Individualist Ethics and Corporate Social Control

The history of human resource management has evolved from an individualist/conflictual approach where wage cuts followed by strikes were common. As employers started to realize that violent strikes were counterproductive, they implemented three approaches. One, scientific management and welfare capitalism, aimed for a "mental revolution" among labor and management whereby workers' aims were aligned with management's through incentives and employee benefits. A second approach was a bureaucratic approach whereby laws, rules and union agreements established a high degree of formal control through regulation and collective bargaining. However, by the 1930s employers had realized that a third approach, emotive manipulation or social control through managing workers' feelings, attitudes and ethical beliefs had the potential for a more complete influence. This theory was related to Progressivism, which, as McFarland has argued, followed an earlier attempt by the Mugwumps to establish professional standards, credentials and licensure in such fields as medicine, law, economic policy, public health and library science. The Mugwumps were most concerned with rationalization of the public sector.

The Mugwumps had earlier demonstrated that an organized movement, even if small in numbers, that utilized mass media to unify and focus the movement, could result in effective political action. The Progressives utilized this approach. The argument that labor relations could be improved through psychological methods followed the muckrakers and Herbert Croly's emphasis on the use of public power and mass movements to recreate democracy.

The shift to emphasis on psychological and social control, via the management theories of Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard, was a reflection of the Progressive movement's tactical application of the same principles for public influence. The Progressives emphasized moral relativism to combat the American religious tendency toward individual conscience. They utilized the groupthink approach that Mugwumps pioneered. They realized that to manipulate the public, understanding of the public's group processes was necessary. Thus, the progressives applied the welfare benefit approach that local political clubs had used for centuries, but nationalized it and rationalized it.

The Origins of Progressive Liberalism

The modern progressive-liberal movement may be said to have its earliest origins in the presidential campaign of 1884 when the Independent Republicans or Mugwumps (named after the word for young Algonquin Indian chieftain) bolted the Republican Party to fight the candidacy of James G. Blaine (R-ME), whom they associated with corruption and feared would scotch the Pendleton Act that had recently established the federal civil service. Instead of Blaine, whom they hated, they supported Grover Cleveland (D-NY). Theodore Roosevelt was linked to the Independent Republicans as was Harvard University's president, Charles Eliot, the New York Times, the Nation, the New York Evening Post, and Harper's Weekly. John M. Dobson* writes of the Mugwumps, the progressive-liberals' precursors:

"In their energetic promotion of Cleveland and their unstinting criticism of Blaine, the Mugwump journalists sometimes exceeded the bounds of objectivity. If they avoided telling outright lies, they were guilty at least of telling only part of the truth. Seldom content with straightforward statements of fact, the Mugwumps interpreted and twisted their stories to suit themselves. Editorializing about Blaine in late September, for example, the New York Times stated, 'There is no speculation which he can resist, but, rich as he is, he has never earned money by any business or profession...' Blaine did initiate a libel suit against and Indianapolis Democratic newspaper...But many Americans considered it somewhat unsportsmanlike to go that far..."

Mugwumpery may be viewed as the roots of liberalism not because the Mugwumps' ideas were like the twentieth century's progressive-liberals' (they were more like today's conservatives') but rather because their approach to ad hoc adoption of a singular idea, intense social pressure to conform to politically correct doctrine and the use of the media to create social conformity to their ideology is very much the technique that the progressive-liberals adopted in the early twentieth century and continue to use today.

*John M. Dobson, Politics in the Gilded Age: A New Perspective On Reform. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. p. 141.