Industrial accidents as a means of withdrawal from the workplace according to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: a re-examination of a classic study.

Abstract

IN rRODUC rION This paper revisits a classic study in the development of British industrial sociology which was conducted by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the early postwar period and which still remains a common source for the idea that there is a relationship between industrial accidents and absenteeism. It is argued that the lack of any sustained appraisal of this study over the span of several decades has allowed the specific conclusions that the Tavistock researchers advanced about a relationship between industrial accidents and absenteeism to take on an apparent validity which was not always warranted on the basis of their own original evidence. In addition, and with specific reference to the social scientific explanation of industrial accidents, it is shown how far the explanations advanced by the researchers sometimes took the form of little more than convoluted forms of what today would be called 'blaming the victim'. More generally, and with reference to the sociology of sociological knowledge, the fact is recovered that this classic work of early postwar British industrial sociology was replete with assumptions about worker psychology that most certainly rivalled the gratuitous excesses about 'irrationality' that today are much more commonly believed to have been a feature of the earlier Hawthorne Experiments in the USA. In Britain the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations made a significant contribution to the postwar development of industrial sociology. One important set of empirical enquiries conducted by the Tavistock concerned industrial accidents, as is clearly acknowledged in a seminal review of its contribution by Brown (Brown 1967). This aspect of the Tavistock's work is not gone into in much detail by Brown however. The same brevity characterizes the treatment of the Tavistock's contribution in a more recent specialist review of the