No domain better illustrated the developing relationship between the world of ownership and that of engineering than the new approach that, far more than the schemes of Taylorism, became the favorite form of managerial science in the 1920s and 1930s. This was personnel management — a managerial technique promoted by no less than Hoover himself as Secretary of Commerce. Where engineers like Taylor and social scientists like Veblen sought to displace owners and management, whether for their own sake or that of the larger society, the champions of personnel management sought to keep challenges to superiors to a minimum. It is well known that the introduction of the “personnel” or “human relations” approaches to management, together with the growing corporate welfare states that these departments administered, was a crucial element in resistance to the labor movement in the early twentieth century. Just as much as a way to stop the labor movement, though, executives and owners turned to the personnel department as a way to put a stop to the engineers’ own technocratic movement, and to keep leaders like them in charge.
Consider the career of Channing Dooley. In the 1900s, Dooley trained as an electrical engineer before becoming the first personnel director at one of the most cutting-edge companies of the early twentieth century, Westinghouse Electric. By the 1920s he had become head of personnel at Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil), at that time perhaps the largest company in the world. Despite his engineering background, however, Dooley avoided quantification. Like many of his peers, he believed that “every field of industrial activity is calling for the man” who “produces facts, not opinions.” But although this engineer could take his trade far beyond the factory — “he need not engines with which to ply his art” — Dooley also insisted that “man is not a machine,” that the “forcible conformity to system” of highly quantified systematic management threatened to kill unquantifiable human “initiative.” The claims of efficiency, he argued, worked against those of originality: “there is not anything so efficient as a bee hive, but it never changes in a thousand years.” Although Dooley might find some use for the rapid quantification provided by systematic tests, he preferred to focus on signs of “originality and personal initiative,” “co-operation” and “personality.” A potential employee needed to know the “fundamentals of his profession,” but “all modern writers are putting [such fundamentals] at the end of the list no matter how long and complex.” Instead “moral character and good fiber come fundamentally first,” Dooley believed, and such qualities had become so rare that he sometimes thought “it might be well to abolish all technical schools” and instead “teach people how to behave.” It was real higher education, typified by a liberal arts institution, that provided just such training, graduating “a fellow of pretty high moral fibre, clean, sober, honest.” Even then, though, Dooley found that less than half of the college graduates he interviewed proved to have sufficient “originality and initiative.”