Abstract
The work of the American educator and academic Arland D. Weeks (1871–1936) constitutes an interesting effort to contribute to the reform of society on the basis of an adequate knowledge of the human mind. He was a political progressivist, and his writings are representative of the prevailing pragmatist, functionalist ‘spirit of the times’. Deeply concerned with the making of good citizens, he approached the field of work with a critical eye, making specific recommendations and proposals for improving the efficiency and fostering the personal development of the individual worker. The aim of this article is to analyse such proposals in the light both of their psychological bases and of the ideological and social environment to which they were addressed.
Introduction
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once defined history as ‘the science of transition’ (1942: 380). Accordingly, he demanded from historians that they study those periods usually considered as ‘merely transitional’, by contrast with other, more brilliant, splendorous or flourishing times. Ortega y Gasset was thereby invoking the importance of focusing on obscure, infrequently scrutinized historical periods as a means of achieving fuller understanding of the emergence and brilliance of the others. As he said, in his own metaphorical terms: ‘Orography is not only the science of summits; the mountain requires the valley’ (ibid.).
A similar consideration can also be made regarding the study of authors. It does not seem sufficient to attend just to the ‘great men’ whose ideas are likely to dazzle us with their peculiar individual brightness. The historical approach also demands that attention be turned to the not-so-great; not so much because of the intrinsic value of their thought, which will probably lack the bright singularity of the great, but precisely for this reason, which allows them to achieve a higher representative significance. It is in the ideas of ‘obscure authors’ that the pulse of life and society is best revealed, the very life and society which are the common sources of the ideas of both the greater and the lesser men. In the final analysis, therefore, the knowledge of the latter can only be beneficial to the understanding of the former.
This article is focused on one such ‘obscure author’: Arland D. Weeks, whose psychological ideas on work refer to and reveal the American socio-cultural context in the early decades of the 20th century, from which they acquire their particular significance.
Let us note that our purpose is not to propound the figure of Weeks as a specific contributor to industrial psychology. The history of psychology is not understood here in terms of a linear development advancing through the accumulation of theoretical, empirical, or applied contributions, but rather as a broad field where scientific, technical and socio-political dimensions become intertwined (Jansz and Drunen, 2004). Weeks is thus resorted to as a symptom of the inextricable intertwining of psychology with citizenship and work, in a historical period when work psychology had not yet acquired disciplinary autonomy – making it therefore easier to grasp the relationships between the dimensions just mentioned. His work stands halfway between the academic and the informational and non-specialized, and includes psychological contents which are inseparable from a definite conception of what a citizen ought to be within the framework of American democracy.
Because Weeks is not a well-known author today, we will begin by evoking some aspects of his life and work which may be helpful in situating him in his time–space and intellectual coordinates (further information, particularly on the relationship between psychology and citizenship in Weeks’s work, may be found in Loredo and Castro, 2013).
Arland D. Weeks: A look at his life and work
Arland D. Weeks was born in McLean (New York) in 1871, and died in Fargo (North Dakota) in 1936. He was trained as an educator at Cornell, Wisconsin and Minnesota Universities, and taught English language and literature in several North American institutions of higher education: Berea College, in Kentucky (1901–2); Valley City State Teachers College, in North Dakota (1902–7); and North Dakota Agricultural College (1907), where he was to remain for the rest of his life as professor and, from 1917, also as Dean (The Forum, 1936; Spectrum, 1936).
Whatever his achievements as a teacher of English may have been, however, his figure concerns us here rather in connection with another important dimension of his biography: that of the social reformer. Throughout his life, Weeks showed a keen interest in public affairs, in which he became very actively involved within his own community, his state (between 1909 and 1911 he belonged to the committee in charge of writing the educational laws), and also his country (as consultant of an education committee for the improvement of the American school system, an appointment he received only a few months before his death). He also wrote articles with clear socio-pedagogical purposes in the daily press and both in popular and scholarly journals (such as the American Journal of Sociology or The Scientific Monthly), to which he contributed with some regularity. But it is perhaps in his more academic writings where his reformist aims become more apparent (see Table 1).
Main writings of A. D. Weeks.
