The cardinal feature of these various schools and the currents within
them is that, unlike the scientific management movement, they do not by
and large concern themselves with the organization of work, but rather
with the conditions under which the worker may best be brought to cooperate
in the scheme of work organized by the industrial engineer. The evolving
work processes of capitalist society are taken by these schools as inexorable
givens, and are accepted as “necessary and inevitable” in any form of “industrial
society.” The problems addressed are the problems of management:
dissatisfaction as expressed in high turnover rates, absenteeism, resistance
to the prescribed work pace, indifference, neglect, cooperative group restrictions
on output, and overt hostility to management. As it presents itself
to most of the sociologists and psychologists concerned with the study
of work and workers, the problem is not that of the degradation of men
and women, but the difficulties raised by the reactions, conscious and
unconscious, to that degradation ( 97).