PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The topic of this article is the contribution of the behavioural sciences to personnel management. I must confess, however, to a distaste for the term ‘behavioural science’ for two reasons. To begin with, it originated as a paraphrase for ‘social science’ during the McCarthy era in the United States. It was then feared that Congressional backwoodsmen would veto any programme or project labelled ‘social science’ because of their inability to distinguish it from ‘socialism’ But the second reason is the more important. In the eyes of industry behavioural science has come to be identified with a particular set of packages and devices — the T‐group. Blake's Grid, job enrichment, to mention only the most prominent. So I shall use the term ‘social sciences’ and make it clear that I am discussing psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent anthropology, but excluding ergonomics at one end of the spectrum and economics at the other. Political science is included, but best left to the author of the article on industrial relations and personnel management