To mention only some of the most significant: in The Education of Tomorrow (1913), Weeks defended the idea of modernizing the school curriculum through an organization of its educational contents and subjects in accordance with the economic categories of production, distribution and consumption. The Psychology of Citizenship (1917) constitutes a remarkable effort to highlight the necessity of taking psychology into account if initiatives on the reform of society were to achieve any success at all. Again, in The Control of the Social Mind (1923) a strong emphasis is given to the importance of psychological components of human nature for achieving a proper understanding and managing of the individual’s participation in public affairs. Finally, The Control of Pupils (1903) and Psychology for Child Training (1925) deal with such crucial psycho-pedagogical issues as the different ways to channel the natural tendencies of children, so that they may succeed in leading a civilized life; or the question of good habit formation, including moral training.
Other books of his, which are alluded to here only in order to complete our picture of the author, include a number of novels, addressed to children’s and youth audiences, which take place in natural environments and deal with the contrast between rural and urban living. That this literary dimension is not as unrelated as it might at first sight seem to the theoretical and practical features of his other more academic works, is clearly shown in the following statement from his Psychology of Citizenship, his most ambitious book: ‘A single day of camping out will perhaps raise more problems than months of routine occupation’ (Weeks, 1917: 32), he wrote, as part of his argument against the stupefying effects of routine in work and life. From this perspective, the adventures of the little bears in Playdays on Plum Blossom Creek (1916b), or the holidays of the young heroes in Squaw Point (1919) or Children of the Pines (1926), acquire a significance which goes beyond their purely fictional value by pointing to the psychological importance of environmental changes as necessary stimuli for the individual’s mental growth.
The theoretical framework: Evolutionism, functionalism, progressivism
Weeks was not, therefore, a psychologist. But he was certainly conversant with psychology, and was fully persuaded of the importance of knowing and applying it to the task of social reform which undoubtedly constituted his deepest vocation.
Weeks was generally reluctant to explicitly acknowledge his intellectual sources. Rather than rigorous scholarly citations, what can be found in his writings are mere mentions in passing, which nevertheless make it possible to obtain a quite precise idea of some of his basic sources of inspiration, his general frame of reference. And this seems to have been, to begin with, of an evolutionary nature, to judge from his admiring and comparatively frequent allusions to such authors as Spencer, Haeckel, Darwin, or Russell Wallace, among others with a similar scientific outlook. Like other reformists from both within and without the USA, Weeks was rather eclectic when it came to selecting the sources on which to base the relations between work, democracy, socialism, citizenship, etc. Reformist thinkers used to embrace with equal enthusiasm any theoretical contribution contrary to social immobilism. It was only after the First World War that modern political-ideological tendencies gradually began to shift and acquire the features by which they are known today.
His psychological approach to the many questions appealing to his intellectual attention was indeed pervaded with evolutionism. ‘Nature has disciplined all living things into a quick response to whatever is in motion, for danger comes with movement’, he wrote, for instance, when speaking of the relevance of moving things as resources for attracting attention in advertising (Weeks, 1918: 34). Or, in another place: ‘As the inherited powers and instincts of man are in a large way the reflex of the requirements made upon him through unmeasured prehistoric time, so the thought of the individual of today is in direct response to the features of his environment’ (Weeks, 1917: 29).
Weeks’s effort to highlight the role played by environment in shaping the individual’s mind and behaviour is thus apparent. In this, along with his emphasis on the adjustment problems raised by the surrounding milieu, his distinction between the concepts of instinct, habit and intelligence as integral components of the activity of individuals, and the applied intention of his proposals (fundamentally to education, work and forensic settings) we can see the stamp of functionalism, which, by the 1910s and 1920s, the time period when Weeks published his main works, was the dominant trend in American psychology.
His reformist purposes, on the other hand, to which his resort to psychology was always explicitly subordinated, were in line with the wide social and political progressive movement which had emerged in the United States as a reaction against the abuses and excesses associated with the great end-of-the-century industrial development (Eisenach, 2006; Ekirch, 1973). The determined commitment to the modernization of life and society on the basis of the rational, scientific treatment of their problems, with a view to the ultimate improvement of democracy (which was one of the identifying marks of early 20th-century American progressivism), can be recognized in Weeks’s work.
