Personality, Incorporated: Psychological Capital in American Management, 1960-1995

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Kira Lussier

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

Personality, Incorporated

Kira Lussier Doctor of Philosophy Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto 2018 Abstract

Personality, Incorporated traces the history of personality testing in American corporate management from 1960 to 1995 through three case studies. This dissertation takes up the twinned history of psychological techniques, as deployed by a cadre of “consulting psychologists,” and the psychological capacities conjured by these techniques. Personality,

Incorporated make two core arguments. First, it argues that personality tests aimed to incite and channel employees’ psychological capacities as forms of economic value. Psychological tests did not simply measure static traits, but they also actively elicited and mobilized affects, subjectivities, and differences, that they then harnessed for corporate value production. Second, this dissertation argues that late twentieth-century corporations were not just sites for the application and circulation of psychological knowledge, but they also served as important experimental laboratories for investigating humans’ interpersonal, emotional, and cognitive capacities. A core contribution of this dissertation is to identify, investigate, and interrogate the specific form of value mobilized at this intersection of personality tests and management practices: “psychological capital. As an analytic category, psychological capital names how human beings’ psychological capacities are enlisted into circuits of economic value, with the aid of psychological techniques that can measure and incite these capacities. Psychological capital circulates as an intangible yet nonetheless measurable form of capital that was made visible, measurable, and valuable through psychological techniques of personality testing and training amidst economic, social, and cultural changes of the knowledge economy. This dissertation

ii offers a new way to think about psychological tests: as tools designed to mobilize and channel psychological capacities, to elicit and cultivate the very characteristics that they purported to measure. In weaving together histories of psychology, science and corporate capitalism with critical scholarship on affect and value, this dissertation excavates how psychological tests have become corporate techniques that shape contemporary selfhood.

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Acknowledgments

Writing a dissertation is an incredibly solitary endeavor, but also an endeavor impossible without the mentors, colleagues, institutions, funders, friends, and family who sustained me during the triumphs and the anxieties of finishing a dissertation.

My first and greatest intellectual debt is to my supervisors, Elspeth Brown and Michelle

Murphy. This project would have looked quite different had I not taken a class with Michelle all those years ago—a class which first showed me that I could be a historian of science attuned to power, politics, and theory. Her feedback was consistently generous and generative, with a knack for summing up my argument and greatest stakes in a manner for more eloquent way than I could have. Through the Technoscience Research Unit and Technoscience Salon, she fostered interstitial homes on campus that made my graduate experience much more welcoming. In addition to their intellectual support, both my supervisors have been models for me of engaged, conscientious academics and citizens. Elspeth Brown molded me into a historian of American capitalism with her incisive, careful feedback that pushed me to situate my work in the broader historical context, to link theory with historical evidence, and to pay attention to the footnotes.

Maintaining a constant investment in my project, even when my own had faltered, her encouragement provided crucial moral and intellectual support. I was incredibly fortunate to have an engaged and enthusiastic committee that included Mark Solovey. The kernel of this dissertation began with a term paper in Mark’s class, and he has helped shepherd my writing from term papers to journal articulates and dissertation chapters, always with careful attention to style, structure, and evidence. I am grateful for his introduction to the literature and networks of people in the history of human sciences that are so foundational to this dissertation.

Thanks to my committee and my two external readers, I had a dissertation defense more enjoyable and generative than I could have imagined. I am grateful to Sarah Igo for her flexibility in scheduling and ability to attend in person. The perceptive, thoughtful and enthusiastic commentary on the dissertation she provided is sure to inform the future directions of this project. Pushing me to situate my work in labor history, Steve Penfold asked incisive questions that cut to the heart of the dissertation—including a question I keep coming back to about whether or not I made capitalism appear “too interesting.”

In addition to the intellectual support of my committee, the ability and privilege to dedicate oneself to such a major project requires financial support; I am grateful for the funding bodies that provided time and space to research and write this dissertation: Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); Department of Historical Studies at

University of Toronto, Mississauga; Ontario Graduate Scholarship; Canadian Business History

Association; Jackman Humanities Institute; Center for Addiction and Mental Health; and

Victoria College. My archival research was generously supported by grants from the School of

Graduate Studies and the Center for the Study of the United States, both at the University of

Toronto; an Alvin Achenbaum grant from Duke’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising &

Marketing History; a grant-in-aid from the Rockefeller Archives Center; an Alfred D. Chandler fellowship from Harvard Business School; and a Henry Belin du Pont grant from Hagley

Museum & Library.

During these research trips, the assistance and expertise of archivists was invaluable.

Lizette Royer Barton saved my dissertation by allowing me access into Akron’s Archives for the

History of American Psychology before they closed for renovations. At the Center for the

Application of Psychological Type, Logan Abbitt and Judith Breiner were generous with their time in allowing me access to the Isabel Briggs Myers Library. At Duke, Joshua Larkin Rowley

v helped me access archival materials that would be crucial to the project, while librarian Joyce

Chapman served as a wonderfully friendly inadvertent host for a researcher. At Harvard Business

School, Walter Friedman oriented me to the world of business history, before later providing an important opportunity to publish in the Business History Review. At Hagley, the archival assistance of Lucas Clawson and the logistical expertise of Carol Lockman’s logistical expertise helped make my first archival visit go smoothly.

It was at my home department, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and

Technology (IHPST) where I became a historian of science, and I am grateful to the training of faculty members, particularly Lucia Dacome, Nikolai Krementsov, and Marga Vicedo. In addition to building my historians’ toolkit, Nikolai Krementsov merits special thanks for

(perhaps unknowingly) leading me to my interest in management by encouraging me to investigate scientific management and Fordism. A particular thanks goes to Muna Salloum and

Denise Horsley, whose organizational acumen has kept the department afloat. I am grateful for the opportunity to teach a course in the history of personality testing just as I finished my dissertation, which reminded me of the importance and the pleasures of pedagogy and personality tests. Thank you to my students in “Making Up People” and to Chen-Pang Yeang for providing the opportunity to teach a topics course. Before I became a historian of science, I became enamored with history through seminar courses at McGill taught by Thomas Jundt,

James Krapfl, Brian Lewis, Leonard Moore, Suzanne Morton, and Andrea Tone.

I was fortunate to build a supportive community of graduate students in Toronto to celebrate the highs and commiserate the lows of graduate school. My most significant and enjoyable interlocuters, Justin Douglas and Bretton Fosbrook, have been there for every step of the journey through graduate school: together we have read Foucault and Marx, co-organized a major conference, and read countless drafts of each other’s papers; we have debated how much

vi coffee to serve and argued about the nature of capitalism, all with equal fervor. They made this dissertation sharper and graduate school less lonely. The genesis of our friendship lay in an STS reading group alongside Sonia Grant, Johanna Pokorny, Alex Schweinsberg and Adriel Weaver, which become one of my first social-intellectual homes at the University of Toronto. Thank you to Nico Saldias and Curtis Forbes for being my favourite café pals, and to Curtis for always buying me the most spot-on souvenirs. For support and solidarity throughout my years at the

IHPST, thanks to Esther Atkinson, Riiko Bedford, Agnes Bolinska, Michael Cournoyea, Alex

Djedovic, Gwyndaf Garbutt, Jenn Fraser, Liz Koester, Cory Lewis, Rebecca Moore, Sarah

Qidwai, Adam Richter, Kristen Schranz, and Jai Virdi. Outside of my department, I am grateful for the collegiality and comradery of Jordan Bimm, Ian Davidson, Dan Guadagnolo, and the late

Brianna Hersey. Outside of the University of Toronto, I found kindred spirits and colleagues in

Sam Franklin, Matt Hoffarth, Robbie Nelson, Adam Fulton Johnson, Rachel Knecht (and thank you for that breakfast sandwich), and Tess Lanzarotta. My long-distance text thread with

Jennifer Jhun and Sarv Lotfi provided crucial emotional support throughout graduate school.

One of the most rewarding experiences in graduate school was organizing a conference,

Techniques of the Corporation, alongside my wonderful collaborators Justin Douglas, Bretton

Fosbrook and Michelle Murphy. With support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking and SSHRC, and the logistical labors of Jocelyn Torres, this conference introduced me to a network of inspiring scholars, particularly Dan Bouk, Lucy Carrillo, Louis Hyman, Orit Halpern,

Melissa Gregg, Luke Stark, and Matthew Wisnioski. Some of my favourite intellectual moments came through attending conferences, particularly the History of Science Society, Histories of

Capitalism conference, Business History Conference, Society for U.S. Intellectual History,

Society for the Recent History of the Social Sciences, and the Montreal Summer School for the

History of Economics, which introduced me to wonderful communities of scholars.

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Conversations with Jamie Cohen-Cole, Mike Pettit, Jeff Pooley, Joanna Radin, Dana Simmons,

Quinn Slobodian, and Nadine Weidman were particularly influential in shaping this project.

Writing is a joy, but sometimes a slog. For making the writing process less lonely, I think the Technoscience Research Unit writer’s group, especially Martina Schluender and Patrick

Keilty, and the HAPSAT writing group, led by the organizational labor of Alex Djedovic. Thank you to the organizers and participants at Lakeshift writing retreat in summer 2017, for reminding me again of the joys of writing and the community of academia. The workshops, writing bootcamps, and blog posts of Rachael Cayley were invaluable in producing chapter drafts and motivating me when I needed it. My writing was sustained by a constant stream of music, with particular thanks to Boards of Canada, Do Make Say Think, and Miles Davis for providing a soothing soundtrack for writing.

These intellectual communities, institutions, colleagues, archivists and funders were all invaluable for helping produce this dissertation. Also invaluable was the emotional support, friendship, love, of my friends and family, who reminded me that there is life outside of a dissertation and for believing in me even when my own will faltered. For diversions, general and specific, I thank Megan Andrews, Maeve Biggar, Emma Carver, and Carly Minuk. Special thanks go to Sam Jackson—for studying and snacking with me in the Gladstone library—and to

Michelle Desroches, whose late-night brownies fueled my dissertation proposal and whose continued presence in my life I cherish. Thank you to the whole Desroches family for their support, homemade preserves, and cottage visits. The friendship of Renee Saucier has ranged from art sessions and dance parties to writing sessions and last-minute editing of my dissertation introduction, whatever the situation entailed. For friendship, thank you to Maria Anatolias, James

Christopherson, and Nida Nizam—who sent chocolate covered fruit and encouragement when I needed it most and is always available to talk about stationary. Thank you to my book club for

viii reminding me of the pleasures of fiction. The crew of impressive women I met at McGill over a decade ago still remains some of my dearest friends, even as our paths have taken us across countries, coasts, and continents: Caroline Austin, Sabrina Brody-Camp, Rosie Burns, Nicole

Ebert, Rosalie Kennedy, Amelia Lenke, and Jessie Mansperger. Over two decades ago, I met Liz

Consky and found friendship at first sight.

The night before I submitted the final version of the dissertation was spent with my immediate family, flying to Winnipeg to visit our extended family. I can think of no better representation of my family’s love and support than watching them alternate between proofreading chapters of my dissertation and talking me out of a meltdown by reassuring me that my dissertation would get finished. Thank you to Danny Samson for proofreading my footnotes like a true historian and for becoming part of the family through delicious dinners, shared musical tastes, and competitive hearts games. Thank you to my sister Megan Lussier, my earliest friend (and sometimes foe), my cheerleader, and my mole in the corporate world, whose practical wisdom, sheer grit, and integrity I have always admired and whose adult friendship I am thrilled to maintain. I am happy I was able to celebrate my sister’s marriage to Kirill

Stepanov and my dissertation completion in Winnipeg, and grateful for the love of my entire

Makus/Lussier family in Winnipeg, particularly my Oma. Thank you to Megan and Kirill for helping me celebrate the acceptance of my dissertation by playing trashcan basketball with the printed pages.

A dissertation is made in the network of supervisors and committees and colleagues and institutions and university departments named here; its writer was sustained by the friends and family credited thus far. But it is in the nitty-gritty of daily life that a dissertation is written, line by line; it is in the nitty-gritty of daily life where I have found my greatest advocate and favourite companion in my partner, Stefan Perrier. Thank you for making me laugh harder than anyone

ix else, for dancing with me in kitchens or at concerts, for being my meditation guru, for hosting late-night talk shows with the collective, for washing endless dishes and tolerating my cup hoarding, for grocery shopping and cooking so I could stay glued to my computer, for doing the crossword with me every weekend, for keeping me on my toes, and for losing so graciously in cribbage. I have never doubted your unwavering support as you cheer me on in the triumphs and console me in the disappointments that come with completing a PhD.

First and last are my parents. My dad, Roger, died too soon, but I would not be the person I am today without his early caretaking, cooking, and kindness. I dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Ingrid Makus, my longest and greatest champion, who gave me life both literally and figuratively (and who hates when I use the word “literally”). Since I can remember, she has served as an exemplar for how to balance work and family, intellect and emotions, abstraction and practicality, all in high heels while serving canapés. She has read my proposal drafts at the eleventh hour and talked me down from anxieties, becoming not only my mother, but also my confidante and my friend.

A dissertation is an intimate labor of love, particularly a dissertation inspired by my own personal encounters with the Myers-Briggs and motivational psychology. Thank you to the anonymous Internet strangers who poured their soul (or their personalities) out on Internet forums—forums which sparked my own interest in personality tests.

Table of Contents

Abstract...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... xi

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Psychology, Science and Expertise ...... 10

1.2 Management, Marketing, and the Corporate Form ...... 19

1.3 Value, Capital, and Human Resources ...... 28

1.4 Organization of the Dissertation...... 36

Chapter 2: Measuring Managers ...... 43

2.1 Introduction ...... 43

2.2 Measuring the Work Ethic: The Thematic Apperception Test ...... 54

2.3 The Corporate Work Ethic: The Manager as Motivator ...... 64

2.4 The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: the Racial Politics of Motivation Training ...... 80

2.5 Redesigning Work: Texas Instruments as Experimental Lab ...... 93

2.6 Conclusion ...... 104

Chapter 3: The Intuitive Leader...... 110

3.1 Introduction ...... 110

3.2 Intuitive Personalities: Researching Creativity ...... 117

3.3 Intuitive Brains: Race, Gender, and Split Brains ...... 132

3.4 Intuitive Futures: Training Intuition for Corporate Strategy ...... 148

3.5 Intuitive Awakenings: The Visionary Leader ...... 166

3.6 Conclusion ...... 179

Chapter 4: Managing Differences...... 183

4.1 Introduction ...... 183

4.2 The Encounter Group ...... 195 xi

4.3 Corporate Diversity Training ...... 210

4.4 The Team-Building Seminar ...... 227

4.5 Conclusion ...... 247

Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 253

5.1 Contemporary Stakes and Future Directions ...... 257

Bibliography ...... 265

Manuscript Collections ...... 265

Primary Sources ...... 265

Secondary Sources...... 277

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Chapter 1 Introduction

Do you prefer to work alone or in groups? Do you decide based on hunches or on step-by- step reasoning? Are you motivated by meaning in work, or by a pay check? Are you an introvert? Are you self-actualized? Are you a team player? Answer the questions. Open the test booklet, grip your pencil, and mark an X in the correct bubble. Perhaps you sigh, or fidget, or hedge, stumped by the test’s binary answers; you erase an answer, mark an X in the other bubble.

And then, results: a personality profile, perhaps some letters or numbers that correlate to a paragraph description that makes you nod along—“that does sound like me!”—or smirk with skepticism—“that’s nothing like me!” The corporate trainer standing at the front of the room looks at you expectantly, awaiting your results and the results of the rest of the participants in the management training seminar. The trainer passes out workbooks, containing exercises that explain how to harness your personality for professional success. You and your fellow participants in the training seminar are asked to reflect on your personality differences and similarities. You wonder how much the trainer is getting paid, and why your company wants to peer into your psyche. Whatever the case, you return to the test booklet; you squint at the tiny print, the boilerplate that your eyes glossed over on the first read. There, you will find the publishers, the date of publication, the copyright, and the price: the cost for one test, for 25 tests, for 100 tests.

This dissertation begins with an object both familiar and strange: the personality test.

Circulating through corporate training seminars, university psychology departments, online quizzes and forums, in everyday twentieth-century North American life, personality tests appear as management techniques, as scientific instruments, as entertainment, and as tools of self-

1 2 understanding. Personality tests are hybrid objects. They are instruments of psychological measurement that seek to assess facets of an individual’s personality through prompts, which can include written questions (as in self-reporting personality tests) or images (as in projective tests).

Composed of paper and ink, or more recently pixels and software, they are material objects. As copyrighted commodities, they are constituted by congealed labor—of psychologists, clerical staff, and experimental subjects—and activated by circuits of profits and value. As encountered in corporate spaces, they rely on and reproduce management protocols and practices and depend on networks of experts that include psychologists, consultants, and corporate clients. Personality tests embed psychological theories and ideological assumptions about human nature, power, and organizations. Personality tests also produce material effects: most visibly, they help to categorize and classify people and thus influence business decisions about hiring, firing, or promotion. Less visibly, they also regulate and prescribe modes of being: the “motivated worker” or the “team player” are genres of corporate subjectivities shaped by personality tests.

How and why did this chimeric object, the personality test, become such a prominent part of American corporate management practices? How did the personality test become a privileged methodology to understand personality? Personality tests were developed and deployed by actors who straddled the boundaries of psychology and business, a body of experts I call “consulting psychologists.” Although examples of consulting firms date to the 1920s, the phenomenon of psychologists marketing specialized techniques to management exploded in the late 20th century.

Consulting psychologists generally had academic training, often holding PhDs in psychology or an applied social science, such as organizational behavior. But rather than spend their careers exclusively in university departments or psychological laboratories, these consulting psychologists worked as corporate trainers, organizational behavior specialists, management consultants or diversity experts. They ran management training seminars and developed and sold

3 their own proprietary testing or training protocols; some combined their academic work with consulting work—such as motivational psychologist David McClelland, who taught at Harvard’s interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations while consulting for corporations through his firm, McBer & Co. This cadre of “consulting psychologists” at the intersection of psychology and management claimed that psychology offered a way to both increase corporate value and empower workers. They promoted personality tests as tools to study, manage, and value employees’ psychological capacities.

