Safety Movement and the Growth of Personnel Management : A Business Historical Analysis of the Emergence of a New Professional-Managerial Class in Progressive America.

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This study represents an effort to recast the history of the personnel management movement in the Progressive era, focusing on the ideas and behavior of the participants. They intended to discover the "labor problems" to be resolved and devise scientific and bureaucratic solutions to them in order to create "needs" for their own "professional service."The personnel management movement included the two different major ideologies of labor reform : employment management and industrial relations. Both had differences in social background of proponents and a prescription for labor problems.The employment management advocators had led the personnel management movement in its early phases. They held the Progressive social reform ethos, and used word "human engineering" synonymously to personnel management. Such a metaphorical expression implied neutrality in labor relations and scientific approach to the labor problems, and represented their eager to see the personnel work as a profession.After the World War I, managers of industrial relations of major industrial concerns came to advocate "service" in place of the word human engineering. By changing such metaphor and appropriating the employment management reformers' issues in modified form, they persistently blunted the reformers' appeal. Thus, they changed the course of personnel management movement, and persuaded their employers to introduce employee representation plans and other industrial relations programs.Among the new leaders of the personnel management movement, there were former prominent safety managers like Arthur H. Young and Earl B. Morgan. They tried to obtain a higher managerial position in the corporate hierarchy with their own administering ability of the employee representation plan that had been acquired through safety committee activities in the steel industry. This research has clarified a relationship between the two movements of safety and personnel management.