Eugen Peter Schwiedland: Industrial Psychology and the Human Factor (1922)

Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s double review pairs Frank Watts’s An Introduction to the Psychological Problems of Industry with B. S. Rowntree’s The Human Factor in Business. Its organizing judgment is their complementarity:

Zwei einander ergänzende Bücher: das erste seelische Tiefenforschung treibende Theorie, das zweite anschauliche Darstellung der Lebenserfahrung eines Industriellen und Sozialpolitikers.

English translation: Two mutually complementary books: the first a theory pursuing research into the depths of the psyche, the second a vivid presentation of the life experience of an industrialist and social politician.

Schwiedland first presents Watts as evidence of English psychoanalysis’s advance toward practical efforts to reduce the burdens of industrial work. He attributes to Watts the conviction that social ethics and economic benefit are compatible, together with the hope of clarifying relations between employers and workers. His reservation concerns presentation:

Immerhin hätte sein Buch eine übersichtlichere und anschaulichere Darstellung vertragen.

English translation: All the same, his book could have borne a clearer and more vivid presentation.

The contrast with Rowntree is therefore methodological as well as stylistic. Rowntree proceeds from everyday industrial experience to the possibilities of employee and worker participation in managing large enterprises. Schwiedland emphasizes the connection between demands for participation, their implementation in Rowntree’s own firm, and prospects for extending them.

Participation belongs here to a broader conception of industry’s social obligations. In Schwiedland’s account, Rowntree requires industry to supply goods and services beneficial to the community, organize production in accordance with public benefit, and distribute returns in ways serving collective ends. Workplace reform thus involves both internal governance and the purposes of production.

The review closes with the works council at Rowntree’s York chocolate factory and the Cocoa Works Magazine, presented as evidence of efforts to foster intellectual and emotional community among 7,000 members of the enterprise. Its significance lies in connecting psychological inquiry with concrete institutions of industrial cooperation, while keeping the theoretical hopes of Watts distinct from Rowntree’s practical experience.