My dissertation tracks the personality test, as used in corporate management practices, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s—a time period that marks an important change in the use of personality testing, as well as sweeping social and economic transformations in American life.

From their first introduction into corporate spaces in the 1920s, personality tests attracted enthusiasm from management practitioners who saw in them ways to better select, manage, and train workers in increasingly complex multidivisional organizations. By the mid-1960s, psychological techniques gained purchase amidst economic and cultural changes associated with the emerging “post-industrial” or “knowledge economy” of the late 20th-century, which include the spread of information technologies, global redistributions of production and consumption, and corporate restructuring. Such changes prompted new theories of management in the 1960s that highlighted the psychological and social capacities of the “knowledge worker” as crucial to the operations of the company, and the empowerment of the individual.

The fraught relationship between the individual and the organization forms a crucial problem space for this dissertation. Longstanding anxieties about the dehumanizing effects of corporations had accompanied the rise of industrial management, like the anxiety about workers as cogs in the machine reflected, humorously, in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times. Amidst the expanding infrastructure of white-collar work, midcentury social critics worried about the

“organization man,” while 1960s counter-culturalists and strands of the New Left lamented the curtailment of individuality through bureaucratic corporate conformity.1 On the heels of these social protests, corporations sought to shore up their legitimacy by emphasizing that corporate management practices were compatible with—and even central to—human flourishing, by incorporating theories and techniques from humanistic psychology and the wider human potential movement. It is in the midst of transformations in the corporate landscape that personality tests and training seminars became techniques that promised to create self-motivated, flexible subjects who could thrive within a corporate environment commonly perceived, in the

1970s and 1980s, as increasingly more turbulent and uncertain.

From the personality test, this dissertation scopes outward to the managerial environment that mediated corporate encounters with personality tests and spawned a new corporate technique: the “psychological training seminar.” For consulting psychologists, training seminars served as applied spaces to experiment with techniques and theories, which they in turn appropriated as the basis of new psychological knowledge; at the same time, these seminars acted as spaces to intervene in management arrangements, thus shaping managerial relations in the corporation. As a form of management training, psychological training seminars sought to teach employees the psychological and emotional skills required to work with and manage other people. These seminars almost invariably began with a personality test, accompanied by a profusion of exercises, like role playing and hypothetical scenarios. As mediated through the psychological training seminar, personality tests served not just as measures of personality traits, conceived as static, but as techniques that could elicit and measure changes in the psychological

1 William Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, N.Y: Simon & Schuster, 1956); Anna Creadick, “Postwar Sign, Symbol, and Symptom: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” in Cultures of Commerce: Representation of American Business Culture, 1870-1960, eds. Elspeth Brown, Catherine Gudis and Marina Moskowitz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

5 capacities at stake. Psychological training seminars taught managers that their role entailed mobilizing their own psychological capacities, and those of their subordinates, and harnessing them to organizational goals.

This dissertation takes up the twinned history of psychological techniques and the psychological capacities conjured by these techniques in order to make two core arguments.

First, I argue that personality tests, as deployed by consulting psychologists, aimed to incite and channel employees’ psychological capacities as forms of economic value. In focusing on the personality test as encountered through the psychological training seminar, this dissertation offers a new way to think about psychological tests: as tools designed to mobilize and channel psychological capacities, to elicit and cultivate the very characteristics that they purported to measure. In other words, psychological tests did not simply measure static traits, but they also actively elicited and mobilized affects, subjectivities, and differences, that they then harnessed for corporate value production. To understand how psychological tests operated by mobilizing the capacities that they measured, I draw on scholarship that shows how “measures” are not just static, objectifying or representational forms, but are also dynamic, lively entities that garner a series of affective attachments.2 Psychological tests did not just index traits, but they also incited our capacities; in the context of management training seminars, these psychological capacities, furthermore, became sites of economic value.

Secondly, my dissertation argues that late twentieth-century corporations were not just sites for the application and circulation of psychological knowledge, but they also served as important experimental laboratories for investigating humans’ interpersonal, emotional, and cognitive capacities. Domains such as human resources management and organizational development have

2 Celia Lury and Lisa Adkins, eds, Measure and Value (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

6 been prime sites for the production of psychological knowledge. Across the consulting firms and psychological research centers in this dissertation, corporate training seminars served not just as ways to improve managers, but also as important experimental laboratories for understanding human psychology—insights that were in turn applied to management practices. Through the techniques of measurement and training, such as the personality test as used in training seminars, consulting psychologists produced a body of knowledge about human beings that sought to intervene in individuals’ personalities and in the managerial arrangements of the corporation.3

Weaving together these strands of measure and value, affect and epistemology, a core contribution of this dissertation is to identify, investigate, and interrogate the specific form of value mobilized at this intersection of personality tests and management practices:

“psychological capital.” 4 As an analytic category, psychological capital names how human beings’ psychological capacities are enlisted into circuits of economic value, with the aid of psychological techniques that can measure and incite these capacities.5 When individuals describe themselves as “self-starters” or “team players” on cover letters, or when companies host creative brainstorming sessions, or when managers read books on “emotional intelligence,” or

3 My emphasis on scientific practices and understanding of knowledge as a project of intervention, rather than representation, draws on STS scholarship. Anne-Marie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 4 My usage of psychological capital differs from the existing term used by management scholars. In a 2007 book, management scholars drew on positive psychology to define psychological capital as composed of positive psychological capacities—confidence, hope, optimism, and resiliency—that individuals and corporations could cultivate as forms of corporate value. In contrast to this definition, my definition of psychological capital emphasizes the historical development and critical stakes of psychological capital. Moreover, I do not focus solely on the “positive” traits identified by management scholars. Fred Luthans, Carolyn Youssef, and Bruce Avolio, Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2007). 5 Jackie Orr’s theorization of “psychopower,” which braids together affect and rationality to understand psychology as a discourse of power, is an important inspiration for my invocation of psychological capital. Psychopower operates through the measurement, disciplining, and ordering of the psyche in order to regulate the psychological health of individuals and populations. Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

7 when career advice blogs advocate the importance of “soft skills,” they are laying claim to psychological capital. 6 Psychological capital circulates as an intangible yet nonetheless measurable form of capital that was made visible, measurable, and valuable through psychological techniques of personality testing and training. Late 20th-century practices of personality tests, as this dissertation shows, have been guided by an attempt to measure and make calculable the more ineffable, qualitative capacities of the human psyche, so that they could enter into circuits of psychological capital.

By using the term capacity in the dissertation, I deliberately eschew the term “trait.” A term commonly used in personality psychology, trait describes a stable personality characteristic; for trait theorists, personality can be broken into discrete traits that combine in individuals to produce the overall personality. Some of the psychologists I study did attempt to carve up the psyche into discrete traits (for instance, introversion vs. extraversion) through measurement and classificatory schemes, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. However, as personality tests circulated in corporate management practices, they became a tool to cultivate and elicit dynamic, latent, and potential capacities, rather than measure static, standardized traits. Indeed, the capacities that compose psychological capital encompass our subconscious motives, creativity, and sociability. Emphasizing capacities rather than traits thus aids in my attempt to pivot away from understanding psychological tests as primarily tools to standardize, rationalize, or discipline discrete traits or static subjects. The capacities at stake in psychological capital include emotional, affective, and social capacities that are susceptible to change and cultivation.

6 My emphasis on the circulation of psychological capital draws on affect theorist Sara Ahmed, who uses the Marxian circuit of capital to describe affect as produced and acquiring value through its circulation, rather than a property residing in the individual; this circulation of affect arranges bodies and objects into affective economies. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 118-139.

Psychological capital became a knowable and nameable form of value through practices of corporate management in American corporations in the late twentieth century. Locating it in this moment does not imply that psychological capital could not be found elsewhere, in other geographical spaces or temporal moments, but it does claim that practices of management in late twentieth-century century American corporations became a central site for the explicit designation of “psychological capital” as a prominent form of economic value. In theorizing psychological capital as a form of capital bound up in the knowledge practices of psychology and corporate capitalism, I am inspired by STS scholarship on “biocapital.” This scholarship theorizes how value accumulates from the very stuff of life itself— our cells, our bodies, or our clinical labor— and thus emphasizes how scientific epistemologies have engaged with regimes of value in corporate capitalism.7 I am also inspired by scholarship that directly emphasizes the intersection of psychology, corporations, and economic value.8

The “knowledge worker,” a term coined by management theorist Peter Drucker in 1959, is one canonical subject figure of the late-twentieth century corporation that serves as a crucial bearer of psychological capital. 9 Marked as elite, white, and male, the knowledge worker, as a worker who “thinks for a living,” emerged as a central figure of white collar office work in the

7 Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Kaushik Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 8 Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Los Vegas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Luke Stark, “Algorithmic Psychometrics and the Scalable Subject,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 2 (April 2018): 204-231; William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (New York: Verso Books, 2014). 9 Peter Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1959). Roy Jacques argues that the figure of the “knowledge worker” emerged in the 1920s second industrial revolution, when specialized knowledge became increasingly important to the productive capacity of corporations. It was in the post-1960 period, however, that the knowledge worker became the public preeminent figure of the worker. Roy Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee: Management Knowledge from the 19th to the 21st Centuries (New York: Sage Publications, 1995).

9 mid-century amidst economic changes in America, including the outsourcing and redistribution of production and developing infrastructures of communication technology. Hailed to make their work their life, knowledge workers in late 20th-century America were encouraged to invest in themselves, and thus to cultivate their psychological capital: through reading self-help books, through attending training workshops, through incorporating productivity techniques to become self-motivated workers.10 Psychological training seminars for managers promoted self-awareness as the foundation of effective management, encouraging managers to first understand their own personalities, and then study the personalities of their subordinates.11 For particular kinds of white-collar, professional-managerial subjects—like the knowledge worker— the very awareness of one’s own personality, gained through these psychological techniques, became markers of cultural capital.12

This midcentury professional-managerial class was overwhelmingly white and male, with white women generally performing lower-status clerical labor, and men and women of color remaining excluded almost entirely from white-collar work due to longstanding structural racism and segregationist practices. Given these historic exclusions, management positions became an important target for civil rights movements and women’s rights movements in the 1960s, as part

10 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011). 11 Barbara Townley, “‘Know Thyself’: Self-Awareness, Self-Formation and Managing,” Organization 2, no. 2 (1995): 271-289; Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21-41. 12 Cultural and social capital are important kin to psychological capital. As defined by social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital names the intangible attributes—mode of speech, dress, knowledge of etiquette—that reinforce class distinctions, or conversely, allow for social mobility. Social capital describes how our social relations and networks, formal and informal, serve as a form of capital. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in J. G. Richardson, ed, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241-258 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

10 of their struggles for economic enfranchisement.13 Following the establishment of the Equal

Employment Opportunities Commission in 1965, which provided legal mandate for employees to sue employers for workplace discrimination based on race and gender, some changes in the racial and gender composition of corporate management occurred, even as decision-making power often stayed in the hands of white, male elites. In a nation founded on race-based capitalism, slavery, and continuing racial segregation, whiteness in America has accrued economic value that has shaped the uneven distributions of psychological capital, through whites’ “possessive investment” in the “wages of whiteness.”14

In order to understand the historical development of personality testing and psychological capital, this dissertation bridges three main bodies of scholarship, addressed in the following sections: histories of science and psychology that emphasize psychology’s cultural power in post-war America; histories of management and corporations that treat management as a political project; and the scholarship on value, human capital, and racial capitalism.

1.1 Psychology, Science and Expertise

The modifier “psychological” in psychological capital entails two dimensions: 1) the actual

“stuff” of psychology—humans’ mental, cognitive, and emotional processes and capacities, and

13 Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, eds, The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012); Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 14 In her history of work at Bell, Venus Green, for instance, has argued that the “psychological wages of whiteness”—white women’s acceptance of a white identity—contributed to management’s ability to control the workforce in the 1950s. Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791; George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).

11 how such processes are expressed in social behavior; and 2) the body of expertise and knowledge that studies the “stuff” of psychology: a form of expertise that became wedded to corporate management.15 To understand how personality tests have helped to circulate psychological capital requires understanding the broader histories of psychology, science, and expertise that have made personality tests into the most popular, mobile, and adaptable technique of the human sciences.16 Since the early twentieth century, techniques from the human sciences, such as the social survey and the intelligence test, have played a central role in sorting and arranging human beings, creating classifications of human beings that have influenced people’s very sense of self.

Psychological tests have been mobilized to shore up existing hierarchies of race and gender, as well as to challenge racial segregation.17 Despite their significance, popular personality tests used in corporate spaces, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, have been surprisingly neglected in histories of psychology, which are often oriented around the academic discipline and laboratory life of psychology.18 This dissertation thus contributes to histories of psychology

15 As Ellen Herman defines psychology, psychology “does not stop at the margins of an academic discipline or the boundaries of a professional job category. Rather, it indicates an emphasis on analyzing mental processes, interpersonal relationships, introspection, and behavior as a way of explaining both individual and social realities.” Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 5. 16 Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Roderick Buchanan, “On Not Giving Psychology Away: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and Public Controversy over Testing in the 1960s,” History of Psychology 5, no. 3 (2002): 284-309. 17 To understand how subjectivity is shaped by techniques from the human sciences in a looping process, I am inspired by Ian Hacking’s work on the classification of human kinds. As Ian Hacking argues, human beings interact with the scientific classification schemes that seek to classify them, in ways that feed back into the classification schemes. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 18 Existing scholarship on the history of popular personality tests is scant, aside from one popular book and some sociological work. Anne Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests are Leading us to Miseducate our Children, Mismanage our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2004); Karin Garrety, “Beyond ISTJ: A Discourse-Analytic Study of the Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Asia

12 and science by filling in significant scholarly gaps in histories of popular personality tests. More substantively, this dissertation illustrates the importance of psychological testing in creating classifications, fostering subjectivities, and arranging human beings in corporations.

The first kinds of psychological tests widely used for classifying and sorting people in educational, military and business environments were intelligence tests, which served as a methodological model for personality tests, even as developers of personality tests focused on the affective, emotional dimensions left out in intelligence tests.19 Based on the work of French educational psychologist Alfred Binet in the early 1900s, American psychologist and eugenicist

Lewis Terman developed the American version of the intelligence test, the Revised Stanford-

Binet, during the 1910s.20 The American military and immigration officers adopted intelligence tests to screen military recruits and immigrants at Ellis Island during World War I and its aftermath. From their origins, intelligence tests were tools of classifying and sorting people, by an abstracted, quantified notion of “intelligence,” that displayed cultural and racial biases as adopted by eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s. From their use by eugenicists in the 1920s, through to the 1990s publication of the Bell Curve, intelligence tests have been a technique used to justify racial hierarchies.21 However, psychology has also been mobilized in the struggle to undermine racial hierarchies, as in the work of psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark that challenged segregation.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I, psychologists developed personality tests that sought to measure emotions, attitudes, and temperament, rather than intelligence. The

Pacific Journal of Human Resources 45, no. 2 (2007): 218-234; Majia Nadesan, “Constructing Paper Dolls: The Discourse of Personality Testing in Organizational Practice, Communication Theory 7, no. 3 (Aug 1997): 189-218. 19 Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (New York: Sage Books, 1997). 20 Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds; Peter Hegarty, “From Genius Inverts to Gendered Intelligence: Lewis Terman and the Power of the Norm,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 132-155. 21 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1981).

13 development of increasingly sophisticated techniques of statistical analysis, such as factor analysis, in the next few decades, gave psychologists the ability to break down personality into discrete traits, such as introversion or extraversion, to be measured through personality tests.

These early years of psychological testing and its spread into industry and education have been well-documented by historians of psychology.22 This same interwar period has been well-studied by business historians, who have charted the emergence of personnel departments and human relations management alongside the expansion of the modern corporation. As corporations grew larger and more complex in the early twentieth century, companies began consolidating duties of hiring, firing, and managing people in the personnel department, inaugurating a new profession of personnel management. Personality tests become one technique, alongside the application form and the standardized interview, to screen large numbers of applicants.23

Personality tests have long been bound up in corporations. Indeed, for the earliest applied psychologists, corporations served as their experimental laboratory and major client. The first psychological consulting company and progenitor of the “consulting psychologists” in this dissertation, the Psychological Corporation, was founded in 1924 to produce and market psychological tests to a variety of organizational clients. 24 Personnel selection was one of the first domains where psychological tests were used. Amidst expanding corporations whose growing size necessitated new strategies for hiring, industrial psychologists promoted tests as a more efficient and effective way of screening applicants and fitting workers to appropriate jobs.

22 Danziger, Naming the Mind; Carson, The Measure of Merit ; Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1960). 23 Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee; Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 24 Michael Sokal, Psychological Testing & American Society, 1890-1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).

Introducing personality tests into corporate personnel departments offered an efficient tool to screen employees, in an attempt to rationalize the subjective, emotional dimensions of the worker’s mind.25 Many corporations seized on the growing numbers of psychological tests to screen potential and current employees, convinced by the claims of industrial psychologists that the right psychological traits were crucial to the efficiency and productivity of their business.

One progenitor to the Myers-Briggs widely used in interwar corporations, the Humm-Wadsworth

Temperament Scale, sought to assess job-seekers’ capacity to express and regulate their emotions at work.26

This earlier network of psychological tests, corporate personnel departments, and psychological experts, which developed from the 1920s to the 1940s, left important marks on the post-1960s practices examined in this dissertation. By the mid-1960s, psychologists’ status as experts who could speak to a wide variety of business, political, and social problems had been assured. As historians of psychology have argued, the 1960s became a crucial moment for psychologists to promote their expertise, framing social issues like racism and poverty as problems to be addressed by psychological techniques.27 Ellen Herman, for instance, refers to post-1960 America as a “psychologized” society, in that psychology became a common idiom in public life, across public policy and social movements.28 In “Personality, Incorporated,” I extend

25 Brown, The Corporate Eye. 26 Kira Lussier, “Temperamental Workers: Psychology, Business, and the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale in Interwar America,” History of Psychology 21, no. 2 (May 2018): 79-99. 27 Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Herman, The Romance of American Psychology; Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Daryl Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 28 Herman, The Romance of American Psychology.