In this respect, it should be noted that one of the key instruments advanced by progressivism in general, and by Weeks in particular, for the scientific reformation of society, was education. In fact, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, all ideologies and national projects viewed education as a major strategic institutional area of citizen formation. A double line of action can be seen to have been pursued. On one hand, there was the establishment of those minimal formative conditions for literacy, numeracy, etc., so as later to make it possible to develop the sophisticated productive tools demanded by modernity. On the other, there was the goal of granting a wide collective agreement through the implementation of common identity references (history, literature, etc.).
Now, the peculiarity of largely functionalist and progressive educational positions such as Weeks’s is that they took seriously the active role of consciousness and, together with it, the reflective competence of the subject for critically and explicitly going beyond the more alienating and reactionary versions of subjectivity: those promoted from the educational front of the robotized worker (the antagonist of the rational and flexible worker) and from that of the fanatic patriot (the antagonist of the reflective, democratic citizen).
Weeks considered a number of adjustments of study plans and curricula for fighting on both educational fronts, his suggestions revealing full confidence in the effectiveness of science to deal with modern socio-economic problems and conditions. In The Education of Tomorrow, Weeks even went as far as to suggest an ideal syllabus based on the importance of studying practical subjects associated with such conditions. He wrote, for instance:
Popular education may promote democracy only when the curriculum prepares the individual for the three great economic processes of production [language, science, trade…], distribution [politics, sociology, law…] and consumption [art, history, sports…]. (Weeks, 1913: 126; original emphases)
It is thus progressivism that provides the political background making Weeks’s undertaking fully meaningful. In fact, it is his incarnation of the features characterizing the contemporary social reformer (also embodied by such authors as Joaquín Costa in Spain, Herbert Spencer in Great Britain, Edmond Desmolins in France, Giuseppe Sergi in Italy, or José Ingenieros in Argentina) that makes his figure particularly representative. Such intellectuals who resorted to psychology and the social and biological sciences in order to promote political initiatives, science, ideology and social engineering became intertwined in the service of different versions of modern governmentality (Foucault, 1994). Specifically, in the books The Education of Tomorrow (1913), The Psychology of Citizenship (1917), Social Antagonisms (1918), or The Control of the Social Mind (1923), Weeks’s evolutionary and functionalist inclinations may be seen to be subordinated to a progressive sensitivity that comes very close to socialism (significantly, authors like Marx and Kropotkin are often referred to). As a matter of fact, and with due respect for the obvious differences in philosophical sophistication, Weeks’s intellectual and political attitude can be said to be broadly coincident with that of John Dewey.
In any event, the progressive ideals of making ‘political life more democratic’, ‘economic life fairer’ and ‘social life more moral and more just’ (Hofstadter, Miller and Aaron, 1964: 287) – aspirations, may it be noted in passing, which have not lost a bit of their timeliness – can be clearly identified in Weeks’s writings, which are, to a great extent, conceived to provide more or less realistic guidelines to realize them. And, in the increasingly plutocratic, oligopolistic early-20th-century society, which American progressivists viewed as lacking morality, justice and democracy, the industrial world, with its unsafe and unhealthy work conditions, excessive work schedules and abundance of child labour, was certainly one of the fields seeming to require such guidelines with more urgency.
The practical applications: Work and its discontents
It is precisely to industrial work settings that Weeks’s considerations on the matter were mainly addressed. Along with exposing the hard, de-personalizing work conditions suffered by factory workers, Weeks also intended to present the tools psychology was making available at the time for the improvement of their situation. It should be borne in mind, in this respect, that H. Münsterberg’s work on Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, which contributed so much to the general acceptance of psychology as a science applicable to industry and management, had appeared only three years before Weeks’s first approach to these questions (Münsterberg, 1913; Weeks, 1916a).
