HAWTHORNE EFFECT && ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Studying work organizations yields insight into society, b/c, just “as a primitive group with minimal external relations provides a relatively self-contained field laboratory for studying whole societies, so [too do] work organizations in our more complex society approximate this concept of relatively self-contained groups in a natural setting” (398).
The corporation becomes a "natural setting,"
and thus..
The corporation becomes an ethnographic field
How is this related to Satin Island?
U. uses this "field" to study up on humanity w/ the ultimate goal of creating The Great Report
The Hawthorne studies are flawed w/o quantitative data b/c “quantitative analysis enables the scientist to separate fact from fiction” (638).
Is U. a bad anthropologist because he invents fictitious stories instead of relying on numbers?
U. fails many times in creating The Great Report for the same reasons that Brannigan et al. claim that “Hawthorne persists in the imagination in spite of the empirical challenges”: “because it paints a picture of employees and industrial production that is of historical proportions. The employees…are cast as subjects prone to morbid fantasies that they are little capable of understanding” (59)
U. is too obssessed w/ the qualitative details to ever develop a meetanarrative of humanity
In contrast, U. is always thinking about "morbid fantasies," overly fictionalizing/ sensationalizing them instead of actually being productive.
Brannigan et al. even state that the Hawthorne effect in part “was about changing civilization by harnessing the technical engineering of productivity…while steering workers wide of their obsessions and morbid thinking and harnessing their human resources” (59).
Does being observed make you more inauthentic?
Can you really escape fiction and find truth?
Or maybe as U. suggests, the best way to present a true narrative of humanity, a pure ethnorgraphy is in fiction. Maybe the novel is key to preserving humanity as corporations become naturalized