15 these arguments by showing how psychology became an idiom to understand the role of corporate management post-1960.

In order to historicize the combination of capacities at stake in psychological capital, I bridge histories of scientific and bureaucratic rationality with histories that emphasize the continuing importance of emotions, creativity, and psychoanalysis to the scientific research and political projects of the human sciences in post-1960s America.29 Practices of personality testing and management training that thread throughout this dissertation, including motivation training, creativity research, and research into group dynamics, are legible as part of broader shifts that sutured management theories to humanistic psychology.30 Humanistic psychology, a strand of psychology associated with Abraham Maslow that emphasized human flourishing, influenced new theories and practices of participatory management which described work as a site for self- actualization, meaning, and even pleasure. To counter charges that corporations entailed the numbing rationalization and standardization of individuals, new theories of participatory management developed in the 1960s and implemented in corporations in the next few decades instead foregrounded individual difference, empowerment, creativity, self-actualization, and sociality: the precise virtues that social critics had worried were stamped out by corporations. As management practitioners began to trumpet virtues of self-actualization and human flourishing, they even folded in strands of the counterculture, like the human potential movement.31

29 Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Frank Biess and Daniel Gross, eds, Science and Emotions After 1945 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014); Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind; Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Orr, Panic Diaries; Solovey and Cravens, Cold War Social Sciences. 30 David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds, Groovy Science: The Counter-Cultures and Scientific Life, 1955-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (New York: Harper-Collins, 2012). 31 Nadine Weidman, “Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s,” in David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds, Groovy Science: The Counter-Cultures and

In focusing on the corporation as an important client for psychological tests and expertise, this project expands on this scholarship’s emphasis on the role of power, patronage, and funding in the production of Cold War social scientific knowledge.32 During the Cold War, psychologists became even more intimately bound up in structures of power by working for government and military contracts and at hybrid spaces like RAND Corporation, which combined military and government contractors with scientific research in a hybrid and interventionist form of knowledge.33 The subjects of my historical research have been similarly entangled in questions of power, class, and subjectivity in Cold War America: they have marketed their expertise to clients, producing psychological knowledge shaped by the needs of their clients and funders.

Like their early 20th-century predecessors, these consulting psychologists turned to corporate

America, creating a relationship that shaped the nature of late 20th-century American psychology, orienting its techniques and theories around the psychological capacities valued by American corporations. My approach to understanding the political stakes of psychology is shaped not only by historians of postwar human sciences, but also takes inspiration from the insights of feminist and anti-colonial science studies scholars who have emphasized how power relations of racism, sexism, and colonialism have shaped scientific epistemologies, practices, and values. 34

Scientific Life, 1955-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 109-134; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Bill Cooke, Albert J. Mills and Elizabeth S. Kelley, “Situating Maslow in Cold War America,” Group Organization Management 30, no. 2 (April 2005): 129-152. 32 Mark Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 33 Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2013). 34 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2005); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).

As historians of psychology have shown, invoking psychology to explain and intervene in social problems was not an inherently reductive project, even though invocations of psychology could act in ways that minimized structural conditions of power. For example, Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s writings on psychiatry and colonialism in the 1950s demonstrate how the discipline of psychiatry acted as a colonial tool in Algeria. At the same time, Fanon’s excavation of the psychic effects of racism and colonialism, which inspired American Black nationalists and critical race scholars, argued that psychology could not be understood without an understanding of the social, including the structural relations of power, race, and colonialism.35

In corporate America, some Black consulting psychologists promoted psychological capacity- building as one partial remedy for the psychic harms caused by structural racism and white supremacy.36

To understand the role of consulting psychologists in developing and deploying psychological techniques, this dissertation extends a core thematic of STS scholars and historians of science—expertise and expert knowledge.37 By wielding techniques of personality testing and training, these consulting psychologists combined elements of scientific expertise, as embodied in their psychological techniques, with business rationales about the economic value of psychology. Networks of consulting firms, think tanks, and research institutes developed and sold psychological techniques. The expertise of the consulting psychologist was a hybrid kind of

35 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. 36 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Scott, Contempt and Pity. 37 Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome; Ted Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

18 expertise that combined qualities of scientific expertise with qualities of an increasingly prominent form of expertise in late 20th- century corporations: the management consultant.

Management consultants positioned themselves as “outside” the corporation, an external standpoint that, consultants claimed legitimized their particular brand of objectivity, even as their consulting work intervened in the inner workings of the corporations.38 Consultants played an integral role in spreading management practices, and in shaping the contours of contemporary corporations. As a new kind of hybrid expert that came to prominence in the 1960s, management consultants drew on the professional fields of law and accounting for legitimacy, and the networks of elite business schools, like Harvard Business School.39 By the 1980s, large companies hired a continual roster of consultants, especially from large global consulting firms like McKinsey & Co.40 McKinsey consultants published some of the best-selling management texts of the 1980s, including In Search of Excellence, which further promulgated ideas about the role of psychological capacities in corporate culture.41 By the late 1960s, companies hired rotating casts of consultants from major firms like McKinsey, and from the network of smaller consulting firms and individuals who deployed psychological techniques.

This longer history of psychological testing, science, and expertise demonstrates how psychological knowledge has been inextricably linked to relations of power in ways that shape the operations of psychological capital. To be made legible, psychological capital rests on bodies

38 Karen Ho, “Corporate Nostalgia? Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective,” in Corporations and Citizenship, ed. Greg Urban (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 267-288. 39 Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018). 40 Hyman, Temp. 41 Indeed, consultants created the very notion of “corporate culture.” McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession; Avery Gordon, “The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management,” Social Text 44 (Autumn-Winter 1995): 3- 30.

19 of scientific knowledge developed about human beings, from psychoanalysis to humanistic psychology. The very capacities that personality tests seek to measure—the capacities that compose psychological capital—became intertwined with corporate values. From the early twentieth-century, psychologists embodied their expertise in psychological tests. They drew on the cultural prestige of science while marketing psychological tests to corporations and the military as ways to improve hiring and productivity and to improve the psychological wellbeing of workers.

1.2 Management, Marketing, and the Corporate Form

This dissertation’s emphasis on the role of consultants in spreading a set of practices of personality testing and psychological training draws on business historians who have narrated the history of management from scientific management and human relations in the early 20th century through the increasing prominence of management consulting and business education after

1950.42 Historical and critical studies of management have argued that management is an ideological and political project that serves as a primary site where people experience relations of power.43 By integrating STS and history of science perspectives on expertise, power, and knowledge into scholarship on management, my dissertation argues that psychological techniques have been important tools in relations of management and in shaping the

42 Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2009); Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 43 Brown, The Corporate Eye; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart; Stephen Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).

20 subjectivities of managers.44 By narrating the history of business through the lens of psychology and affect, my dissertation incorporates the insights of cultural historians of business and capitalism, who have called attention to the cultural meanings and representations of business while still attending to the material conditions of corporate capitalism.45

The corporations that implemented psychological techniques were hierarchical, large-scale, multidivisional organizations with hierarchical lines of authority and a division of ownership from management. Although my focus is on the for-profit corporation, the personality tests and training seminars examined in this dissertation spread to other organizational forms as well, such as governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and universities. In part, this spread of techniques was aided by management consultants who claimed the fundamental similarity of these varied organizational forms, and indeed helped to restructure these organizations according to claims of their shared similarity.46 It is in the for-profit corporation, though, that psychological capital came to be a particularly crucial justification for psychological testing and training.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of economic retrenchment and fears about global competition, American management consultants sold companies on “outsourcing” and

“downsizing” These euphemistically-named practices referred to strategies of reducing labor forces, with the goal of creating “lean corporations” free to pursue aggressive strategies of mergers and acquisitions. Downsizing was one response to the earlier expansion of corporations in the early and mid-20th century that had proliferated the ranks of middle managers.47 In the

44 Townley, “’Know Thyself.’” 45 Brown, Gudis and Moskowitz, Cultures of Commerce; Kenneth Lipartito, “Connecting the Cultural and the Material in Business History,” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 4 (Dec 2013): 686-704. 46 Merina Walker, Damani Partridge, and Rebecca Hardin, “Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form,” Current Anthropology 52, no. S3 (April 2011): S3-S16. Middle managers, as figures who had authority over other workers without having an ownership stake in the corporation, map poorly onto distinctions between labor and capital. 47 Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee.

21 economic climate of the 1970s and 1980s, mergers and acquisitions frequently led to downsizing and restructuring—and middle managers were often the target. Downsizing became one corporate condition for consulting psychologists to insert their expertise: for instance, consulting psychologist Weston Agor drew on the Myers-Briggs to argue that capacities for “intuition” acted as a way to extract more human capital from workers at a moment of downsizing.

To understand this reframing of the subject and the development of new psychological techniques that occurred with post-1960 management requires understanding the longer context of management history. The earlier intertwined history of scientific management and human relations management is particularly significant for creating a body of management experts who emphasized the bodily and psychological capacities of workers. What remains important about scientific management, aside from the braiding together of science and management, is its emphasis on the embodied, productive capacities of workers, elicited through the techniques and specialized knowledge of “efficiency experts.”48 Proponents of scientific management, such as

Frederick Taylor, sought to create a universal science of work that harnessed the capacities of workers for maximum efficiency. The key technique was the “time and motion” study, where experts watched workers perform tasks, broke down tasks into their constituent movements, and then rebuilt the task into its most “efficient” iteration.49 Although industrial factory work was the best known site for implementing techniques for scientific management, office work and even domestic work became the target of efficiency experts such as psychologist Lillian Gilbreth.

Gilbreth, who held a doctorate in applied psychology, brought concern with the affective lives

48 Rabinbach, The Human Motor. 49 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management. (London: Harper and Brothers, 1911). Also see Brown, The Corporate Eye; Rabinbach, The Human Motor.

22 and psychological capacities of workers into the foundations of scientific management.50

Throughout the dissertation, I will show how scientific management served as both a point of departure and a point of contrast for psychologists who emphasized the psychological dimensions of management. For instance, advocates of job redesign carried over techniques of job analysis from scientific management, while arguing that their techniques were different because workers, not managers, had control over the task of job analysis.

The second important context is human relations management, a management approach rooted in the 1920s that emphasized the “human dimensions” of work, including the psychological, emotional, and social arrangements that shaped work and management. The contemporary field of human resource management has been profoundly shaped by earlier human relations management, which developed out of the personnel management movement of the 1910s, and came to the forefront of public and management attention through experiments at

Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory outside of Chicago, conducted by Harvard

Business School researchers in the 1920s. The afterlives of these experiments continue to this day: the Hawthorne Works experiments remain one of the most significant industrial social science experiments, spawning reams of texts, theories, and subsequent experiments into the psychosocial dynamics of work.51 The significance of human relations is twofold: first, as the first well-known business social science experiment, Hawthorne Works is one early moment where the corporation became a key experimental site that produced new knowledge about human psychosocial relations at work. And secondly, human relations management articulated

50 Laurel Graham, “Domesticating Efficiency: Lillian Gilbreth’s Scientific Management of Homemakers, 1924- 1930,” Signs 24, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 633-675. 51 The most thorough historical analysis of the Hawthorne experiments remains Richard Gillespie’s Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

23 psychosocial capacities as crucial to the harmonious function of the corporation; at an interwar moment when management sought to defend corporations against union activism, these claims of

“harmony” concealed ideological anti-union projects.52

In addition to management, scholarship on consumption, advertising, sales, and marketing is an important foundation for understanding the historical entwining of psychology, affect, and corporate value at stake in this dissertation. Consumption has been a generative site for cultural historians of business to understand the corporate shaping of subjectivity—as “consumer citizens,” “sold Americans” or the “creditworthy consumer.” 53 Although my dissertation does not directly take up the history of marketing and consumption, I build on scholarship on this history in order to reinforce my central two arguments: about the importance of psychological techniques in deriving value from psychological capacities, and about the importance of the corporation as epistemological sites for psychology.

Corporate research into the needs and desires of consumers emerged in tandem with the expansion of the corporation.54 In the late 1800s and early 1900s, companies developed marketing and advertising departments as a way to stimulate consumer demand for the mass numbers of goods being produced by the second industrial revolution in America.55 From the earliest days of applied psychology, there was a close relationship between psychology and marketing: in the 1910s, applied psychologists such as Hugo Munsterberg and Walter Dill Scott

52 Baritz, Servants of Power. 53 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic; Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Lauer, Creditworthy; Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity. 54 Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: the Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 55 Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

24 wrote treatises on the psychology of advertising; advertisers turned to psychologists to understand and stimulate consumer desire.56 Psychologist John B. Watson, for example, drew on the principles of conditioning, developed during animal experimentation, to consult for advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.57 Salesmen and sales managers since the early twentieth century were targeted by psychologically-oriented management practices, given the centrality of motivation to sales jobs.58 The integration of psychology into marketing strategies and techniques reached prominence with motivational research in the 1950s and 1960s, most closely associated with the work of Ernest Dichter, who produced ideas of consumers as active, creative agents fulfilling their psychic needs through purchasing consumer goods.59 Beginning in the late

1960s, psychographics, lifestyle and attitude research combined motivational research’s qualitative interest in the consumer psyche with a sophisticated statistical analysis that sought to create typologies of consumers based on their personality traits, as correlated with consumer behavior.60 Psychographic researchers explicitly drew on existing theories and methods of human sciences, including Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology to understand consumer motivation. Niche marketing firms broke down the “mass market” by creating fine-grained classifications of consumers based on personality, race, or age (the “teenage girl” or the

56 Pettit, Science of Deception. 57 Danziger, Naming the Mind. 58 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman; Jessica Burch, “Soap and Hope: Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 4 (December 2016): 741-751. 59 Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). 60 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004); Adam Arivdsson, “General Sentiment: How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy,” The Sociological Review 59, no. 2 (2012): 39-59.

“African-American consumer”).61 These new consumer niches in turn served as justifications for hiring more diverse marketing staff, in a rationale that fed directly into the business case for diversity that I examine in the fourth chapter.

By mid-century, a proliferation of psychological techniques, including psychographic surveys, focus groups, and psychoanalytic “depth interviews,” sought to measure, elicit, and channel human emotional and affective capacities into the consumption of goods, influenced by the (uneven) extension of credit to consumers.62 The marketing and advertising industry in

America mobilized consumers’ affects as sources of corporate value production, making it a central focal point for understanding the circulations of psychological capital. Marketing research has been one important method of mobilizing consumers as active, desiring subjects and of generating value from the measure of affective capacities. Critical theorist Adam Arvidsson, for example, argues that marketing psychographics, which carves consumers up into psychological categories, allows for affect to be made measurable, and thus enter directly into circuits of economic value.63 To show how psychological capital enlists affective capacities as economic value, I draw on scholarship that shows how late 20th-century capitalism harvested affect for the sake of value.64

61 Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Shalini Shankar, Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian-American Consumers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Daniel Guadagnolo, “Segmenting America: Historical Approaches to Niche Marketing” (Dissertation in progress, University of Wisconsin-Madison). 62 Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America (Columbia University Press, 2017); Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “Assembling the Subject of Consumption,” Theory, Culture & Society 14, no. 1 (1997): 1-36. 63 Adam Arivdsson, “General Sentiment: How Value and Affect Converge in the Information Economy,” The Sociological Review 59, no. 2 (2012): 39-59. 64 Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Timothy Mitchell, “The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes its World,” in Politics of Method in the Human Sciences, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Patricia Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2010): 1-22.

Given their investment in psychology and affect, it is not surprising that marketing and advertising firms adopted psychological techniques as part of their management strategies. These firms sought to cultivate their employees’ psychological capital and to foster a creative, diverse, and intrinsically motivated workforce who could tap into consumer desires. For instance, management training seminars run through Young & Rubicam’s direct selling division,

Wunderman, illustrate how psychological theories of self-actualization and achievement motivation filtered into corporate management training practices. By focusing on the management practices of marketing and advertising firms, and by extending analyses of affect and capital to management, this dissertation thus offers one avenue to bring together histories of production and consumption that are often narrated separately.65

Even as consumption became a generative site for 20th-century subjectivity, work still remained one primary site for citizenship, social belonging, and the affective capacities at stake in psychological capital.66 One space to understand the role of affect is through conceptions of affective labor, which explains how our emotions, our social relations, and our bodily and embodied capacities became directly productive of value in late 20th-century capitalism. 67

Feminist scholars have made important contributions to affective labor, by emphasizing how the unwaged affective labor of social reproduction required to maintain and regenerate the labor force, as in the care work generally performed by women, has been directly productive of

65 Brown, Gudis and Moskowitz, Cultures of Commerce. 66 Weeks, The Problem with Work 67 Autonomist Marxists have theorized affective labor as a form of immaterial labor, waged or unwaged, that entailed the created and manipulation of affect. Further, they argue that in conditions of late 20th-century capitalism, it was no longer the category of labor, but the category of life/affect, that served as the primary source of productive value. Maurizio Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labor to Capital Life,” ephemera 4, no. 3 (2004): 187-208; Antonio Negri, “Value and Affect,” boundary 2 26, no. 2: 77-88; Antonio Negri, “Value and Affect,” boundary 2 26, no. 2: 77-88.