Münsterberg demanded that psychologists pay attention to the world of work, as they already did to the clinical and educational domains. Beyond the purpose of justifying the social function of psychology and securing a new ecological niche for psychologists, his book can be read as a symbol of the entry of psychologists into a new sphere of knowledge where human beings were no longer a mere object of disciplinary control, but rather became themselves an object of study. In fact, in work settings, the subjectivity of workers was ceasing to be viewed as something to be broken, and was becoming instead something to be taken into account as well as scientifically managed. The goal was to achieve higher business efficiency through the adjustment of workers’ subjectivities to the work to be done. By that historical moment, particularly in the United States, the figure of the ‘free worker’ – i.e. the productive subject freed from feudal ties – was beginning to be understood as a psychological concept. What mattered was not so much the action of workers as their psychological make-up, which was described as increasingly complex and full of attributes (Pulido, 2012). It was necessary to get to know the subjectivity of workers in order to achieve harmony between them and their companies, and it was psychologists who could offer such knowledge.
As Nikolas Rose (1990) emphasized, from the beginning of the 20th century, businessmen and politicians alike became increasingly interested in the subjectivity of workers as the proper sphere for dealing with what Marxists viewed as an objective conflict between work and capital. Work even began to be considered as a source of personal realization. The goal, then, was to make work more pleasant for the worker while making it more profitable for the businessman. This was the origin of such disciplines as occupational psychology, industrial psychology, organizational behaviour, vocational guidance, ergonomics, human engineering, etc. Human resources management required experts to establish the way workers’ subjectivities function and may be adjusted to the work while, in turn, attempting to adjust the work to them. Hence the penetration of psychology into such tasks as personnel selection, job promotion and evaluation, performance appraisal, work design, job enrichment, and so on. Rose further added that these sorts of practices linked to management were part of a much wider programme, promoted by public powers, for the betterment of the nations on the basis of scientific criteria, a programme for the rationalization of societies. Various forms of government were accordingly implemented which, through psychological technologies such as those associated with the industrial world, among others, gave way to new socio-political realities and forms of subjectivity.
Although Weeks was a scientific popularizer and reformer rather than a first-rate academic or psychologist, his ideas on work are most representative of this general tendency to psychologize the field of work taking place after the First World War. ‘Scientific management’, however, to put it in F. W. Taylor’s terms, entailed a mechanization of human beings that authors like Weeks found entirely unacceptable. As will be shown below, Weeks, whose thinking included many reformist, even socialist, elements, stood for an effective management of the workers’ daily life and the implementation of those material conditions making it possible for them to lead a dignified existence and achieve personal fulfilment through their profession. At the same time, on the other hand, he criticized the reduction of workers to mere parts of production machinery, a criticism he was to share with work psychology at large, when a few years later authors like Myers showed their concern for ‘human factors’ and strove to take into account the full complexity of the workers’ subjectivity. Thus, Weeks’s critique of the de-humanizing aspects of Taylorism can be seen to predate that of later humanistic work psychologists – although no data are available as to its possible influence – who strove to humanize the world of work.
Weeks’s reflections on work organization and the effects of industrialization on individuals are mainly contained in his Psychology of Citizenship, a book dealing with ‘the mental traits affecting the quality of citizenship’, to put it in Weeks’s own words (Weeks, 1917: Author’s Preface). In this work, as mentioned above, the author attempted to show the role modern scientific psychology could play in the service of social reform, particularly as regards the making of good, democratic citizens. It is in this connection that his suggestions for the betterment of work and the welfare of workers were put forward.
Weeks’s proposals were mainly addressed against what he viewed as the three most serious problems confronting workers at their workplace, namely: (1) the absence of spare time; (2) the excess of machinism; and (3) the lack of motivation, each viewed in turn, on the other hand, as a metaphor or expression of a particular danger threatening democracy.
Work and leisure
The small amount of spare time, to begin with, constituted for Weeks a hardly surmountable obstacle to the worker’s personal and mental growth. Since the individual is endowed with only a limited quantity of energy, he argued, this should be carefully managed in order not to exhaust it entirely in the performance of physical activities; otherwise, there would be no energy left for the mental work required to achieve higher intellectual goals. This consideration led Weeks to denounce the near-slavery conditions suffered by workers in modern industries, and demand a more balanced distribution of time between physical and intellectual tasks. ‘Democracy implies a reasonable universal leisure’ (Weeks, 1917: 45), he wrote; for …[w]e properly distinguish between brain work and other work, and only by holding down physical labour to a moderate maximum may there exist generally throughout society the alert mentality which the social vision requires. The great majority of people do not regularly find time to read and think, and so when an unexpected leisure occurs there is little preparation for making the most of it…The political sagacity of a people who in the majority spend nearly all their time in physical activities is sure to be disappointing. (Weeks, 1917: 44)
In the western world, a neat distinction between working and leisure time was fixed by industrialization, so that the very logic of hyperproductivity was symbiotic to the gradual emergence of a mass-consumption culture. This is why, from a historical point of view, it is not surprising that industrial psychology, as the technology for the management of work and work activities, should arise at practically the same time as the psychology of advertising, as the technology for the management of leisure and leisure activities.
