ABSTRACT
In addition, a series of associations and organizations such as the Verband für Arbeisstudien (REFA), an association on work studies, and the Rationalisierungskuratorium der Deutschen Wirtschaft (RKW), a curatory for rationalization in German industry, contributed considerably to the development of work science in the German-speaking area. REFA succeeded in distributing ergonomic knowledge over the entire range of industry with its books on time and motion study, industrial engineering, and later the six-volume works on methods of work study. Individual education and research units already existed at the universities before GfA was founded. However, these institutions
were integrated into a wide range of different faculties and maintained relatively little contact among each other.