27 value.68 In her analysis of the feminized service work of flight attendants, sociologist Arlie

Hochschild theorized emotional labor as a form of labor that entailed managing one’s feelings in order to produce proper states of minds in others. As the American economy became increasingly oriented around the feminized sector of service work, the psychological dimensions of this emotional work—as in the rejoinder to provide “service with a smile”—have become even more central to economic value in ways that reflect and reinforce the gendered nature of work. 69 As historian of capitalism Bethany Moreton argues, the mega-corporation Walmart has successfully mined the existing emotional capacities and religious beliefs of its largely female service workers, treating these capacities as an under-valued, and thus potentially valuable, corporate resource.70 Building on this scholarship in affective and emotional labor, this dissertation shows how consulting psychologists wielded their psychological techniques to advocate all kinds of work, particularly managerial work, as demanding affective and psychological capacities.71

The history of corporate attempts to arrange and derive value from human beings, across marketing and management, has been closely connected to psychology and affect, which makes corporations the primary sites for forming psychological capital. Moreover, this long 20th-century corporate history demonstrates how corporations have been crucial sites for social-psychological experimentation on human beings, as in the Hawthorne experiments, for applying psychological knowledge to sell products, as in marketing, and for generating new psychological knowledge about the human beings in organizations, through psychological techniques. Even as economic and cultural conditions shifted over the course of the 20th century, from the acute concern about

68 Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” (Brooklyn: Petroleuse Press, 1973). 69 Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 70 Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart. 71 Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

28 unions that shaped 1930s human relations management, to the downsizing that pervaded 1980s corporations, consulting psychologists adapted their tools and their rhetoric to trumpet the power of psychology to arrange humans in organizations.

1.3 Value, Capital, and Human Resources

How do you measure the value of a human life, or the value of the embodied psychological capacities that make up an individual? Psychological capital’s closest kin is human capital, an influential economic theory that describes how humans’ embodied capacities and knowledge have entered into circulations of economic value. To understand human capital’s importance, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault and critical scholarship inspired by him that highlight the centrality of human capital to the politics and economics of post-1970 capitalism.72 As Foucault observed, human capital is not a normalizing, disciplinary force, but instead operates by cultivating and optimizing differences within a population and assigning value to such distinctions, in ways that have reinforced practices of racial segregation in America.73 As a powerful idea that has influenced management and policy in America, human capital remixed older ideas about the economic value of human being in the context of economic changes in the post-1970s. In addition to the analytic linkages between human capital and psychological capital, the infiltration of ideas of human capital into human resource management and American policy over the course of the 20th-century, particularly prominent by the 1970s, furnish an important context to understand the historical emergence of psychological capital.

72 The question of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism — was he a critic or an advocate? — is an interesting one, but not my focus. See Mitchell Dean, “Michel Foucault’s ‘Apology’ for Neoliberalism,” Journal of Political Power 7, no. 3 (2014): 433-442; Bernard Harcourt, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures,” Institute for Law and Economics Working Paper No. 614 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Law School Working Paper Series, 2012). 73 Murphy, The Economization of Life.

As an economic theory, human capital was developed in its contemporary version by

University of Chicago neoliberal economists such as Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz, based on the original formulation of Adam Smith.74 In his 1776 Wealth of Nations, Smith described human capital as a form of fixed capital comprised of the “acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants…of the society”—abilities that could be evaluated according to their potential return on investment, to the individual and to the society.75 This core definition was revived in the late

1950s by neoliberal economist Gary Becker at the University of Chicago, who in 1964 theorized human capital as the total stock of knowledge, skills, experience, training, and capacities embodied in human beings that produces economic value, both for individuals, in their ability to earn a wage, and for the aggregate level of the firm or the nation.76 Human capital is an embodied form of capital, because a person could not be separated from their knowledge, skills, or values. Becker emphasized that human capital encompassed not just technical knowledge or skills, but also a whole host of “talents required to succeed in the economic sphere,” which included “particular kinds of personality, persistence, and intelligence.”77 Human capital economists, such as Becker, sought to give an alternative account of labor and value to the

Marxist account of alienation: their account described all workers as possessing “capital,” understood as the set of embodied capacities that could become a source of future earnings.

74 Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 75 Morgan Adamson, “The Human Capital Strategy,” ephemera 9, no. 4 (2009): 271-84. 76 Human capital first became theorized as a way to solve a problem that puzzled economists—the differential distributions of income—and understand the return on investment from education and training. In the late 1950s, economist Robert Solow noted discrepancies in economic growth that could not be accounted for by the growth of the labor force or of physical capital; this “residual” was claimed for education. Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017). 77 Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96.

Human capital economists also extended economic analysis into all spheres of human existence, including decisions to marry or have children.78 Despite admitting a more capacious class of categories into the purview of economics, human capital economics took as its premise the rational economic actor—one who weighs costs and benefits, and who decides on a course of action based on these calculations; one whose preferences are stable, and who looks forward, seeking to maximize future utility.79

Human capital theory is grounded in technologies of measurement that allows otherwise incalculable capacities—including psychological capacities—to become measurable, commensurable, and valuable.80 Individual differences —such as differences in race, education, age, health, gender, or fertility —could be characterized by the rates of economic return they bring the individual, their employer, or their state. Economists understood these differences to stem from individuals’ birth position, early childhood, and their own differential investments in education and training: human capital development, then, could be measured as the increase in future earnings that derived from investment in education or in training.81 In a circular fashion, individuals’ earnings could then be read back as a measure of their own investment in their

78 The theory of human capital treats these intimate decisions as economic behaviour in two senses: 1) that individuals make choices based on weighing costs and benefits; and 2) that these relationships directly contribute to investment in human capital: the parent/child relationship, Becker argued, was the first site for developing human capital. Gary Becker, “Habits, Addictions and Traditions.” Kyklos 45 (1992): 327-346; Jacob Mincer, “Human Capital and Economic Growth,” Economics of Education Review, 3, no. 3 (1984): 195-205. 79 As Michel Foucault notes, economists redefined rationality to describe any behaviour which responds in a “non- random way” to environmental modifications. The point of human capital is not that the entire subject is reduced to homo economicus, but that the grid of intelligibility to understand behaviour is economics; and that this grid becomes the interface between power and the individual. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 252-269. 80 Adamson, “The Human Capital Strategy”; Niels Van Doorn, “The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies,” Cultural Politics 10, no. 3 (2014): 354-375. 81 Jacob Mincer, “Investment in Human Capital and Personal Income Distribution,” Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 4 (Aug., 1958): 281-302.

31 human capital within specific economic circumstances.82 As an economic theory and policy intervention, human capital operates by carving distinctions between lives that increase in value through their investments, and lives that depreciate over time.83 Carving out differences also rests on techniques to measure and rank individuals, making techniques of measurement central to the operations of human capital.84

As an analytic category, human capital and psychological capital are close kin: like human capital, psychological capital rests on techniques to measure individuals, such as psychological tests, that allow humans’ embodied skills, knowledge, and capacities to become economically valuable. One significant difference, however, is in the assumed subject: rather than the “rational actors” of human capital, the subjects of psychological capital are defined by their emotional and affective capacities, such as creative thinking or their desire for self-actualization. In emphasizing these non-rational capacities, psychological capital connects to an older understanding of human beings as “resources” that could be harnessed for the corporation or the nation.

The early 20th-century confluence of economics, personnel management, and industrial psychology has been treated by historians of human resource management as a crucial moment in depicting the capacities of human beings as bundles of latent economic resources.85 Early personnel managers, such as Katherine Blackford, described managers as “stewards” of human resources, who had to avoid “wasting” these natural resources through practices of conservation.

82 Becker, Human Capital, 98. 83 Neferti Tadiar, “Life-Times in Fate Playing,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (2012): 783-802. 84 van Doorn, “The Neoliberal Subject of Value,” 360. 85 Richard Weiskopf and Iain Munro, “Management of Human Capital: Discipline, Security and Controlled Circulation in HRM,” Organization 19, no. 6 (2011): 685-702; Bruce Kaufman, “The Theory and Practice of Strategic HRM and Participative Management,” Human Resource Management Review 11 (2001): 505-533; Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee; Brown, The Corporate Eye.

Blackford was drawing on a broader cultural understanding of human beings as resources connected to eugenics, as one early moment for articulating “human resources” in relation to both race and environmental conservation.86 Indeed, the justification for both slavery and settler colonialism, which dispossessed Indigenous peoples from their land, was that only white

Americans could properly manage resources.87 Given the need to quite literally place a value on human lives, the insurance industry became a crucial site to develop techniques of human capital that was complicit with both slavery and eugenics: for instance, in 1901, eugenicist and economist Irving Fisher constructed mortality tables for the insurance industry which described human beings as resources, akin to forests and rivers, that needed to be conserved.88 To understand the genealogy of human capital and human resource requires understanding these intertwined histories of management and discourses of eugenics and race predicated on the differential valuing of human life.

Techniques developed in slavery and plantation management, designed to commodify

Black bodies, to calculate their productivity, and to extract economic value through expropriating labor, were pivotal to the development of modern corporate management practices and ideas of human capital.89 Slavery, as a system of value accumulation that operates by extracting unwaged labor through exploitative violence, is one origin point for human capital as a project of

86 Ideas about resources also justified settler colonial tactics of resettling of North American Indigenous peoples, on the justification that they were not using their land properly. Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 87 David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Differences: Race and Management in U.S. Labor History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 88 Dan Bouk, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 89 Roediger and Esch, The Production of Differences; Caitlin Rosenthal, “From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750-1880,” Enterprise & Society 14, no. 4 (Dec 2013): 732-748; Bill Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies,” Journal of Management Studies 40, no. 8 (Dec 2003): 1895-1918; Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

33 valorizing human lives as commodities, rather than subjects.90 The branding of slaves, as Simone

Brown argues, was a monitoring technique and early form of biometrics that constituted the

Black body as a commodity.91 As historian of capitalism Caitlin Rosenthal argues, the log books of plantation owners represent an early technique of scientific management that sought to quantify and measure slave labor.92 In addition to quantitative practices, qualitative practices— such as advice literature that preached the virtues of “emotional management” for slave owners—were management techniques that influenced 20th-century management techniques that rely on emotional management.93 Historians have further located the roots of 20th-century corporate accounting, insurance, and finance in practices developed to assess the value and risks of slaves.94 This important scholarship emphasizes the continuities between plantation techniques for managing slave labor and industrial management practices that continued into the twentieth century. 95 Furthermore, in America, with its historical practices of slavery, management itself became synonymous with whiteness in ways that shaped the operations of psychological capital.96 For example, policy-makers and business leaders alike treated psychological capacity for “motivation” as unevenly distributed among racial groups, even

90 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Rosenthal, “From Memory to Mastery”; Daina Ramey Berrey, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). 91 Brown, Dark Matters. 92 Rosenthal, “From Memory to Mastery.” 93 On the managing of emotions as a managerial virtue, see Carol Stearns and Peter Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 94 Brown, Dark Matters. 95 In showing how slave owners appropriated a managerial identity, critical management scholar Bill Cooke roots contemporary management practices in white supremacy. Cooke, “The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies.” 96 Roediger and Esch, The Production of Differences.

34 blaming African-Americans’ ostensible “lack of motivation”—rather than structural segregation—for their economic position.

Ideas derived from human capital infiltrated American policy and corporate human resources departments beginning in the early 1970s, in ways that often reinforced racist claims about psychological capacities in policy interventions.97 Human capital entered the American policy realm in the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration started using some of the same methods of analyzing government effectiveness as businesses.98 Economic retrenchment of the early 1970s, related to the oil crisis and stagflation, offered political opportunities for economists to market themselves as experts, able to address problems of poverty and crime.99 As wedded to the embrace of free enterprise characteristic of the New Right, human capital become a powerful framework for policy interventions around work and poverty.100 Indeed, human capital influenced the Head Start program, an early childhood intervention program begun in the late

1960s and financed by the federal government to provide early childhood education.101

97 Cooper, Family Values; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge; Lester Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015). 98 Melinda Cooper argues that neoliberalism is not about the individual so much as it prioritizes the family as the economic unit, responsible for social services from college education to healthcare costs. Although now human capital is tightly coupled with neoliberalism, to the extent that Foucault and other critical theorists treat human capital as the defining feature of neoliberalism. Melinda Cooper’s important new book, however, distinguishes between human capital’s neoliberal and neo-Keynesian claims in the realm of education policy. Economist Theodore Schultz, for instance, used human capital theory to advocate for public investment in education: since the returns on investment from education accrued to the collective, the collective should help subsidize education. Schultz suggested that the differential education levels of working class, racial minorities, and women, accounted for income inequality and, moreover, was a waste of national resources. In contrast, Walter Friedman and Gary Becker argued that education resulted in a return on investment only for the individual, and thus only the individual—and their immediate family—should be held responsible for their costs. Cooper, Family Values. 99 Jean-Baptiste Fleury, “Drawing New Lines: Economists and Other Social Scientists on Society in the 1960s,” History of Political Economy 42 (2010): 315-342. 100 Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart; Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: WW Norton & Co, 2010). 101 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge.

Especially as integrated into policy, human capital theory justified economic inequalities: if human capital is something individuals choose to work on and develop, then wages are the result of our choices, and thus a natural reflection of people’s own investments.102

By the early 1970s, human resource management practitioners drew on human capital rationales to emphasize the strategic value of human resources to corporations, particularly highlighting the psychological capacities and skills that humans brought to corporations. For human resources practitioners, human capital provided an idiom and set of techniques by which to legitimize the discipline. One 1972 article in Human Resource Management, for example, cited the work of Theodore Schultz to argue that management development was a crucial human capital investment that would garner economic returns for the corporation.103 Indeed, the journal

Human Resource Management had been founded in 1961 to help develop human resources as a strategic function of the corporation.104 As it filtered into corporate management, human capital treated employees as investments that could grow over time: a claim that served as a rationale for investment in management education.105 By the 1980s and early 1990s, corporations used human capital terminology to boost share prices as collateral for new loans and as a rhetorical strategy to measure and make material “knowledge,” so as to incorporate it into corporate balance sheets.106

102 As Lester Spence argues, neoliberal ideas of human capital, have been reproduced within Black communities (as in Black churches’ adoption of prosperity gospel). Spence, Knocking the Hustle. 103 Thomas Connellan, “Management Development as a Capital Investment,” Human Resource Management 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1972): 1-14. 104 The term “human resources” itself entered corporate lexicons through the discipline of economics. First used by institutional economists in the late 19th century, “human resources” acquired its modern meaning in the late 1950s in a report by economist E. Wight Bakke, the founding director of Yale’s Labor and Management Center, titled The Human Resources Function. Weiskopf and Munro, “Management of Human Capital”; Susan Jackson, Randall Schüler and Kaifeng Jiang, “An Aspirational Framework for Strategic Human Resources Management,” The Academy of Management Annals 8, no. 1 (2014): 1-56. 105 Adamson, “The Human Capital Strategy.” 106 Bregje van Eekelen, “Accounting for Ideas: Bringing a Knowledge Economy Into the Picture,” Economy and Society 44, no. 3 (2015): 445-479.

Management consultants developed techniques to measure the value of knowledge as forms of human capital, which measured the “potential to perform,” a dynamic, future-oriented quality that encompassed psychological capacities.107

The history of human resource management and human capital traced here is a crucial source for making claims about the economic value of human lives.108 The consulting psychologists explored in this dissertation explicitly invoked the economic value of humans’ embodied, psychological capacities. Motivational psychologist David McClelland, for example, argued that the bedrock of national economic development and corporate value rested in the psychological capacities of people: namely, their capacity to motivate themselves. In a 1966 article, he directly challenged human capital economists’ focus on measures of formal education to measure human capital, which he argued failed to capture the importance of psychological capacities to the economy. Similarly, intuition consultant Weston Agor argued that personality tests, by measuring the intangible quality of “intuition,” were crucial techniques of human capital measurement. Although neither Agor nor McClelland themselves used the term psychological capital, psychological capital as an analytic term captures the potent mixture of psychological tests, corporate forms, and economic value that are the subject of this dissertation.

1.4 Organization of the Dissertation

The thematics of psychology, corporate management, and value set out in this introduction thread throughout each of the body chapters, which depict a twinned history of the psychological techniques and the capacities they elicit. Each of these chapters takes up one key psychological capacity that composes psychological capital: motivation, as the latent psychic drive towards

107 Weiskopf and Munro, “Management of Human Capital.” 108 Murphy, The Economization of Life.

37 self-actualization and achievement through work; intuition, as a cognitive and affective process of decision-making and perception; and teamwork, as the orientation towards sociality that entailed interacting and managing across differences.

In chapter 2, I use Achievement Motivation Training, a technique developed by psychologist David McClelland and the behavioral sciences consulting firm, McBer & Co, as a case study of pervasive business and psychological research into motivation. The backbone of achievement motivation training was the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a psychoanalytic personality test, known as a “projective test.” The test asked respondents to tell open-ended narratives in response to ambiguous images, and in so doing to “project” their unconscious motives into the narratives they wrote.109 Achievement motivation training began in international development projects in India in the early 1960s and moved to community development projects in African-American communities and to white executive boardrooms by the 1970s. By attending to the transnational migrations of TAT and the format of motivation training, this chapter shows how some techniques adopted by American management had roots in colonial practices of “development” that positioned psychological capital as the foundation of national economic development. As deployed in America, motivation training reinforced racialized hierarchies in ways that reinforced the claims of white policy makers and business leaders. As I argue in this chapter, as theories and techniques of motivation infiltrated corporate management and American policy around poverty and work, the “work ethic” became reconfigured as a latent psychological drive, that, when properly channeled, could serve as an economic resource. The role of the manager became depicted in social-psychological terms, as a

109 On projective tests, see Lemov, Database of Dreams; Jason Miller, “Dredging and Projecting the Depths of Personality,” Science in Context 28, no. 1 (March 2015): 9-30.

