Orthodoxy holds the emergence of the Human Relations ‘school’ in interwar America as a response to the alleged inhumanity and simplistic innovation the Scientific Management tradition was striving to develop within the workplace. This paper challenges this orthodoxy and argues that the Human Relations school was in fact a right-wing and decidedly undemocratic innovation that was developed in response to the demand from organized labour that workers be ceded an active and significant part in management decision making. Invoking actor-network theory and specifically Callon and Latour’s sociology of ‘translation’ to organize our historical data, our primary objective is to explain how Mayo and the Human Relations school were able to translate the prevailing context and in so doing create a forum in which powerful actors came to agree that the Human Relations school was an innovation worth building and defending. Our central argument is that Human Relations school presented conservative business leaders such as John D. Rockefeller Jr with an innovation designed to enable them to both monopolize authority in the workplace and the wider community and justify this monopoly on the grounds that the minds of workers and citizens lacked the rationality required to participate in a significant manner in management decision making.

The conventional wisdom in management thought is that Human Relations was the intellectual progeny of Elton Mayo and his associates, arising out of the fabled Hawthorne ‘experiments’ and marked a distinct intellectual break from Scientific Management.This article questions these sentiments and explores the contribution to Human Relations thinking made by Boston businessman and Taylorist Henry S. Dennison.The article will demonstrate that Dennison preceded Mayo in proffering the view that humans are not merely the egoistic, utilitarian animals of mainstream economics and Scientific Management, but that they have other (high-level) psychosocial needs, and their social relationships at work play an important role in their productivity.

The conventional negative understanding of the scientific management movement has been challenged in recent decades by heterodox scholars who hold that the movement supported the democratization of the management process and in so doing worked closely with unions and with progressives within and around Roosevelt's New Deal administration. This paper seeks to strengthen this challenge to orthodoxy by documenting how the leadership of the Taylor Society, a body established by Frederick Taylor's inner circle as a vehicle to develop and promote their mentor's ideas, strove to internationalize the diffusion of participatory management in tandem with the International Labour Organization, a body whose core purpose was and is to promote codetermination both in workplaces and in wider society.

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