In fact, the ‘father’ of advertising psychology, Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955), whose book Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice was published in 1903, maintained, like Weeks, that human beings were easily suggestible and usually irrational. However, while Scott considered this circumstance as an opportunity for psychology to become involved in the manipulation of the citizen’s leisure time (that is to say, the citizen’s consumption habits), Weeks took rather the opposite view. It was not that he did not trust advertising methods, but his concern was rather the goals to be achieved by such methods in managing the citizen’s spare time. Against Scott, but with no reference to his work, Weeks attempted to make of the producer–consumer a subject fully aware of its decisions. The socio-political implications of his view of human agency should be borne in mind, particularly the convenience that it should be oriented towards the achievement of a truly democratic regime. This is why Weeks, once again clearly foreseeing the evolution of leisure-time culture, was deeply suspicious of the energies spent by citizens in activities like sports fanaticism, gossip magazine reading, or interest in fashion. Instead, he believed that management of leisure time should promote integral professional training, instructive reading and the dissemination of civic ideas. Weeks even envisioned a kind of counter-advertising program where images and slogans, with their ready penetration in people’s minds – in accordance with evolutionary psychological principles – were to be used for promoting activities consistent with the growth of intelligence and the development of citizen values and democratic aspirations.
Work and machinism
From this point of view, of course, the application of machines to work could be hailed only as a welcome achievement. For, insofar as machines were able to free workers from a great deal of the physical load of work, they also allowed the individual – at least in principle – to devote more of his or her time and energy to higher intellectual ventures. And this not only at the level of the particular individual, but also at the level of modern civilization as a whole, whose idle educated classes can achieve such status only as a result of the increase of production and wealth that machines make possible.
But machines also have undesirable consequences which Weeks did not fail to see and denounce. For while it is true that they may be intellectually stimulating for those who invent and repair them, this is not the case for those who operate them, whose regime of work, so brilliantly satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), is restricted to a mere repetition of learned motor habits, which is totally incompatible with intellectual development. This was again emphasized by Weeks in The Control of the Social Mind, where, speaking of the social transcendence of psychological habits, he declared: ‘[t]he greatest progress may be expected in societies in which the daily demands of employment stimulate the mind through the presence of novel elements’ (Weeks, 1923: 38).
Thus, Weeks opposes the proponents of ‘efficient systems’, headed by Taylor – the ‘high priest of scientific management’, as he calls him (Weeks, 1917: 61) – who put the increase of production before the welfare of producers, thereby promoting a model of work based on the conditions of the factory and industrial concepts which, to Weeks’s regret, has ended by prevailing in practically all business fields.
In face of this situation, Weeks demands that the importance of psychological factors in work settings be acknowledged, and the personal development of workers consequently promoted. In his view, workers should be endowed with greater autonomy, and changes of job within the same company or factory should be facilitated. Otherwise, the emergence of two different, intellectually based castes would be unavoidable: the caste of operators, in charge of routine, automatized tasks; and the caste of officials and supervisors, having the monopoly of intelligence and problem-solving. As Weeks puts it: While the production of wealth is of fundamental importance, it is less important than the preservation of conditions favourable to the development of every individual, and indeed in the long run even the production of wealth must be guaranteed by preserving the most favourable conditions of individual development. Society does not profit most by people who are routine slaves, dulled, regimented and automatized. Democracy requires the development of the average man. (Weeks, 1917: 70–1)
Work and motivation
A final set of considerations has to do with the necessity of providing workers with enough motivation, not only for their own sake but also for the sake of the work done. In Weeks’s view, lack of motivation is a common problem in the industrial world; and can result only in an indifference towards work, as well as lead to a kind of permanent sabotage: the wasting of materials, the neglect of equipment, and the reduction of effort to the strict minimum. The problem, moreover, is not to be solved through a simple wage increase, but rather through both the workers’ perception of the usefulness of their own work and the satisfaction they may obtain from its realization – what Weeks calls ‘the spirit of joyful accomplishment’ (Weeks, 1917: 72). ‘Need there be so complete a divorce between spontaneity, preference, and play, and the job?’ asks Weeks at a certain point (ibid.: 74).