38 job of eliciting and channeling the motives of subordinates in a way that sutured motivational psychology to the work ethic.110

The next chapter focuses on the psychological capacity for “intuition,” a holistic, creative, and future-oriented capacity to perceive information and make decisions, which consulting psychologists argued was a crucial capacity for executives in the 1970s and 1980s. I track the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the core technique in the chapter, from its roots in Jungian psychoanalysis and wartime personnel selection tests through its adoption in

1950s creativity research at Berkeley, to its use as a method of cognitive styles in neuroscience, through its adoption in strategic planning, and lastly, to its associations with the “corporate New

Age.” By claiming to measure intuition, long thought to be immeasurable, the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs became a boundary object that moved across disparate worlds, helping consolidate intuition as a valuable attribute for executives. I argue that the intuitive leader became a prominent archetype for the visionary executive in 1970s and 1980s American management, at a time when business leaders perceived the future to be more unpredictable and turbulent than previous eras. Changing gender ideals about the good manager dovetailed with claims about the importance of intuition in management, which acted to revalue and regender historically feminized capacities at a moment when more women were entering into management positions.111 Even as consulting psychologists depicted intuition as an androgynous capacity executive training seminars and business trade literature often reinforced intuition as the property of elite, white male bodies. This chapter concludes by situating the turn to intuition in relation to

110 Weeks, The Problem with Work; Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 111 Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business; Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome.

39 the advent of corporate New Age spirituality to illustrate how the intuitive leader became conceived as a spiritual, visionary guru.

The fourth and last chapter picks up the thread of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, this time to examine how Myers-Briggs’ trainers’ invocation of “diversity of psychological types” in the 1980s and early 1990s mirrored the nascent diversity training movement. In the context of the backlash against affirmative action that followed the 1960s and 1970s implementation of equal employment policies, a burgeoning network of diversity trainers sought to teach managers how to interact with those who were “different” from them. Drawing on the histories of race and psychology, this chapter shows how prejudice was framed as an individual, psychological phenomenon that required unlearning prejudice through small group training. This chapter focuses explicitly on the “psychological training seminar,” a form of management training dedicated to cultivating psychological skills through small groups. I trace the technique of the psychological training seminar from the National Training Laboratories’ development of the

“training group” and Esalen’s “encounter groups” in the late 1940s through 1960s, through the diversity training seminars and team building seminars in the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter demonstrates how corporate America’s embrace of a business case for diversity presented individual differences, properly managed, as a potential source of psychological capital. The capacity of concern here is the capacity to “interact across differences.” In this chapter, I show how the managerial understanding of differences folded together racial and personality differences, thus detaching race from the historic legacy of segregation and discrimination. At the same time as diversity became rhetorically valued in corporations in the 1980s and 1990s, the

40 value of whiteness continued to circulate as capital, with diversity initiatives recentering the whiteness of corporate management.112

The conclusion briefly gestures to the contemporary uses and critiques of the Myers-Briggs in contemporary North American culture, to reveal the continuing influence of personality tests as modes of fostering psychological capital. At the same time as the test publishers seek to exert control over their proprietary commodity—a control that has hampered my own access into their archives—unofficial versions permeate online culture, as do forums where Internet strangers bond over shared personality types. Indeed, one origin point of this project was my discovery of these Internet forums, populated by anonymized strangers who zealously swapped personality types and treated the Myers-Briggs as a master narrative to understand themselves. Motivating my research from the start was my attempt to understand how personality tests, through their deployment in corporate practices, have become tools of contemporary selfhood. Even though everyday investments in personality tests motivate my interest in personality tests, this dissertation is not an anthropological or ethnographic study of people’s engagement with personality tests, and how these tests make and remake subjectivity. It does not directly address the way psychological tests and capacities are directly experienced by people, and how people might accept, or resist, the categories of the test.

Instead, I use archives in the history of American business and psychology to show how this network of consulting psychologists developed and deployed psychological tests and training seminars in corporations, particularly targeting managerial ranks. I draw on manuals for psychological tests and training seminars, conference proceedings from Myers-Briggs conferences, consulting reports and memos, business trade literature, and popular management

112 Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June 2013): 2151-2226; Shankar, Advertising Diversity.

41 books. These materials make up a body of “grey literature” that reveals how shared sets of protocols for psychological testing and training circulated among American corporations.113

Nor does this dissertation address the question of the accuracy or correctness of the claims of consulting psychologists or their techniques. I do not ask, for instance, if the Myers-Briggs is correct in its understanding of psychological types, or if implementing psychological training in corporate management has resulted in greater corporate productivity. Instead, I have sought to show how these psychological techniques came to pervade American corporate management practices as ways to harvest value from people’s psychological capacities. By the mid-1990s, the practices and theories addressed in this dissertation had become entrenched in corporate culture.

Indeed, the management theories and theorists that populate this dissertation—like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the business case for diversity—continue to animate contemporary management practices and pedagogy.114

This dissertation reveals how corporate management acted as a space for wide swaths of people, from participants in consumer focus groups to middle managers, to encounter psychological theories and techniques. As just one example, the Myers-Briggs has become a key technique through which people come to understand themselves: people identify as introverts or extraverts, participate in forums dedicated to their particular type, and partake in self- development seminars.115 Corporate training groups have attracted a wide range of participants, from community leaders to corporate middle managers, thus serving as spaces for people to

113 Grey literature refers to a network of unofficial reports, working papers, and manuals produced by organizations outside of standard publishing channels. 114 In situating these theories in the broader cultural, scientific, and economic culture of America, this dissertation contributes to the recent “historical turn” in management and organizational studies. Stephen Cummings, Todd Bridgman, John Hassard and Michael Rowlinson, A New History of Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Gabrielle Durepos and Albert Mills, “ANTi-History, Relationalism and the Historic Turn in Management and Organization Studies,” Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, 12, no. 1 (2017): 53-67. 115 Ian Hacking calls attention to the looping effects of psychological classifications. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul.

42 encounter psychology. At the same moment as I finish the final stages of writing, news stories report on corporations’ unethical use of personality tests to harvest personal data: a scandal made possible by the history of personality testing and psychological capital explored in “Personality,

Incorporated.”

This dissertation provides a historical account of the twinned histories of corporate psychological testing and the capacities that such tests sought to measure and cultivate. It makes two core arguments: first, that personality tests have aimed not just to measure, but also to elicit and channel, humans’ psychological capacities as sources of economic value, or psychological capital. And second, it argues that corporate management has been a central epistemological site for psychology. In weaving together psychology, corporations, and value, this dissertation excavates how psychological tests have become corporate techniques whose history has been intertwined with corporate management practices. The standards for what constitutes good psychological techniques, as well as the capacities that these tests measure and cultivate, have been shaped by corporate contexts. Given psychological tests’ prominence as modes of selfhood, this means that the very categories by which many North Americans understand themselves— myself included—have been shaped by these personality tests.

Chapter 2 Measuring Managers

2.1 Introduction

On Labor Day 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a radio broadcast from Camp David, the famed American presidential retreat. Nixon praised the American people’s “competitive spirit,” their orientation towards achievement, and above all, the “inner drive,” “ingrained in the American character,” that compelled them to work: the work ethic. The core claim of the work ethic—that work holds inherent moral worth, as the foundation of citizenship and social belonging—remained robust, Nixon declared. American productivity in the 1970s, Nixon continued, depended on the work ethic, as channeled through the appropriate configuration of job training, management, and worker motivation.1 Nixon found that the contours of the work ethic had shifted in the past decade, as workers’ changing psychological needs drove them to seek responsibility and personal growth through work. Invoking coded racialized terms, Nixon described the work ethic as threatened by certain counter-figures:

“members of disadvantaged groups” who “deliberately avoid work by going on welfare” rather than take “jobs that they considered menial.”2 For an American president to trumpet the work ethic in a Labor Day speech is not surprising; invoking the work ethic is a time-honored tradition in American politics. This speech’s significance lies in its articulation of the work ethic as composed of inner drives, psychic needs for personal growth and responsibility, and motivation—all resources to be harnessed for economic ends of corporate and national

1 Richard Nixon, “Address to the Nation on Labor Day,” Speech at Camp David, Sept 6, 1971, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3138. 2 Just two weeks prior, Nixon had announced major economic changes, in the form of wage and price freezes intended to curb inflation; his administration would slash social benefits and implement punitive ‘workfare’ policies on welfare recipients.

43 44 productivity. By describing the “threats” to the work ethic using coded racialized terms, Nixon’s speech demonstrates the class and racial politics that underpinned political ideals of work in

America.

In describing the work ethic as an intrinsic psychological drive, Nixon’s speech reflects how motivational psychology had become a political resource to understand work in late- twentieth century America. My claim is not that Nixon read motivational psychologists

(although his speech writers may well have); my claim is that the political contours of the work ethic were framed, in part, through the idiom of motivational psychology. This chapter shows how a cadre of motivational experts made this psychological version of the work ethic legible to corporations and to policy-makers from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Experts in motivational psychology—such as David McClelland, Abraham Maslow, and Frederick Herzberg— consulted for major corporations, such as Mattel, Nonlinear Systems, and Texas Instruments. Their texts on motivation became required reading for management and their techniques, from projective tests to job redesign initiatives, shaped management practices. Motivation had already been a central category in twentieth-century psychology, to the extent that personality psychologists often described personality as the sum total of motives. In psychology, the study of motivation began as an applied science of human engineering, tied to early twentieth-century corporate projects of marketing and management.3 The specific articulation of motivational psychology from the

1960s to mid-1980s combined psychoanalysis (projective tests and claims about the unconscious), experimental methods, psychometric testing techniques, and humanistic psychology. Drawing on sources that include testing manuals, management training workbooks,

3 Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Founds Its Language (New York: Sage Books, 1997).

45 policy reports, social surveys, and trade literature, this chapter unpacks the relationship between the work ethic and this new motivational psychology.

In this chapter, I theorize a historically specific configuration of the work ethic that emerged at the nexus of psychology, corporate management, and policy research in America from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s. I argue that during this time period, the work ethic came to be figured as a bundle of latent psychological motives that could be activated through techniques of psychological testing, management training, and job redesign. Shaped by cultural standards and economic circumstances, these latent psychological motives were understood to exist in unevenly distributed forms across populations, based on racial, class, and gendered characteristics. As conceptualized by sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century, the

Protestant work ethic, developed over the course of the 19th century, had stitched economic and spiritual values together: accompanying the rational, self-interested pursuit of economic gains was the injunction to treat work as a spiritual vocation—a calling—whose purpose exceeded economic ends.4 The work ethic, as feminist studies scholar Kathi Weeks argues, is an ideology at once remarkably tenacious and eminently flexible.5 While its constitutive claim—devotion to work as the center of life—remains consistent, the rewards promised by the ethic vary in

4 As Weber described it, the Protestant work ethic was a psychological attitude needed to be trained through a “long and arduous process of education.” In Weber’s example, raising piece-rates for workers who subscribed to the traditional work ethic, induced them to work less, rather than more, because they treated work was a finite activity undertaken to satisfy existing material standards, not a route to increased prosperity. For Weber, the transition from a traditional view of labor to the Protestant work ethic offered an explanation for the historical emergence of Western capitalism. Wedded to the power of technoscience, the rational organization of free labor—or rationalized unfree labor, as on the plantations of the American south—explained Western economic prosperity. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner Books, 1930): 62. 5 I am indebted to the analysis of the work ethic in Kathi Weeks, who argues that under conditions of post-Fordism, the work ethic becomes directly productive of economic value and of individual subjectivity. She emphasizes the psychological dimensions of the postindustrial work ethic, as a force that “targets the energies, capacities, desires of the body, entailing the “cultivation of habits, the internalization of routines, the incitement of desires, and the adjustment of hopes.” Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 54.

46 historically specific ways, from the Calvinist promise of salvation, to the nineteenth-century promise of social mobility. 6 Indeed, part of the power of the motivational psychology examined in this chapter is precisely how it drew on and reinscribed long-entrenched discourses of the work ethic, while mobilizing a new constellation of psychological techniques, motivational theories, and corporate strategies within late 20th-century America. From the 1960s onward, the secular understanding of the work ethic drew not on Calvinism, but on humanistic psychology and participatory management, which depicted work as a site for psychological satisfaction. In this conceptualization of the corporate work ethic, the role of the manager became crucial as the mediator of motives. What is at stake here is a secular work ethic suitable for late-twentieth- century corporate subjects, who must find meaning amidst giant corporations—corporations which must in turn extract value from the psychological capacities of laboring bodies. Although this version of the work ethic betrays significant continuity with the longer tradition of the work ethic, the psychological techniques developed to measure and train these two motives, as well as the corporate adoption of these psychological frameworks, marks a distinct historical moment in the work ethic.

Specifically, I show how this articulation of the work ethic braided together two motives newly theorized by psychologists in the late 1950s and early 1960s: the achievement motive and the self-actualization motive.7 The achievement motivation, as the orientation to set goals, take calculated risks, and assume personal responsibility, was described by David McClelland, a

6 For the classic treatment of the work ethic in industrial America, see Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 7 By describing the work ethic as latent, I am riffing on Joanna Radin’s theorization of latency, which describes how indigenous people’s tissue samples were kept in a state of latency as a potential source of value, stockpiled for the anticipatory future. In a similar fashion, the motivation to work was described as a latent potential, able to be activated through the right set of techniques and right motivational climate, to serve as a resource. Joanna Radin, “Latent Life: Concepts and Practices of Human Tissue Preservation in the International Biological Program,” Social Studies of Science 43, no. 4 (2013): 484-508.

47 midcentury motivational psychologist who spent his career researching and teaching at Harvard and consulting for corporate clients through his company, McBer & Co.8 Founded in Boston in

1965 as the Behavioral Science Center, McBer was a Boston-based consulting firm—now owned by the multinational conglomerate Hay Group—which ran management training seminars for corporations, non-profits, and government bodies from the late 1960s onwards.9 As an entry point to understand motivational psychology’s relationship to the work ethic, this chapter follows

McClelland and McBer’s attempts to measure and cultivate the work ethic, starting from their initial 1950s research into achievement motivation using the Thematic Apperception Test, an image-based psychoanalytic test, to the corporate training seminars run by McBer. From the early 1960s onwards, McClelland’s consulting firm McBer ran motivation training seminars in

America and abroad that sought to activate and channel these motives towards economic success.10 Although their approach targeted the individuals’ fantasy life as a route to behavioral change, McBer scoped outwards from the individual to emphasize the ‘organizational climate’ surrounding and motivating the individual. McClelland specifically sought to understand achievement motivation as the force that underpinned the Protestant work ethic, and thus

8 After receiving a doctorate in psychology from Yale, David McClelland spent his career as both a consultant and a professor, first as Wesleyan (1947-1953) and then at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary hub for the postwar behavioral sciences. 9 The organizational affiliations of McClelland and these researchers underwent several different names and mergers. McBer & Co began as the Behavioral Science Center, a division of Sterling Institute, changing its name in the late 1960s. In 1982, the company was briefly acquired by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, the survey research firm which published social surveys on the work ethic. In 1984, McBer was acquired by Hay Group, a human resources consulting firm that today remains a global conglomerate. The Hay Group’s original incarnation, launched in Philadelphia in 1943, was the first company where the creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator tried out personality testing. 10 In addition to McClelland, McBer & Co had a roster of ‘consulting psychologists’ who developed curriculum and led seminars. Affiliated ‘consulting psychologists’ included: David Berlew, the first CEO of McBer, and professor of organizational psychology at MIT’s Sloane School; George Litwin, who also directed Intermedia, an experiential learning company that collaborated on motivation training; David Winter, psychologist and close collaborator with McClelland on his earliest research into motivation; Richard Boyatzis, who became director of McBer in 1976, and would be COO of Yankelovich and Associates.

48 accounted for economic prosperity under capitalism.11 Through psychological techniques of testing and training, the category of motivation operationalized the work ethic, making it legible to psychologists, policy researchers, and corporations; motivation served as a proxy measure for the capitalist work ethic.12

By treating motivation as a psychological capacity oriented towards work, this chapter contributes to the dissertation’s overall project of articulating psychological capital as a form of human capital. McClelland described achievement motivation training as a technique to cultivate psychological capacities of citizens, describing psychological motives of citizens as the fulcrum on which national economic development and business success rested. As McClelland put it,

“the question of what happens to our civilization or to our business community depends quite literally on how much time tens of thousands or even millions of us spend thinking about achievement, about setting moderate achievable goals, taking calculated risks, assuming personal responsibility, and finding out how well we have done our job.”13 This one line extends outward from the intimate fantasy life of individuals to the economic fate of business, even to Western civilization. Human capital economists, who developed human capital as a way to calculate the return on investment from education, generally adopted formal measures of education—like number of college graduates—to calculate economic growth.14 McClelland argued that these

11 A technical term in psychological testing, operationalization that refers to how psychological capacities are translated into codified test, making capacities knowable, measurable, comparable. Adrian Furnham, “The Protestant Work Ethic: A Review of the Psychological Literature,” European Journal of Social Psychology 14 (1984): 87-104. 12 As the policy report Work in America suggested, psychological instruments measuring motivation could serve as proxy measures for the otherwise vague term, “Protestant work ethic.” Although difficult to “measure the past allegiance of a populace to an ideology” contemporary social scientists “can measure the impact of the present work environment on youth’s motivation to work.” James O’Toole et al, Work in America: Report of a Special Task Force to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1972): 40. 13 David McClelland, “Business Drive and National Achievement,” Harvard Business Review 40, no. 4 (1962): 112. 14 For more on human capital, see Chapter 1.

49 formal measures were flawed because they failed to account for the psychological motivation to use knowledge to achieve: “people have got to want to achieve, to care about putting their knowledge to productive uses.”15 Instead of formal measures of education, McClelland argued that achievement motivation constituted the best measure of a nation’s human capital. Drives and desires, not just graduates and GDPs, fueled the macro-economy, and served as its barometer.

