Suchergebnisse

The present study pursues the question how labor scientists and corporate players conceptualized the connection between work performance and work- related emotions in 20th century Germany. It does so from a history of emotions and a history of science perspective. The project sets in around 1900 by exploring the cultural, social and economic reasons why employees' emotions turned into an object of labor scientific inquiry at the time. The problematization of contemporary 'class hatred' as well as the seemingly wide- spread aversion of industrial workers towards their tasks can be viewed as two driving powers for the efforts to turn monotonous and highly partialized industrial labor into a more likeable experience. This was the point of departure for the emergence of disciplines like labor physiology, labor pedagogy and psychology as well as industrial sociology, which all aimed at making the worker more productive and content. After having outlined these points of origins for the scientific and corporate occupation with 'emotions at work', the study identifies four consecutive 'emotional styles' which shaped the approach towards work-related feelings in the 20th century. These four emotional styles (following the periodization 1900-1925, 1925-1940, 1940-1960, 1960-1980) stand for historically distinct ways of framing emotions and working on them in the corporate space. Each style challenges the previous one in terms of its efficiency to generate productive and happy employees in the respective economic and political context. This does not mean that all established personnel management methods were discarded with the advent of a new emotional style. However, a new paradigm respectively shifted the attention with regard to those new promising labor scientific and corporate measures in which higher performance outcomes could be yielded: Around 1900 psychotechnical methods emerged and promised to make industrial labor less exhausting and thereby reduce the workers' revolutionary zeal. By 1925, the new guiding ideas ...