ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the environment of the Bank Wiring Observation Room: the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company and the groups, such as families, from which the wiremen came. It explores how environmental pressures tended to produce a set of initial relations between the men in the room. The chapter argues that the internal system arises out of the external and then reacts upon it. The external and internal systems are not independent but mutually dependent. The chapter examines the mere differentiation between the cliques in interaction, sentiment, and activity. It also explores how the feeling of the connector wiremen that their jobs were somehow better than those of the selector wiremen was connected with other elements of the behavior of the Bank Wiring group. The chapter also argues that the persons who stand highest in a group do not conform with undue strictness to some of the group norms.