His answer is of course negative, but to establish the conditions for overcoming such a divorce was certainly not an easy task. In his opinion, it first required banishing fear as a dominant motive among workers, and then allowing their active participation in the management of the company: One of the requirements for a satisfying life is to have a voice in management. To have a voice in government is not more important than to have a voice in the business with which one is connected. But the autocratic principle prevails in industry. Democracy is yet to be extended to productive enterprises. The boss, the superintendent, and the proprietor have the same sort of relation to employees as autocrats to their subjects. The principle of self-government is as desirable in a factory as in a state. (Weeks, 1917: 83–4)
In short, Weeks sketched a citizen landscape where theoretical and ideological perspectives matched to perfection. While considering unruly instincts, noxious habits and numbing routines as obstacles to individual and social progress, he believed that a changing environment, as well as novel experiences and an active interest in the world around us, had positive effects on the human mind. True motivation, commitment and meaning in human life emerge wherever changing activities demand an active participation from the subject’s mind. For all these reasons, according to Weeks, exposure to appropriate stimuli, and education in a broad sense (that is, both formal and informal), should contribute to the development of the workers’ minds and awareness, and enable them to participate fully in democracy.
Concluding remarks
It was again Nikolas Rose (1990) who pointed out that, particularly after the First World War, concern for the subjectivity of workers became associated with an ‘industrial betterment principle’, according to which work was not conceived as a mere economic exchange but rather implied a commitment between workers and employers, a mutual obligation which was backed by public powers. Measures growing out of the concern for the workers’ physical, mental and moral health were implemented, both within the factory (selection for and adjustment to the different types of work, training, work safety, bonuses) and outside it (neighbourhoods for workers, public rest-rooms, recreational and cultural facilities…). These kinds of measures were based on the idea, which was shared by Weeks, that industrial inefficiency (and, by extension, any obstacle to progress) was due to an insufficient knowledge of the subjectivity of citizens as workers, which prevented individuals from accomplishing a good adjustment to their work. In agreement with what might be considered as the more leftist tendencies of liberal reformism underlying this idea, Weeks emphasized the necessity of assuring dignified life-conditions for everyone, particularly workers. These conditions were to include a fair distribution of wealth, the granting of public services, and enough spare time for creative rest, civic participation and education. This would allow people to have their basic needs covered as well as to develop their abilities to the maximum in all areas. In the work field, this would result in a motivated, satisfied worker, in sharp contrast with the mechanized worker of Taylorism and very much in line with the image of the ideal citizen in a democracy: a self-governed, educated citizen developing all aspects of his or her personality, behaving responsibly and participating in public life in a well-informed way. In the final analysis, Weeks’s proposals for the field of work were but technologies of subjectivation aiming at making precisely this kind of a subject.
Such was Weeks’s utopia. For Weeks’s proposals have the unmistakable flavour of utopianism, a characteristic he shared with many other progressivist social reformers. His awareness of such a utopian element, moreover, did not prevent Weeks from making the proposals that, in his opinion, ought to be made. The moral imperative prevailed here over the purely intellectual ‘sense’ or pragmatic calculus.
Together with this moral, utopian component in the ‘therapeutic’ measures suggested, also a fundamentally scientific, psychological component must be recognized in his ‘diagnoses’. Weeks took considerable pains to approach the major problems of American society (education, labour, law, democracy, etc.) from the perspective that psychological science already made available at the time. As a result, he became a most enthusiastic and efficient propagandist for the ‘new psychology’, whose usefulness and relevance in dealing with social issues seemed to him unquestionable.
