Article:

Organisation durch Kommunikation. Medien des Managements in den USA Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts

The contribution draws attention to the psychological experiments conducted from 1924 to 1932 at the Hawthorne Works that led to a reformulation of central assumptions of modern management, such as the concept of rational behavior. As a result, the techniques of disciplining single bodies and subjects was replaced by techniques of organizing social communication, speech, and affect through instruments of group-building such as teamwork. The essay contributes to the history of knowledge and media by further discussing the role of visualization techniques for the operationalization of these new management approaches. The paper argues that the Hawthorne experiments supply a pre-history of the current interest in (media-)ecologies and in the functioning of social and technical networks.