The achievement motivation describes the first half of the work ethic—the rational pursuit of economic ends. The second half of Weber’s notion of the work ethic—devotion to work as a spiritual calling—gestures to the self-actualization motive, most closely associated with the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow.16 Maslow’s theory of motivation—the

“hierarchy of needs”—arranged all human needs into a ladder with physiological needs for food and shelter at the base, moving up towards safety, belonging, esteem and, at the apex, self- actualization.17 The hierarchy of needs was, quite literally a hierarchy—one that bore the influence of extant scientific and social hierarchies in Cold War America.18 From the earliest articulations of his motivational theories, Maslow described the hierarchy of needs using workplace examples. His handwritten notes, for example, list various workplace perks under each category: security needs included insurance and sick leave; ego needs, a plush office; and

15 David McClelland, “Does Education Accelerate Economic Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 14, n. 3 (1966): 269. 16 Maslow first proposed his theory of motivation in a 1943 article. Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370-396. On humanistic psychology, see Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (New York: Harper-Collins, 2012). 17 Like the experimental apparatus of achievement motive, the conceptual apparatus based higher-order motives on the basic need for food. 18 On Maslow’s Cold War connections, see Bill Cooke, Albert J. Mills and Elizabeth S. Kelley, “Situating Maslow in Cold War America,” Group & Organization Management 30, no. 2 (April 2005): 129-152. For a mostly biographical account of how Maslow’s ideas on gender connected to boundary questions in history of psychology, see Ian Nicholson, “‘Giving Up Maleness’: Abraham Maslow, Masculinity, and the Boundaries of Psychology.” History of Psychology 4, no. 1 (2001): 79-91.

50 self-actualization encompassed management training programs themselves (Figure 1).19

Distancing himself from the counter-cultural movements, Maslow cautioned that self- actualization did not entail self-indulgent “loafing and loitering,” but required discipline and hard work.20 “Highly evolved” people, according to Maslow, were those for whom "work actually becomes part of the…individual's definition of himself.21 Motives were constantly expanding, never fully satiated: once we satisfy one rung on the ladder, we reach for steadily higher motives.

What it meant to be a person, for Maslow, was to be driven by needs: “man is a perpetually wanting animal.”22 It is precisely our yet unsatisfied needs that serve as our prime motivator and the organizing principle of behaviour—indeed, the organizing principle of selfhood. “We speak of a self,” Maslow wrote, as “which has to be sought for, and which has to be uncovered and then built upon, actualized, taught, educated.”23 The self-actualization motive—as a future- oriented potentiality that drove humans to seek meaning and fulfillment in the world—was precisely the continual process of striving for self-actualization; the journey, not the destination.

Maslow presented self-actualization as not just compatible with corporate work, but as a motive that could best be realized through corporate work.

19 Abraham Maslow, “First Attempt—Hierarchy of Needs Draft,” (no date), Box MM4427, Folder 3, Abraham Maslow Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 20 Abraham Maslow, “Notes on Industry at Nonlinear Systems,” (Del Mar, California: Non Linear Systems): 26. Abraham Maslow Papers, Box MM430, Folder 7, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 21 Abraham Maslow, “Self-Actualizing Work,” in Maslow Business Reader, ed. Deborah C. Stevens (New York: Wiley Books, 2000), 3. 22 Abraham Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 390. 23 Quoted in Robert Tannehill, Motivation and Management Development (London: Buttersworth, 1970): 9.

Figure 1. “Hierarchy of Needs—First Attempt,” Box MM4427, Folder 3, Abraham Maslow Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron.

For Maslow, as for the management theorists who invoked him, the corporation served as both the prime site for people to fulfill their higher psychological needs and the ideal experimental site to study motivation.24 Humanistic psychology’s contribution to management theory was to suggest that work could be a site for the fulfillment of psychological, not just material needs and that given the appropriate arrangements of psychological capacities, organizational climates, and job design, people liked to work.25 In the early 1960s, theorists of

‘participatory management’ like Douglas McGregor drew on Maslow’s theories of motivation to advocate a new style of management—one based on decentralized, non-hierarchical, and non-

24 In emphasizing work as the route towards self-actualization, Maslow also distanced himself from the countercultural movement, who had picked up humanistic psychology via the human potential movement. Nadine Weidman, “Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s,” In Groovy Science: The Counter-Cultures and Scientific Life, 1955-1975, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, 109-134 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 25 Participatory management proponent Douglas McGregor distinguished between Theory X and Theory Y: while the Theory X mindset assumed that people naturally dislike work, and thus need to be coerced or corralled to work, the Theory Y mindset presumed that work could be a source of pleasure. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).

52 authoritarian principles, which allowed workers to satisfy their psychological needs. Managers at major corporations, such as Young & Rubicam and Texas Instruments, were taught that their role was not to coerce unwilling workers into an unpleasant duty, but to channel their motives for achievement and self-actualization towards organizational goals. One management training manual from 1964, for instance, explained that people spend so much time at work—“almost a third of their lives” not because of financial need or compulsion, but “to gain satisfaction of needs which motivate their behavior and press them forward.”26 Corporate audiences gobbled up

Maslow, who offered them a powerful rhetoric to argue that corporations were compatible with—and even central to—human flourishing in postwar America.27 Working as a consultant for California corporations in the mid-1960s, Maslow described the corporation as a laboratory to study human motivation.28 To his consulting client Saga Corporation, Maslow described the corporation as a “test tube experiment,” a source of knowledge “far more useful than the laboratory.”29

This chapter thus contributes to the second overall argument of the dissertation: that corporations became epistemological sites for psychology. Here, I show how corporations became the key epistemological sites for learning about motivation, as spaces of both pedagogy and experimentation. Corporate training served as pedagogical spaces for people to encounter motivational psychology: at Mattel’s McBer-led training, they read hand-outs from McClelland

26 William Underwood, “People’s Needs and Motivations,” (American National Red Cross Management School, 1964): 5. National Training Laboratories Papers, Box 256, Folder “The American National Red Cross Basic Management School.” On the history of the National Training Laboratories, see chapter 4. 27 In making this claim, I draw on the argument of Jenna Alden, “Bottom-Up Management; Participative Philosophy and Humanistic Psychology in American Organizational Culture, 1930-1970” (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2012). 28 Maslow spent a year as a visiting fellow for California company Non-Linear Systems, whose CEO, Andrew Kay, had been inspired by Maslow’s work on motivation. Maslow, “Notes on Industry at Nonlinear Systems.” 29 Abraham Maslow, “The Dynamics of American Management,” In Maslow Business Reader, ed. Deborah C. Stephens, 159-170 (New York: Wiley Books, 2000).

53 called “That Urge to Achieve” and Maslow’s “Theory of Human Motivation”; Young &

Rubicam training manuals featured diagrams of the hierarchy of needs; job training programs taught unemployed Americans that cultivating their motivation would be crucial to their workplace success. Job design explicitly presented itself as experimental initiatives, as did policy interventions in the war on poverty. In emphasizing how psychological frameworks of motivation influenced policy interventions and political rhetoric around employment, I bridge histories of policy, modernization, and racial capitalism with histories of postwar psychology that show how psychology became a prominent resource in in American public life.30

I start with an introduction to David McClelland’s theoretical and experimental studies of motivation, showing how projective testing became an important way to study motives, both in

America and as part of cross-cultural anthropological and modernization initiatives. In the second section, I show how management training programs—run by McBer and at marketing company Young & Rubicam—adapted the entrepreneurial ethos to the requirements of corporate life, teaching managers that they should act as mediators of motives. My third section focuses on entrepreneurial and job training within Black communities, showing how white trainers at

McBer and Black community leaders drew on different idioms of motivation as a psychological capacity that allowed for Black economic participation. Here, I most explicitly address the whiteness of the work ethic as an ideological force that influenced the formation of social institutions and policies in the 1960s and 1970s, including job training programs. In my last section, I examine how corporate job redesign programs, especially at Texas Instruments, drew on theories and techniques of motivation to counter the dehumanizing effect of work across

30 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Joy Rohde, Armed by Expertise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

54 multiple levels of the organization. Throughout the chapter, I emphasize how the motives for self-actualization and achievement underpinned a wide range of experimental initiatives and assumptions about work that remain with us today.

2.2 Measuring the Work Ethic: The Thematic Apperception Test

How do you measure a motive? This section shows how David McClelland and affiliated researchers measured the “achievement motive” by modifying the Thematic Apperception Test, an image-based psychoanalytic test which asked test-takers to tell open-ended, free form stories to image prompts.31 Projective tests sought to expand the reach of measurement into previously inaccessible domains, such as the unconscious, so that unconscious motives could enter into calculations of economic value.32 However, the apparatus of psychological testing with the TAT did not just index motives, but incited motives.33 McClelland treated the fantasy life of individuals as the route towards behavioral change: “what a man imagines, so he is,” McClelland proclaimed, and “if he changes what he imagines, he will change in significant ways.”34

Historian of science Rebecca Lemov describes projective tests as a technology that, quite literally, made the self manifest—a technique that produces the subjectivity it then evaluated. In this section, I track the TAT from its initial development in Harvard’s psychoanalytic clinic in

31 Rebecca Lemov, “X-Rays of Inner Worlds: The Mid-20th-Century Projective Test Movement,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47, no. 3 (2011): 51-78; Jason Miller, “Dredging and Projecting the Depths of Personality: the Thematic Apperception Test and the Narratives of the Unconscious,” Science in Context 28, no. 1 (2015): 9-30. 32 Lemov, “X-Rays of Inner Worlds.” Lemov argues that the TAT expanded measurement into the subconscious, but she does not attend to the business uses of the TAT. 33 “In a projective test, a stimulus card such as an inkblot becomes a spot where the self moves and becomes visible as a pattern of interactions. It is glimpsed—there!—at the place where the card or paper tool meets the user or test taker.” Rebecca Lemov, Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 38. 34 David McClelland, “Proposal for Research on Motivation Change,” (undated and unpublished): 4. David McClelland Papers, Box 2888, Folder 5, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron.

55 the 1930s, through McClelland’s motivational experiments at Wesleyan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and into its cross-cultural adoption by anthropologists and psychiatrists in the

1950s, highlighting the business values and gender and race politics embedded in achievement motivation from the beginning.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) was created by psychologists Henry Murray and

Christiana Morgan at Harvard in the 1930s.35 Morgan and Murray took pictures from magazines or popular culture and stripped away identifying details to create a set of pictures that featured ambiguous scenes of people or animals. The test prompted subjects to compose imaginative stories about the thoughts, motives, and feelings of figures in the pictures, by asking open-ended questions: “what is happening in the picture?” “what just happened?” and “what is the subject thinking or feeling?” Like the Rorschach test, which presents subjects with ambiguous inkblot images, the TAT was a projective test—so named because test-takers would “project” their unconscious fantasies, fears, and feelings onto the ambiguous material provided, be it inkblots, in the case of the Rorschach, or photos, in the case of the TAT. The TAT was rooted in a psychoanalytic understanding of motives, which suggested that the drives that motivated humans lay below the threshold of consciousness, in the murky depths of the unconscious. Subjects themselves might not even be aware of the fundamental motives that drove them. Melding psychoanalytic claims about the unconscious with the codified techniques of psychological testing, the TAT represents one route for psychoanalytic ideas to be disseminated in mainstream

American society.36

35 While Morgan and Murray co-authored the test, her name was removed from later editions and her contributions obscured in the historical record. For a biography of Morgan, see Claire Douglas, Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 36 On psychoanalysis in America, see John C. Burnham, ed, After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

McClelland first adopted the Thematic Apperception Test to study motives—specifically the relationship between physiological needs, such as hunger, and higher-order motives—while teaching at Wesleyan (between 1947 and 1953).37 To study this relationship, McClelland’s student, John Atkinson, developed a research protocol that experimentally aroused the ‘hunger motive,’ either through depriving subjects of food, or showing them films depicting particular food imagery. Then they measured the psychological effects of this motive pattern on the subjects’ fantasies, as reflected in their TAT stories. Perhaps unsurprisingly, subjects who had been deprived of food were more likely to tell stories incorporating food imagery. But more importantly, this early research demonstrated, for McClelland and his students, that higher-order psychological needs were as fundamental as our basic need for hunger.38 The TAT scoring manual scoring from 1953 compared achievement motivation to hunger, because “like hunger, achievement motivation has been shown to energize the organism…to orient attention to related stimuli…and to select behavior.”39

The McClelland laboratory drew not only on Murray and Morgan’s technique of the

TAT, but also on their theory of motives. Based on TAT and interview data, clinical observation, and reading in psychoanalysis, Murray and Morgan had developed an understanding of motives that would be foundational for achievement motivation training.40 A motive, according to

37 McClelland encountered projective testing during WWII, when he replaced personality psychologist Donald MacKinnon as a lecturer at Bryn Mawr during World War II. During the war, MacKinnon worked with Henry Murray at the Office of Strategic Services developing an arsenal of tools, including the TAT, for officer selection. For more on MacKinnon and the assessment center methodology, see chapter 3. David Winter, “‘Toward a Science of Personality Psychology’ David McClelland’s Development of Empirically Derived TAT Measures,” History of Psychology 1, no. 2 (1998): 130-53. 38 Winter, “‘Toward a Science of Personality Psychology.” 39 Charles Smith, John Atkinson, David McClelland, and Joseph Veroff, ends, Motivation and Personality: Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992): 145. This handbook reprinted the scoring guidelines found in David McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co, 1961). 40 Henry Murray was particularly influenced by Carl Jung, who would also be an influence on the Myers-Briggs Tye Indicator creators, in chapter 3. Henry Murray would also be an important figure in the origins of assessment center

Murray, was an “latent attribute of an organism”; an “organic potentiality or readiness to respond in a certain way under given conditions.”41 It was a need that drove the organism to act to resolve the tension the need had provoked in order to seek satisfaction. McClelland maintained that motives were not cognitive, conscious, or rational. He also sharply distinguished motives from behavior. “We can conceive of a man high in power motivation,” McClelland wrote, “who acts in no powerful ways at all, but sits home and reads sex and adventure novels and watches boxing on television.”42 Given the unconscious nature of motives, any measures that tried to rely on cognitive, rational explanations—like self-reporting personality tests—were bound to fail.43

Motives also served a pragmatic purpose as the object of study for psychologists, in allowing them to gather and relate divergent phenomena. As McClelland explained, motives represented a

“higher order of behavioral abstraction than any given act itself which has not the capacity to stand.”44

Morgan and Murray had enumerated a lengthy list of specific motives, divided into primary (bodily) needs and secondary (psychic) needs. From those, McClelland’s research team chose three: the need for power, the need for affiliation, and the need to achieve. All three motives would be significant for McBer’s motivational training, but none more important than the need to achieve, the target of achievement motivation training. As defined by Murray, the

methodology, discussed in chapter 3. The TAT was also used as part of officer selection for the Office of Strategic Services. 41 Henry Murray, Explorations in Personality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 [1938]), 461. 42 David McClelland, Power: The Inner Experience (New York: Halsted Press, 1975), 17. 43 McClelland cited neuroscience research into severed hemispheres to advocate the unknowability of motives to the conscious mind: people were as divorced from their own motives as someone with a severed corpus callosum. David McClelland, “Some Reflections on the Two Psychologies of Love.” Journal of Personality 54, n. 2 (1986): 334-353. This same research into split brains will be discussed in chapter 2, as important connection to discussions of intuition. 44 David McClelland, “Testing for Competence rather than for ‘Intelligence,’” American Psychologist 28, no. 1 (1973): 5.

“need to achieve” encompassed the need to “overcome obstacles, to exercise power, to strive to do something difficult as well and as quickly as possible.”45 McClelland’s researchers did not significantly alter the original definition: they described the “fundamental psychological characteristics underlying achievement motivation” as the “development of a sense of potency and autonomy, and establishment of personally meaningful and challenging goals.” 46

Achievement motivation—abbreviated to n Ach— thus encompassed initiative, personal responsibility, willingness to take calculated risks, and the desire for concrete feedback.

While convinced that fantasy life and narrative analysis were important, McClelland and his researchers sought to make TAT scoring more rigorous and empirical by codifying responses into a standardized scoring system. As developed by Murray and Morgan, subjects narrated their stories orally to the psychologist, who interpreted their stories according to their own subjective judgment. McClelland’s TAT protocols used written stories and a standardized method of coding stories for motives. Researchers made lists of key themes correlated with the motive under study, and then counted instances of such themes in subjects’ narrative in order to produce an overall measure of the strength of the motive. For a story to score highly in achievement motivation, for instance, it had to reference an “achievement goal”— defined as "success in competition with some standard of excellence.” Test-takers received additional points for themes of instrumental activity, anticipatory goal states, and the appropriate affective orientation towards the achievement goal (disappointment in case of failure, or satisfaction if success).47 The scoring

45 Murray, Explorations in Personality, 81. 46 George Litwin, “Project on Achievement Motivation and the Youth Culture,” (Intermedia), Box 112, David McClelland Papers, Harvard University Archives. 47 “In examining a story for the achievement motive we first determine whether there is concern for competition with a standard of excellence, or long-term involvement with an achievement goal, or au unique accomplishment. If so, the story receives on point and we go on to see if it contains evidence of one or more of the following scoring categories, each of which receives an additional point if it appears.” “Stories Showing Achievement Motivation,” (McBer & Co: no date), David McClelland Papers, Box 101, Harvard University Archives.

59 manual provided sample stories high in achievement motivation, reflecting themes like business success, upward mobility, long-term goals, or hierarchical relationships (Figure 2): “The son has been successful in his business largely because of the training he received in his home as a child”; “A boss is talking to her secretary, telling her what has to be done”; a businessman who

“has dreamed of being a big executive,” and feared losing control of the company in a merger.48

The very theoretical apparatus to understand psychological motivation embedded normative claims about business life.

