The Chicago Factory Where Workers Were Studied for Forty Years Without Their Knowing the Study Was the Point
Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, employed 45,000 people at peak. Between 1924 and 1932 a team of Harvard researchers studied the workforce in increasing detail. The eventual finding — that workers behave differently when they know they're being watched — gave its name to the Hawthorne Effect.
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