As to labour problems proper, his analyses were aimed at the unveiling of a number of essential psychological deficits (fatigue, lack of motivation, de-humanizing consequences of machinism, and so on) which were inherent in industrial work as it was then and there conceived and performed. Democracy and the citizen were undoubtedly Weeks’s primary concerns; accordingly, for him, the welfare of the worker should always come before the efficiency of work. He was thus anticipating the importance of the ‘human factor’ in work situations, an importance generally agreed to have become fully acknowledged only after the realization of the Hawthorne studies, which were not launched until several years later (Muchinsky, 2008; Peiró, 1991; Robbins, 1998).
In any case, what matters here is not Weeks’s ability to foresee specific developments in industrial psychology, nor the originality, relevance, or present validity of his psychological approaches. Rather, his theoretical reflections on instinct and consciousness, as well as his attempts at drawing practical and political lessons from them, are of interest to us inasmuch as they provide evidence of his awareness of the crucial socio-historical crossroad at which psychology found itself. Weeks’s work, in short, is very revealing of the socio-political contradictions facing psychology as the science of modern subjectivity – a condition that does not apply only to the foundational period of the discipline, since its consequences can still be felt at present.
In particular, as far as the relations of psychology with the world of work are concerned, current perspectives such as, for example, Organizational Citizen Behaviour (OCB) seem to reflect little doubt as to what the nature of citizenship, as a reflective capacity, can contribute to the social project of western liberalism (Law, Wong and Chen, 2005; Organ, Podsakoff and MacKenzie, 2006). The self-governed citizen is comparable with the responsible worker, individually committed to the company’s goals. To OCB, therefore, the citizen is, above all, the major driving force of an economic and material development of a global scope. It is true that not all industrial and organizational psychology is so ‘optimistic’ in this respect, aware as its practitioners are of the cultural maladjustments and socio-political difficulties involved in the application of such managerial agendas as that of OCB. For agendas like these tend to lose sight of – or simply neglect – the deep roots of their own logic of production and consumption in the western world, not to mention the controversies emerging from the attempts at establishing these agendas in such a diverse setting, both ideologically and culturally, as is the global context. Very significantly, in contrast with OCB’s ‘optimism’, the concern of these broader industrial/organizational psychological perspectives for the complexity of the contemporary global and multicultural world does not only arise in the context of specialized papers, but appears in introductory textbooks as well (Castro and Lafuente, 2011).
But what are hard to find in the literature of industrial psychology are perspectives dealing with socio-historical paradoxes such as those identified by Weeks, i.e. the construction of a self-governed subjectivity capable of taking up a stance toward the logic and socio-cultural conditions accounting for its own creation – including, of course, its productive–consumptive structures. As Weeks rightly observed, the conscious citizen, that is, the reflective, self-governed one, could no longer be just a submissive producer, blind to the logic of industrial progress, but should become a political agent capable of actively participating in and deciding on the type of coexistence and lifestyle wanted by society. Regrettably, his advice has remained unheeded to this day by all subsequent psychology, including of course industrial/organizational psychology.
The reason for this may lie in the process of specialization and professionalization undergone by psychology as a practical science since the second decade of the 20th century. To a great extent, this process forced psychology to set aside considerations of value and political-ideological aspects that could threaten its own pertinence and professional take-off within western liberal societies (Castro-Tejerina and Rosa, 2007). It is no wonder that these aspects reappear in times of change and social crisis similar to those lived in by Weeks during the decades previous to the First World War. Only the focus, of course, has now been widened to adjust it from the construction of the nation-state citizen to that of the citizen of the global village.
To sum up, Weeks’s work is highly representative of that crucial historical moment of ‘invention of our selves’, to put it in Nikolas Rose’s terms (Rose, 1996), when, at the beginning of the 20th century, psychology was consolidating its role as an indispensable tool at the service of the making of western liberal societies. Furthermore, independently of the greater or lesser value of his theoretical psychological referents in general and industrial referents in particular, Weeks’s broad socio-political view on the relation between work, citizenship and psychology still retains its validity today.
Footnotes
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [Research Project SEJ2005-09110-C03-03/PSIC].