For McClelland, cultural and racial norms shaped the very definition of achievement motivation, as it shaped the expression of all motives. In America, long-term goals counted as

“evidence of achievement motivation,” McClelland wrote in the scoring manual, only because in

“contemporary American society, success in the career usually demand successful competition with a standard of excellence.” These standards for success were inculcated in childhood by social institutions and parental relationships. Parents, particularly mothers, could reinforce or block achievement motivation depending on their parenting style. Children learned that meeting standards or failing to meet them carried emotional heft: “which, if successful, produce positive affect or, if unsuccessful, negative affect.”49 The importance of early childhood was a shared concern with human capital economists, who treated the parent/childhood relationship as a crucial economic relationship where human capital was initially cultivated.50 Different cultural groups, outside of and within America, inculcated different standards of achievement. In The

Achieving Society, McClelland explained ostensible lower rates of achievement motivation

48 Smith et al, Motivation and Personality. 49 David McClelland, John Atkinson, Russell Clark and Edgar Lowell The Achievement Motive (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), 275. 50 Economist Gary Becker even compared human capital economics to Freudian psychoanalysis in their shared concern with early childhood. Gary Becker, “Habits, Addictions and Traditions,” Kyklos 45 (1992): 327-346.

60 among African-Americans as the result of the harmful legacy of slavery on Black family structures. Slaves had “developed child-rearing practices calculated to produce obedience and responsibility” rather than the achievement motivation. Those characteristics were passed down through parenting to subsequent generations, who continued to “show the effects of such training in lower n Achievement.”51 Motivation thus became a language for psychologists and policy- makers to explain the uneven economic position of Black Americans, just as it ostensibly explained unequal national levels of development.

McClelland extended the narrative analysis of the Thematic Apperception Test from the individual to the nation. Just as the TAT measured individual motives through narrative analysis, so too could national levels of achievement be measured through narrative analysis—in this case, though an analysis of popular children’s literature, scored for themes of achievement motivation.

Stories, McClelland declared, were a “symptom of the quality or 'drive' of the entrepreneurial sector of an economy.”52 Popular children’s literature, as the index of a nation’s achievement motivation, reflected historical and future stages of a nation’s development, as reflected in its national GDP.

McClelland’s claim that psychological motivation was the fulcrum of national economic development reflects a more widespread orientation of midcentury social sciences toward modernization theory.53 For midcentury modernization theorists, the mind operated both as the space for measuring a nation’s modernity and the space for intervening to cultivate modernity.

51 David McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co, 1961), 376. 52 McClelland, “Business Drive and National Achievement.” 53 Indeed, Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, where McClelland spent his academic career was a hub for midcentury modernization theory—in part because the department housed Talcott Parsons’ whose structural functionalism influenced behavioral scientists including Harold Lasswell, Lucian Pye, and David McClelland. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Modernization theory was both a policy project connected to American governmental and philanthropic intervention projects, and a project of social scientific knowledge accumulation, crucial to the formation of disciplines of behavioral sciences and area studies. In McClelland’s hands, as in many of the psychologically-trained proponents of modernization theory, modernization theory sutured psychological capacities to economic development. 54 Rather than just giving foreign aid or material capital, McClelland urged policymakers and development agencies to target individual’s psychological motives.55 Indeed, McClelland launched the pilot project for achievement motivation training in Hyderabad, India, sponsored by the Indian government and the Ford Foundation and run through the Small Industry Extension Training

Institute. McBer described motivation training as a portable “technology which can readily and inexpensively be transferred” across and within national boundaries.56

Following the transnational TAT takes us on surprising itineraries that reveal how the test became, in the words of historian of science Rebecca Lemov, a “mobile experimental lab” across nations and disciplines. 57 Anthropologists in the “culture-and-personality” school adapted the

TAT to study the personalities of indigenous populations around the globe, finding its reliance on pictures particularly valuable for cross-cultural research into the relationship between personality characteristics and cultural norms. Although brought to India as part of American

54 As its historians have argued, modernization theory reflected an ideology of midcentury technocratic liberalism. While implicitly presenting America as the apex of modernity, they claimed modernization to be a universal process, developing through universal stages. Gilman, Mandarins of the Future; Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ during the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Matthew Farish, Contours of America’s Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 55 McClelland, “Business Drive and National Achievement.” 56 David McClelland and David Miron, “Entrepreneurial Training for Small Business Owners and Managers: A Brief Historical Review” (Boston: McBer & Co, 1976): 1. David McClelland Papers, Box 112, Harvard University Archives. 57 Lemov, “X-Rays of Inner Worlds.”

62 modernization projects, the TAT was also used to understand the psychic effects of colonialism.

In 1956, psychiatrist and anti-colonial scholar Frantz Fanon adopted the TAT to analyze

Algerian Muslim women who had been hospitalized for psychiatric illnesses. Soon after, Fanon began articulating his political critique of Western psychiatry as a tool in French colonial violence, while at the same time emphasizing the psychological effects of colonial violence.58

Fanon would in turn inspire Black Americans to analyze the effects of racism, colonialism, and capitalism on the Black personality. Fanon concluded that TAT results in Algeria displayed an

“absence of correlation between the perceptual stimuli offered…and the personality of our subjects.”59 The test failed to recognize the women; or, the women failed to recognize the test, resulting in answers Fanon deemed incoherent, inconsistent, and indeterminate.

Given that the TAT was calibrated on white male subjects—college students at

Wesleyan—it is not surprising that researchers found achievement motivation highest among white males.60 Research on subjects who were not white males found that they had different levels of achievement motivation and different affective responses towards their own motives than white males had.61 In the early 1950s, McClelland’s students at Wesleyan found gendered differences in the responses of their undergraduate research subjects. Most puzzling researchers found women remained resistant to experimental manipulation: their measured levels of achievement motivation remained high even if experimenters tried to “relax” their motivation

58 On the circulation of psychoanalysis in colonial contexts, see Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard Keller, eds, Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 59 Quoted in Alice Bullard, “The Critical Impact of Frantz Fanon and Henri Collomb: Race, Gender, and Personality Testing of North Africans,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 41, no. 3 (2005): 235. 60 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 61 Achievement motivation’s gendered and racialized itineraries exist in separate, but parallel literatures: while one strand of education research used achievement motivation to understand academic performance among minority students, the other itinerary focused on imposter syndrome among educated white women. Dana Simmons, “Imposter Syndrome: A Reparative History,” Engaging Science, Technology & Society 2 (2016): 106-127.

63 arousal—like, by serving them tea and biscuits in “domestic settings,” a condition that was supposed to result in lower measured levels of achievement motivation. Researchers altered the

TAT protocols to incorporate images of females in “achievement-oriented positions,” rather than in clerical or familial roles (as in the original TAT protocols). Yet they found that, in the first condition, neither men nor women responded to test images with high levels of achievement.

Women confounded the projective test’s protocols; the test failed to recognize them in the way it had hailed male subjects.62

These unresolved discrepancies in achievement motivation impelled doctoral candidate

Matina Horner, one of John Atkinson’s graduate students, to investigate gender differences in achievement motivation in the early 1970s. She altered TAT protocols to evaluate the “fear of success”—imaginaries of fear that swirled around achievement imagery, highlighting how motives were shaped by social environments. High-achieving women, Horner argued, found themselves in a double bind: as conflicting social messages urged them towards and away from motivation, they found themselves split between feelings of imposture and their motivation to achieve. Horner’s “fear of success” crystallized into the now-pervasive (among white educated women) ‘imposter syndrome,’ a term which names these feelings of self-deception and the inner monologue of anxious uncertainty.

Horner and Fanon’s findings that the TAT failed to work on female and Algerian subjects, as well as the initial apparatus of achievement motivation, indicates how assumptions about capitalism, work, race, and gender were embedded in projective testing from the beginning. The TAT’s use by McClelland and McBer researchers, as we see in modernization theory, presents the most intimate spaces of the mind—the subconscious, fantasy, the

62 Simmons, “Imposter Syndrome.”

64 imagination—as not just measurable, but directly constitutive of the macro-economy. In the next section, I show how the TAT was adopted in McBer’s management training in order to measure and incite the appropriate motivations for corporate work. I also show how achievement motivation, as an entrepreneurial ethos, had to be adapted for corporate life.

2.3 The Corporate Work Ethic: The Manager as Motivator

Achievement motivation was an entrepreneurial motive that required translation into corporate settings. Vignettes from initial experiments in achievement motivation training—like the pilot project in India and in America—portrayed men whose achievement-oriented personalities hampered them in corporate life: motivating others required a different set of capacities than motivating oneself.63 People who had high levels of achievement motivation were not necessarily adept at stimulating the achievement motive in other people: their own high need for achievement could lead to an inability to delegate, set appropriate standards, and allow subordinates to set their own goals, or to frustration with corporate structures blocking their motives. Corporate life could clash with achievement motivation: as McBer training materials noted, “committee management destroys the sense of individual creativity, the satisfaction of being able to deliver a tied-up package of achievement.”64 This section shows how the entrepreneurial ethos of the achievement motive became translated into a corporate work ethic, suitable for large, multidivisional, hierarchical corporations.65 It focuses on two kinds of management training programs: training programs run by McBer to cultivate motivation for

63 David McClelland, “The Two Faces of Power,” Journal of International Affairs 24, no. 1 (1970): 31. 64 David McClelland, “Business Attitudes Survey” (no date), David McClelland Papers, Box 2894, Folder 6, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 65 McBer continued management training well into the 1990s. In chapter 4, I discuss McBer’s shift from focusing on individual competencies, such as motivation, to team competencies.

65 managers, and training programs at Young & Rubicam. Both versions of the training seminar depicted the role of managers as motivators who had to understand and channel their subordinates’ motives.

McBer ran motivation training programs for managers through business schools (Stanford and Harvard) and companies (IBM, General Electric, and Mattel) in America and abroad

(Mexico City, Japan, and India).66 With names such as “Entrepreneur as Manager and

Motivator,” or “Motivation Development for Managers,” courses in these programs drew on techniques—the TAT, business simulations, and education in principles of motivational psychology—to teach managers how to adapt their achievement motivation for corporate life.67

In addition to on-site training, McBer offered motivation training, the “Business Leadership

Inventory,” through correspondence courses based on at-home tests, readings, and audio cassettes tapes of lectures by McClelland and George Litwin, which asked students to mail in their TAT results. 68 These courses aimed to train managers not to cultivate their own achievement motive, but to manage the motives of their subordinates.

McBer & Co ran motivation training workshops for a variety of organizational clients, including Mattel, best known as the producer of Barbie dolls.69 In 1972, Mattel’s sales division hired McBer to conduct motivation training for their sales managers. Mattel had recently undergone corporate restructuring: they added more levels of hierarchy, combined sales districts,

66 Perhaps renamed due to the waning popularity of projective tests. Miller, “Dredging and Projecting.” 67 McBer & Co, “The Entrepreneur as Manager and Motivator,” (Sign-up form and brochure, 1971). David McClelland Papers, Box 2886, Folder 8, Archives of the History of American Psychology; George Litwin, “Responsibility and Motivation in Business: Achievement Motivation Training Group Exercises” (McBer & Co, 1962), David McClelland Papers, Box 2885, Folder 1, Archives of the History of American Psychology. 68 McBer & Co and Humana, “Business Leadership Inventory: A Program for Self-Appraisal and Planning,” (McBer & Co, 1970), David McClelland Papers, Box 2886, Folder 8, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 69 Other clients included Navy Chaplains, the Peace Corps, and an Australian manufacturing company. Behavioral Science Center, “Activity Report,” (March 1970), David McClelland Papers, Box 112, Harvard University Archives.

66 and changed job descriptions so that district sales managers’ main role was no longer to sell products, but to coach the sales staff.70 McBer trainers taught sales managers that their role was to “motivate salesmen to think in achievement terms.”71 The corporate case of Mattel and McBer writings show how corporate motivation training scoped outwards from the individual’s unconscious motives to their management style in practice, and then further outwards towards the organizational climate of the corporation as a whole.

Manuals for the use of the TAT in motivation training seminars prescribed specific testing protocols, confirming the point made by historians of psychology that psychological testing required precise arrangements of test-takers, administrators, and conditions, to control the unruly, “excess” subjectivity of the test-takers.72 As McBer instructions recounted, the test should be administered under “fairly relaxed conditions,” but with a “reasonably serious” atmosphere.73 The ideal test administrator had the same age and status (and, unstated, race and gender) as the testee, but was a stranger, so specific issues of status did not influence test scores; the administrator was to maintain a “relaxed…almost ‘offhand’” demeanor. Group testing was preferable, because it provided a “relative anonymity” that individual testing could not—such as the setting of the achievement motivation training seminar.74 In motivation training, the TAT was administered both at the start and end of training. At the end of the seminar, participants

70 McBer & Co, “Report to Mattel Toy: On the Effects of Workshops on managing Motivation After Six Months,” Boston: McBer & Co, November 20, 1973), David McClelland Papers, Box 112, Harvard University Archives. 71 McBer & Co, “Report to Mattel Toy,” 8. 72 On psychologists’ attempts to account for the unruly subjectivity of their experimental subjects, see Jill Morawski, “Epistemological Dizziness in the Psychology Laboratory: Lively Subjects, Anxious Experimenters, and Experimental Relations, 1950-1970,” Isis 106, n. 3 (September 2015): 567-597; Martin Derksen, “Discipline, Subjectivity and Personality: An Analysis of the Manuals of Four Psychological Tests,” History of the Human Sciences 14, no. 1 (2001): 25-47. 73 McBer & Co, Test of Imagination: Form A for Business, David McClelland Papers, Box 101, Harvard University Archives. 74 McBer & Co, Test of Imagination.

67 were asked to write new narratives that deliberately incorporated achievement imagery: “Now make some decisions,” the test prompted them, “about changes you want to make in your achievement motivation and thinking.”75 The TAT remained the backbone of motivation training; but as it was adapted for achievement motivation training in America, the images depicted business situations featuring a cast of white men, usually in suits: the imagined subject of achievement motivation was the businessman (Figure 2).

Figure 2. McBer & Co, Test of Imagination: Form A for Business, David McClelland Papers, Box 101, Harvard University Archives.

75 “Self-Evaluation Project,” Project with IBM (1962), David McClelland Papers, Box 2885, Folder No. 1, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron.

One sample course, “Motivation Development for Managers,” was offered through the

Harvard Business School starting in 1963. The course brochure marketed the course as a program of “self-development,” which sought to create “new alternatives in thought” by learning a “modern conception of man’s motivated behavior.”76 Participants read McClelland’s essay,

“Business Drive and National Achievement,” learned about achievement motivation, and discussed the contents of their TAT—marketed in program brochures as an “experimentally- validated and objective measures of motivation.”77 “Motivation Development for Managers” relied on the business case method, popular at the Harvard Business School; but rather than use cases readymade, trainers encouraged participants to bring in cases from their own business experience. 78 A form of experiential learning, personalized business cases allowed participants to reproduce the “experience or feeling associated with particular kinds of motivation.” Not only would the personalized cases make the conceptual material relevant, but the experiential methodology enlisted participants in the epistemic project of motivation. “If this research is to be of any use,” the course description explained, “executives who know business and its problems must bring up concrete business situations and relate them to the psychological concepts that have been presented. Throughout the course, we want you to think about your own situation using the ideas we are developing together.”79 This experiential aim reflected the course’s goals of creating psychological changes in fantasy and imagination life as a route towards behavioral change.

76 “Motivation Development for Management: A Research and Training Program,” (Boston, MA: Human Resource Development Corporation, 1963). David McClelland Papers, Box 2890, Folder 7, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 77 “Motivation Development for Management.” 78 On business education and the case method, see Rakesh Khurana, From Hired Hands to Higher Aims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 79 Litwin, “Responsibility and Motivation in Business.”

The achievement motive remained an important motive, but it was not the only one at stake in management training at Mattel. McClelland and his researchers had identified three motives

(all borrowed from psychologists Christiana Morgan and Henry Murray) as fundamental: achievement, power—the need to influence others—and affiliation—the need to belong. These three motives interacted in an individual, producing a motive pattern that McBer mapped on to managerial success. Particularly important for good management was a higher score on the power motive than the affiliation motive: in essence, a good manager cared more about exerting influence over others than being liked.80 McBer’s report on management training at Mattel confirmed the importance of the power motive for managers’ success. McClelland took pains, however, to distinguish between the need for power and authoritarian styles of management.

Referencing theories of participatory management—which advocated decentralized, non- hierarchical, and non-authoritarian approaches to management—McBer cautioned that the emphasize on the need for power “may be somewhat disturbing to the whole school of psychologists and management experts which has been attacking 'authoritarian' management.”

Even though managers needed to have the drive and the capacity to influence others, McClelland stressed that the need for power was not equivalent to an authoritarian style of management: “we are dealing here with motivation—with what managers are concerned most about—not with management styles.”81 Indeed, better managers scored higher on scales of participatory management, measured through the Managerial Style Index. Moreover, motivation training participants who returned to work for authoritarian managers found their motives would be blocked, their achievement motivation limited. Good managers should use their need for power

80 David McClelland and David Burnham, “Power is the Great Motivator,” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 1 (1976): 120. 81 McBer & Co, “Report to Mattel Toy.”

70 to make their subordinates feel responsible—a claim that was a hallmark of participatory management—and so motivate them. In other words, a good manager should be a motivator.

In depicting the role of the manager as a motivator, these training seminars depicted management relations as affective relations, which could be incited through the space of the training seminar.82 Motivation training courses were spaces of self-development that fostered affective entanglements. McClelland described how seminars “usually created a group esprit de corps from learning about each other's hopes and fears, successes and failures, and from going through an emotional experience together, away from everyday life, in a retreat setting.”83 To be a motivator, managers needed to become aware of their own motives. McBer taught corporate managers to recognize and express their motives: “motivation training says: embrace your motives, experience them in all their aspects in the safety of a training situation.”84 It was through understanding one’s own motives and motivational profile that one’s capacity for management could be unleashed; vignettes of self-discovery permeate the archives of motivation training. One such vignette depicted a manager whose motive pattern (high in achievement, high in power, low in affiliation), which suggested an aptitude for management, was contracted by poor reports from his subordinates due to his authoritarian style of management. Once confronted with his motives in the workshop, however, he was able to change his managerial style to match his motive profile; reports from his subordinates a few months later showed improvement.85 In another instance, a salesman recently promoted to a managerial role learned

82 The space of the training seminar thus serves as an example of Sara Ahmed’s framework of “affective economies,” in which affect is generated through its circulation—in this case, in the space of the motivation training seminar. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 117-139. 83 David McClelland, “That Urge to Achieve,” Think Magazine (IBM, 1966): 365. This article was provided as a handout to Young & Rubicam’s management training seminars. For more on the group dynamics of training seminars, see chapter 4. 84 McClelland, Power. 85 McClelland and Burnham, “Power is the Great Motivator.”

