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A short 'tweeticle' in honor of this great journal thanks to @SimmsMelanie for her tweet prompting me 1/ https://twitter.com/HR_TIHR/status/1356156800568086528
The name 'Human Relations' was proposed by the Rockefeller Foundation's Alan Gregg, c 1945/6. Most likely this followed from the Yale Instituted of Human Relations. Possibly it was suggested at a party hosted by Sir Stafford Cripps at his flat just after the end of WWII. 2/
Interestingly, Gregg was director of RF's Medical Division, not Social Science. The link went back preWar to RF funding Tavistock Clinic funding research on hormones and women's psychology (wtf) 3/
the vaunted link with Lewin/Research Centre of Group Dynamics came much later. Interesting, in Tavistock bid for RF funding of what would be the TIHR, no mention is made of Lewin//RCGD, although many US social psychologists and strong US/UK wartime collaboration evident. 4/
It also mentions a questionnaire designed to determine Fascist tendences (pre-the Authoritarian Personality F scale) which they say could be applied to executives to weed them out (if only). That was probably the work of the usually overlooked, in B-School academia, H.V.Dick 5/
(But see Daniel Pick's great bio. of him). So it looks like the journal was actually where the Lewin/RCGD -Tavistock Institute of Human Relations connection came about. 6/
note too the journal was not for a long time a 'management and organization journal' - it was much broader. However, it looks like it was how/where the transatlanic relation between Lewin et al, and the Tavistock Institute began was with the journal. 7/
Indeed, Anindita Banerjee and I argued in a long ago BAM paper, the journal Human Relations was constitutive of the field. Our hypothesis - that the idea of 'Human Relations' as a management field, and its naming thus happened because of the journal. It was a Boundary Object. 8/
Diana Burfield was the first managing editor of Human Relations, and she wrote a memoir of her time as publisher Tavistock Publications, also, inter-alia the first to publish Foucault in English, here: 9/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1744935909104962
I wrote a homage to her, and the Tavistock in the same issue connecting alleged Benzedrine usage to the T-group vibe in passing, but mainly lauding Diana's 'hidden from history' contribution as scholar publisher. 10/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1744935909104964
For the early, pre-Lewinian founding of the Tavistock Institute, please enjoy this at your lockdown leisure. If, like me, you have no access to any of this through a uni library, DM me. ENDS. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00076791.2013.790368
Apologies for typos/spellers. Yale Institute of Human Relations, Research Centre *for* Group Dynamics among the most egregious.
