ABSTRACT
PART of the analysis to be pursued in this chapter has already been expounded by writers on industrial psychology. We are familiar with the distinction between the financial or pecuniary incentive of the wage, and the non-pecuniary incentives such as love of work, desire for recognition and other impulses, dispositions or attitudes often dignified with the name of instincts. 134 There is no doubt that the starving of these non-pecuniary incentives under modern factory conditions raise formidable obstacles to the efficiency of labour. The precise importance of each of these obstacles has not yet however been successfully measured and the effect of some of them have been exaggerated, while the importance of others have been overlooked. There has been a tendency to focus upon the relation of the worker to his work or his machine, to stress the baulking of his instinct of curiosity, creativeness and constructiveness, and his craving for variety that results from modern specialization, mechanization and monotonous routine, rather than on things often more important to him, his personal relations to his employer and his fellow-workers and neighbours generally. Among these social relations I shall first look to the worker’s sense of equality and fraternity with his employer—to the feeling, if any, of personal relationship, co-operation and identity of interests; later I shall deal with his sense of dignity and respectability in the eyes of his neighbours and the community generally; and finally with his desire for sociability and the companionship of other people in his work and recreations.
