ABSTRACT
The concern of the human relations ideology for reducing social tensions immediately led many authors to accuse its advocates of trying to reinvigorate the capitalist system. Consequently, an ideology whose main emphasis was the human element emerged, displacing Taylorism as the dominant managerial ideology at the beginning of the 1930s. Elton Mayo’s ideology can be understood as a defense of the capitalist system that rejected liberal individualism and installed the notion of the social group as the basic social unit that gives sense to the lives of individuals, both inside and outside their roles of workers. The human relations ideology in its quest for an improved workplace also had an impact on cultural changes. Mayo believed that the high degree of technological advance of the society of his time contrasted with the negative consequences of a social order that produced a generalized anomie in large sectors of the population.
