Paper presented at the Academy of Management (2014)

1. The New Deal for MOS: Lessons,
Insight, Reflections
Albert J. Mills (SMU)
Terrance G. Weatherbee (Acadia U)
Jason Foster (Athabasca U.
Jean Helms Mills (SMU)

2. New Deal Defined
• The New Deal refers to a set of sweeping
legislative reforms that characterized much of
the early stages of FDR’s administration, from
1933-1945. In particular it refers to a series of
progressive enactments that saw millions of
unemployed workers engaged in public works to
improve the infrastructure and cultural life of the
United States; the institution of trade union
rights to organize; and the institution of social
welfare (Genoe Mclaren, 2011)

3. Focus
• We focus on the New Deal and its absence from
Management & Organization Studies (MOS).
• Twofold purpose
• 1) Surface/discuss the problematic nature of
Management History – why has the New Deal
been neglected?
• 2) Call for “the circulation of as many
management models and paradigms as possible”
(Witzel, 2012, p. 103) – what can we learn from
the New deal?

4. Key Sub-theme
• Introduction and application of ANTi-History
(Durepos & Mills, 2012) as an approach to
studies of the past. (How can/do we study
history?)

5. ANTi-History: A Method in 5 Parts
• History as narrative (White, 1965)
• Past and history as “ontologically dissonant”
(Munslow, 2010)
• History as meta-discourse (Jenkins, 1995)
• History as effect of socio-political relations
(Durpos & Mills, 2012)
• History as non-corporeal actant (Hartt, 2013)

6. Sub-themes
• The development of the Human Relations
School
• Introduction of the Social Work School
• Encourage discovery of the contributions to
MOS of leading New Dealers – Ickes, Hopkins
and Perkins

7. Three Inspirations
• The Economic downturn of 2008
• The Missing 1930s
• The development of ANTi-History

8. 2008 and the Economic Downturn
• Re-creating an accurate and objective picture
of the New Deal may be more important
today than at any other time in the last eight
decades. To study the period is to be struck by
the parallels between the economic and
political conditions of the 1930s and those of
the opening years of this century - Hiltzik,
2011, p. 426
• Morris & Mills, 2014. A study of HBR in the 5 years before and
after 2008 show no change in HR strategies or leadership.

9. The Missing 1930s
• History of the field of management thought
largely centers on Taylorism and Scientific
Management in the first two decades of the
20th
Century (Shenhav, 1993; 2003)
• Next two decades are taken up with the
Hawthorne Studies and the development of
Human Relations (Bruce & Nyland 2011;
O’Connor, 1999)

10. The Magnitude
• Bethlehem Steel and Taylorism
• Hawthorne Works and Mayo, Roethlisberger & Dickson
• New Deal – Civil Works Admin (CWA) employed 4.25m;
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed 0.5m
young men; Work Progress Adm (WPA) employed
3.3m at its peak.
• Over its duration, Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies built
85 percent of all airports in the United States; 650,000
miles of roads; 125,000 civilian and military buildings,
and 78,000 bridges (N. Taylor, 2008).

11. The Magnitude
• The impact was not just economic but was also
profoundly social. For example, the WPA is
credited with serving “900 million hot lunches to
schoolchildren;” operating 1,500 nursery schools;
presenting 225,000 concerts to audiences and
performing “plays, vaudeville acts, puppet shows,
and circuses before 30 million people;” and
producing around 475,000 works of art, 276 full-
length books and 701 pamphlets -N. Taylor, 2008,
pp. 523-524

12. The Neglect
• Barely a mention in the leading US textbooks
of the time – 1930s and 1940s, nor in the US
and UK journals as they developed.

13. Three Social Workers
• Harold Ickes – Secretary of the Interior
• Harry Hopkins – Head of Federal Emergency
Relief Administration (FERA); then CWA and
then the WPA
• Frances Perkins – Secretary of Labor (first
female cabinet member in US)

14. Harold Ickes
• “It is the old struggle between the power of money
and the power of the democratic instinct. In the last
few months this irreconcilable conflict . . . has come
into the open as never before, has taken on a form and
an intensity which makes it clear that it must be fought
through to a finish – until plutocracy or democracy –
until America’s sixty families or America’s 120,000,000
people – win. . . . The fight in this country today is one
between the great mass of the people and wealth.
Harold Ickes, Radio Speech, December 1937 -- quoted
in Hiltzik, 2011, pp., pp.386-387).
•

15. Harold Ickes
• Ickes philosophy saw him labeled as a
communist by HUAC for critiquing – over-
production; high structural unemployment;
the exploitation of native Indians; unchecked
and ruthless exploitation of blacks, women,
children, etc.
• Arguing for – work as ennobling; equal
opportunities; self-respect; equitable wages,
etc.

16. Harry Hopkins
• We are beginning to wonder if it is not
presumptuous to take for granted that some
people should have much, and some people
should have nothing; that some people are
less important than others and should die
earlier; that the children of the comfortable
should be taller and fatter, as a matter of
right, than the children of the poor -Hopkins,
1936, p.184

17. Harry Hopkins
• Oversaw the placement of 8.5 million people in 1.4 million
projects at a cost of $11 billion
• The majority of the work involved construction projects,
but also Federal One – the employment of over 40,000
artists, writers, actors, and musicians.
• The federal work programs were not only about material
but also about social and spiritual benefit. Federal One in
particular not only led to creative developments in the arts
(e.g., the work of Jackson Pollock) and theatre (e.g., the
Black Theatre’s version of Macbeth) but also came to
imprint itself upon American history (e.g., State guidebooks
and the establishment of Oral History archives on slavery).

18. Frances Perkins
• I already had a conviction, a “concern,” . . . about
social justice; and it was clear in my own mind
that the promotion of social justice could be
made to work practically. As a student and
professional social worker, I was taking an active
part in proposals to use the legislative authority
of the state to correct social abuses – long hours,
low wages, bad housing, child labor, and
unsanitary conditions (Perkins, 1947, pp.9-10).
•

19. Frances Perkins
• Under Perkins leadership and commitment
the Social Security Act was passed into law on
August 15, 1935. For many commentators this
was the start and the hallmark of the Second
New Deal (Alter, 2007; Kennedy, 2005)

20. • Drawing on these two foci – the socio-political
context of the Cold War and the role of history in
field definition – we go on to argue that the
exclusion of the New Deal from MOS study was
part of a paradigmatic process (Burrell & Morgan,
1979) that was bounded by networked politics
(Latour, 2005a) and a particular formative
context (Unger, 2004). It was a process that saw
certain actors, theories, studies, and areas of
interest included within the MOS domain while
others were excluded.

21. Traces
• Cold War context in which current histories of
the field were written
• An era that discouraged radical thought
• Saw rearguard reactions against progressive
aspects of the new deal (e.g., the Wagner Act)
• A narrow definition of the field as
managerialist, business focussed.