in the "maladjusted" employee rather than in the way management and capital have organized the labor process.

I trace the early history of HRM in four chapters, each centering on a specific factory. By drawing on company archives, employee magazines, local and national newspapers, professional journals, personal correspondences, and the research archives of university-based industrial relations researchers, I show two things. First, human relations outside each factory-laboratory, in professional institutions and networks, were central to the production of knowledge about “human relations” on the inside. Second, insights about tailoring the human factor were produced through narrative rather than “discovered” on site. By recovering the labor that went into producing HRM as a body of knowledge and a set of practices, my dissertation contributes to a labor history of science.