George Elton Mayo

Elton Mayo was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 26 December 1880 and died in Guildford, Surrey on 1 September 1949. He was the second child of a respected colonial family; his father was a civil engineer, and his mother Henrietta Mary neé Donaldson was devoted to her children 's education and success. Elton was expected to follow his grandfather into medicine, but failed at university studies and was sent to Britain. Here he turned to writing, wrote on Australian politics for the Pall Mall Gazette and taught at the Working Men 's College in London. He then returned to Australia to work in an Adelaide publishing business where his radical management practices were not appreciated. He returned to university and became the most brilliant student of the philosopher Sir William Mitchell, won prizes for scholarship and in 1912 was appointed a foundation lecturer in philosophy and education at the newly established university in Queensland. Here he married Dorothea McConnel, who had been educated in landscape art at the Sorbonne and frequently visited Europe. They had two daughters, Patricia Elton Mayo, who would follow her father 's management thinking and had an interesting sociological career, and Ruth, who became a British artist and novelist and took the name Gael Elton Mayo.

Mayo taught philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, economics, education and the new psychology of Freud, Jung and especially Pierre Janet. From the beginning he trained himself in public speaking, and became an outstanding lecturer. He spoke at Worker 's Education Association classes and tutorials, and addressed unions and professional bodies. He much impressed Bronislaw Malinowski when they met in 1914, and they became good friends. During the First World War he served on government bodies, advised on the organization of work for the war effort, wrote and lectured on industrial and political psychology and psychoanalysis, and contributed a lively piece (Mayo and Booth 1916) to Lady Galway 's

Bibliography: Bourke, H. (1982) ‘Industrial Unrest as Social Pathology: The Australian Writings of Elton Mayo ', Historical Studies 20(79): 217–33. Gillespie, R. (1991) Manufacturing Knowledge, London: Cambridge University Press. Mayo, E. (1919) Democracy and Freedom: Essays in Social Logic, Workers ' Educational Series No. 1, Melbourne: Macmillan. ——— (1922a) ‘Civilisation and Morale; Industrial Unrest and Nervous Breakdown; the Mind of the Agitator; the Will of the People; Revolution ', Industrial Australian Mining Standard 67(January–February): 16, 59–60, 63, 111, 263. ——— (1922b) Psychology and Religion, Melbourne: Macmillan. ——— (1933) The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, New York: Macmillan. ——— (1945) The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. ——— (1947a) The Political Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. ——— (1947b) Some Notes on the Psychology of Pierre Janet, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mayo, E. and Booth, A. (1916) ‘Ring Down the Curtain ', in M.C. Galway (ed.), Lady Galway 's Belgium Book, Adelaide: Hussey and Gillingham, 40–48. Roethlisberger, F.J. (1977) The Elusive Phenomena, Boston: Division of Research, Harvard School of Business Administration. Roethlisberger, F.J. and Dickson, W.J. (1939) Management and the Worker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trahair, R.C.S. (1981) ‘Early Contributions to the Political Psychology of Elton Mayo ', in J. Walter (ed.), Reading Life Histories: Griffith Papers on Biography, Canberra: Australian University Press, 56–69. ——— (1982) ‘Elton Mayo and the Political Psychology of Harold D. Lasswell ', Political Psychology 3: 170–88. ——— (1984a) The Humanist Temper: The Life and Work of Elton Mayo, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ——— (1984b) ‘The Life and Work of Elton Mayo ', in B.J. Fallon, H.P. Pfister and J. Brebner (eds), Advances in Industrial Organizational Psychology, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1–9. Whitehead, T.N. (1938) The Industrial Worker: A Statistical Study of Human Relations in a Group of Manual Workers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2 vols.