71 that the strength of his achievement motive made him better suited for his previous sales role than to managing others’ motives.

Change could only come from within; motivation could be externally imposed by a psychologist or consultant. McClelland emphasized that motivating people was not the same as manipulating them—a charge levied against motivational psychologists by cultural critics such as Vance Packard. Motivation training, McClelland argued, was not an attempt to manipulate people against their will, because the kind of change envisioned in such seminars required the active participation of the individual: they signed up for seminars, participated in self-reflection exercises, and implemented the techniques of motivation in their own lives.86

In shifting focus from achievement motivation to the interaction of achievement, affiliation, and power motivation, McClelland and his researchers found gendered differences in the kinds of stories men and women told about motivation. In the late 1970s, McClelland and collaborator Ruth Jacobs found qualitative differences in the TAT stories told by male and female managers.87 Men were more likely to see power as hierarchical, requiring one to overthrow authority figures; women were more likely to see power as existing in a complex, interconnected world, expressed through empowering or nurturing others: “the male high in n

Power has an emotionally assertive approach to life, whereas the female high in n Power focuses on building up the self which may be the object of that assertiveness."88 Carol Gilligan, most well-known as a theorist of feminist care ethics, studied with McClelland as part of her Harvard

86 The importance of self-knowledge speaks to critical theorist Michel Feher’s analysis of subjects of human capital, who are supposed to be constantly “appreciating” and investing in themselves. Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): 21-41; Barbara Townley, “‘Know Thyself’: Self-Awareness, Self-Formation and Managing,” Organization 2, no. 2 (1995): 271-289. 87 Ruth Jacobs and David McClelland, "Moving up the Corporate Ladder: A Study of the Leadership Motive Pattern and Managerial Success in Women and Men,” Consulting Psychology Journal 46, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 32-41. 88 McClelland, Power.

72 psychology PhD and drew similar conclusions about the differences between men and women’s expressions of motives. Instead of the individualistic competitive ethos prized by the achievement and power motives, women emphasized partial, situated activity that considered moral effects on others.89

It was not just among the female participants that McBer began to find problems with the over-emphasis on the atomized individual. The TAT and the technique of motivation training centered around the individual, targeting the latent psychic drives of individuals. However,

McBer psychologists soon realized—via their follow-up surveys of achievement motivation training participants—that the broader organizational factors, from the nature of the job to their relationship with their manager, could hinder or help their individual motivation. Here, the realm of intervention zoomed outward from the individual’s psychological motives to the motivational climate surrounding the individual.

To understand this broader atmosphere of motivation, McBer consultant and psychologist

George Litwin developed surveys of “organizational climate.” As an analytic term, organizational climate encompassed managerial styles, values, and attitudes; the nature of corporate structures and organizational charts; incentive and reward structures; and how people perceived such styles and structures.90 Drawing on Kurt Lewin’s field theory (discussed further in chapter 4), Litwin presented organizational climate as the middle of the Venn diagram looping individuals to the corporate environment.91 As an interstitial area, climate was a key zone of

89 Simmons, “Imposter Syndrome.” 90 George Litwin and Robert Stringer, Motivation and Organizational Climate (Cambridge: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1968). 91 Javier Lezaun and Nerea Calvillo, “In the Political Laboratory: Kurt Lewin’s Atmospheres,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (2014): 434-457. For a more detailed discussion of Kurt Lewin and his influence on management training, see chapter 4.

73 intervention for managers seeking to channel, arouse, or suppress the motives of their subordinates. The need to achieve, Litwin noted, could only be channeled towards organizational goals through concrete mechanisms of feedback, which required the appropriate organizational climate.92 McBer developed an Organizational Climate survey to materialize and make perceptible otherwise intangible factors of organizational climate.93 Organizational climate—as measured through their multidimensional survey—acted not just as the zone of intervention, but also as the metric for success of the manager and the motivation training program alike.

McClelland and his collaborator David Burnham defined the metric for managerial effectiveness as “the climate he or she creates in the office, reflected in the morale of subordinates.”94 They included a graph which plotted the sales profits of the company against the morale of the employees—produced, ostensibly, by the manager’s efforts at creating a motivational climate— as evidence that motivation training of managers garnered economic returns.95 In this imagined causal chain, the appropriate motivational profile of a manager allowed them to create the right climate to motivate their employees to achieve, which resulted in profits for the corporation.

In the training program at Mattel, McBer gave the Organizational Climate survey at the beginning of the course, and six months later as a follow-up to measure the effect of training.

The initial survey pointed to managers’ dissatisfaction with several dimensions of organizational climate, namely the responsibility and reward structures in place, and job/organizational clarity.

To Mattel, McBer advocated structural changes in the structures of work to cultivate achievement motivation among the sales staff: a new goal-setting program where sales people set

92 McBer & Co, “The Entrepreneur as Manager and Motivator.” 93 On surveys see Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Sarah Igo, The Averaged American (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 94 McClelland and Burnham, “Power is the Great Motivator.” 95 McClelland and Burnham, “Power is the Great Motivator,” 120.

74 their own targets, designed to increase their personal responsibility; a new incentive system and performance feedback system that gave sales people the concrete feedback their achievement motivation required; revised job descriptions to improve organizational clarity. In longitudinal follow-up studies six months later, Mattel managers reported improvement across these dimensions of organizational climate. Longitudinal follow-up studies were a common practice in

McBer’s motivation training, both in intervals of months and years: participants were asked how they had changed and about the concrete effects of motivation training on their management.

Cultivating motivation among managers was always an iterative, experimental process.

It is not coincidental that it was Mattel’s sales division—a department concerned about motivating consumers to purchase goods—that implemented motivation training. While a more detailed history of consumer motivation is beyond the scope of this chapter, examining how sales and marketing divisions implemented motivation training demonstrates how shared assumptions and techniques underpinned corporate concerns about motivating workers and motivating consumers.96 Corporate sales and marketing departments developed at the turn-of-the-20th- century in order to stimulate consumer demand for the massive numbers of goods being produced by the second industrial revolution.97 Based on their claims to understand and stimulate consumer desire through psychological techniques, the emerging profession of industrial psychology marketed itself to corporate audiences.98 Sales departments adopted psychological techniques to understand both consumers and employees, using psychological tests to evaluate

96 Indeed, the archives of major marketing firms—McGraw-Hill and J. Walter Thompson—contain thousands of article clippings on management, as well as management training materials for sales and marketing managers. 97 Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989); Pamela Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 98 Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind; Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).

75 the personality of salesmen in the 1920s and 1930s.99 In the 1950s and 1960s, psychoanalyst

Ernest Dichter launched an institute of motivational research which drew on psychoanalytic claims about unconscious motives to market consumer goods.100 Dichter adapted the same arsenal of techniques—from projective tests to role-play exercises—in order to cultivate motivation among managers in his “Top Man” seminars.101 By the 1960s, psychological theories and techniques of motivation had become as entrenched in marketing as they were in management: psychographic surveys, like Stanford Research Institute’s Values, Attitudes, and

Lifestyles survey, carved up consumer audiences according to psychological characteristics.102

Motivation training for sales and marketing managers was particularly important because of the specific motivational exigencies of sales and marketing jobs, and the more general claim that all management positions required the ability to motivate.

This emphasis on motivation training for marketing managers was reflected in another set of early 1980s corporate training programs at direct marketing company Wunderman, an affiliate of the global marketing firm Young & Rubicam.103 Unlike McBer’s consultant-based approach to management training, where a team of consultants came in, trained managers, and left,

99 Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 100 Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research: New Perspectives on the Making of Post-War Consumer Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 101 Ernest Dichter, “How to Be a Top Manager,” (Training guide, no date), Ernest Dichter Papers, Box 71, Folder 3, Hagley Archives. 102 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004); Daniel Guadagnolo, “Segmenting America: Historical Approaches to Niche Marketing (Dissertation in progress, University of Wisconsin-Madison). 103 Young & Rubicam was a large, multidivisional, geographically sprawling marketing corporation first founded in the 1920s. After a boom period in the 1960s, the company responded to the economic downturn of the early 1970s by increasing revenue through a strategy of corporate mergers, resulting in the acquisition direct marketing firm Wunderman in 1973. Wunderman’s founder, Lester Wunderman, coined the term direct marketing in a 1967 speech. He founded his agency in 1958 and stayed on at Wunderman after it was acquired by Y&R until 1998.

Wunderman’s training was run through in-house corporate trainers. Wunderman’s head of training in the 1980s, Cindy Butchko, developed many of the training materials, which included a mixture of bullet-point summaries of psychological theories and hand-outs for the participants.104 Participants read clips from McClelland and Maslow. Wunderman’s management training brought together managers from across departmental and city lines in courses called

“Supervisory Skills” and “Consultative Selling”—all of which featured modules on motivation.

Young & Rubicam, in its own self-image, had a “creative” corporate culture, where employees were expected to work long and irregular hours and to spend all night brainstorming about creative strategies, for the love of the job. As a direct marketing firm, Wunderman was directly invested in a motivational enterprise that used personalized tactics, from direct mailing to company loyalty programs, to motivate buyers.105 These two factors—investment in consumer motivation and investment in work as a site of creativity and meaning—shaped Wunderman’s management training modules of the early 1980s.

This management training was a pedagogical space where people encountered motivational theories of self-actualization, achievement, and organizational climate—where they learned that work should be a site to fulfill psychological, not just material needs. Three bullet points succinctly summarize the seminars’ approach to motivation: “1. All people are motivated.

2. People do things for their own reasons, not yours. 3. You can’t motivate anyone, but you can create an environment that helps people motivate themselves.”106 Managers were taught to

104 Unfortunately, other than conforming that she was a corporate trainer during the 1980s, the historical record on Butchko is scant. 105 On the related history of direct selling, see Jessica Burch, “Soap and Hope: Direct Sales and the Culture of Work and Capitalism in Postwar America,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 4 (December 2016): 741-751. 106 “Participants Manual for Consultative Selling Skills” (Learning Pyramid, 1981), Wunderman Papers, Box TR-46, John Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University.

77 recognize the universal tendency towards self-actualization. All people, despite their differing personalities and capacities, strove to realize their potentialities, to actualize their selves. And it was through work, reframed as play, that people could self-actualize. “Because work can be as natural as play,” participants read, “people do not have to be checked on to see if they are working.”107 Citing participatory management theorist Douglas McGregor’s work, managers were taught the difference between Theory X—the assumption that work was a chore that required coercion—and Theory Y—that work was a source of pleasure. They learned that they should convey to their subordinates that work could be a source of pleasure: “We can have fun in this business.”108

Managers were urged to model the kind of motivational attitude they hoped to bring out in their subordinates, as a strategy for cultivating motivation as a form of psychological capital.

Training materials encouraged the manager to lead by example: “the Senior Planner serves as a key motivating factor for the Planner. It is the Senior Planner's responsibility to insure that the

Planner is kept motivated at all times."109 Managers were to motivate their subordinates by engineering the “right organizational climate,” which would allow their subordinates to “unlock their hidden potential and become both happier and more productive."110 Participants completed surveys of organizational climate, based on the model developed by McBer. In one exercise, participants were asked to describe their organization along multiple dimensions— reward/punishment structure, management style, warmth/support, emphasis on achievement motivation—and to map these dimensions onto productivity outcomes.

107 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials” (Young & Rubicam, 1984), Wunderman Papers, Box TR-45, John Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University 108 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.” 109 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.” 110 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.”

Lastly, managers were taught to study their subordinates to understand personality differences in their motives. One exercise listed examples of requests managers might receive from their subordinates, from more responsibility to increased wages, and asked participants to fill in the “motivating need” (based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) underpinning each request.

Then, through small group discussion, participants discussed how this motivational knowledge would inform their response to employees.111 Role-play abounded: how would you, as manager, assign a project to a “stale and unmotivated” employee?112 The answer depended on what motivated them. They learned that people clustered into motivational profiles, like the “achiever pattern”—people who were motivated by intrinsic motives for achievement.113 Quoting

McClelland, the manual described the need for achievement as a variable strength, differentially distributed through populations based on their personality structure. For achievers, money could not serve as an incentive proper, but only as the psychological affirmation of their success.

Training materials mapped McClelland’s motives onto Maslow’s hierarchy of need, equating

McClelland’s ‘affiliation’ need with Maslow’s need for belonging, and the need for achievement equated to esteem needs.

According to Maslow’s theory, as picked up by management researchers, people were motivated by unsatisfied needs: once satisfied, a need could no longer serve as a motivational force. The manual suggested that for many middle-class Americans— like the employees of marketing firms—lower needs (e.g. physiological and safety) had already been met, and thus no longer served as motivators. Given that basic needs were satisfied, middle-class workers strived for higher needs: “Once other needs are largely taken care of, every person strives for self-

111 “Participants Manual for Consultative Selling Skills.” 112 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.” 113 “Participants Manual for Consultative Selling Skills.”

79 actualization, to become what he can be or must be, whether his capacities are limited or vast.”114

At the same time as these training seminars flagged self-actualization as universal, they cautioned that not all jobs allowed for self-actualization. Workers on assembly lines or in sanitation—jobs not expected to satisfy either achievement or self-actualization motives—were paid wages to “compensate for the lack of esteem or self-actualization in their jobs.”115 These comments gesture to the class and racial politics of motivation and management: these spaces— the creative marketing firm, the white-collar corporation—and managerial roles were flagged as middle-class and inflected by whiteness; these were spaces where self-actualization was possible precisely because baser needs had already been fulfilled.116

This section has shown how management training seminars held at McBer and Young &

Rubicam served as sites to cultivate psychological capital. These training seminars depicted the corporation as a site to fulfill motives for achievement and self-actualization, given the right organizational climate. Importantly, these seminars depicted the role of managers as the cultivation of psychological capital, both in themselves and in their subordinates: managers were enjoined to control their own motivational states, so as to produce motivational states among their subordinates and the right sort of organizational climate.117 This motivational labor, however, did not remain confined to individual bodies, but spread out from the spaces of the training seminar into the corporate sales and marketing department that relied on motivation. In the next section, we will see how similar formats of training seminars, which relied on these

114 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.” 115 “Supervisory Skills Training Manual & Workshop Materials.” The emphasis is in the source. 116 The argument that “whiteness is management” is made by David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Differences: Race and Management in U.S. Labor History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion. 117 Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

80 affective and motivational forces, combined with claims about the uneven distribution of motivation among racialized bodies, to underpin entrepreneurial and job training in Black

American communities.

2.4 The Entrepreneurial Work Ethic: the Racial Politics of Motivation Training

This section turns from the white spaces of American corporations to show how the ideological force of the work ethic combined with ideas about race to influence motivation training in Black communities. For business and political leaders in the late 1960s and 1970s, motivation became an explanation and oftentimes also a justification for racial economic inequalities, and a target of intervention for redressing inequality. At the same time, some Black community leaders drew on racial uplift ideology to articulate psychological capacities as one route towards economic participation, while still recognizing structural forces of segregation and discrimination.

Two McBer proposals to cultivate achievement motivation in Black communities—in

1962 and in 1967—demonstrate the racialized and class-based logics haunting discussions of motivation and the work ethic across the social sciences and American politics. In 1962, the

Kennedy administration’s Manpower Development and Training Act funded job training for workers ‘displaced’ by technological automation.118 In response to this act, McClelland corresponded with IBM’s adult education department over a proposed Manpower Motivation

Project. This project aimed to “motivate the unmotivated”—those who had been “economically displaced” by the forces of automation and ever-changing technology, like Black urban

118 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge.

Americans and blue-collar workers. 119 Soliciting McClelland’s advice on the project, the education director suggested that education was the solution to their economic displacement.

Corporations and consulting firms like IBM and McBer had the responsibility to motivate the

“unmotivated” to “accept the necessity of lifelong learning and training.”120 Lifelong training was “an urgent, basic need for social and economic survival.”121 This proposal reflects how

McBer’s consulting psychologists and business leaders understood the connection between motivation, work, and race in terms of individual psychology, rather than more systematic issues of discrimination and housing segregation policies that had economically gutted inner-city

America. Nor did it reference the way that technological automation fell unevenly along racial and gendered lines.122 In this project, white rural Americans and Black urban Americans were both depicted in the same imaginary as the “economically displaced.” Like in the international realm, McBer marketed achievement motivation training as a technique to usher communities out of poverty and into economic prosperity.

These same assumptions about economic displacement and modernization shaped a motivation training program in the late 1960s. In 1967, McBer received funding from the United

States Economic Development Administration, as part of the War on Poverty, to run a “Business

Leadership Training Project” that brought achievement motivation training to two American economically depressed communities—African-Americans in inner-city Washington, D.C and

119 Letter from Charles Bowen to David McClelland, 22 March, 1963, David McClelland Papers, Box 2888, Folder 6, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 120 Letter from Bowen to McClelland. 121 Charles Bowen, “A Long-Range Manpower Plan to Meet the Challenge of Accelerating Change,” (Unpublished proposal to David McClelland, March 1963): 8. David McClelland Papers, Box 2888, Folder 6, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 122 Venus Green’s history of Bell, for instance, shows how systematic discrimination kept Black Americans out of well-paying operator clerical jobs in Bell; by the time Black women had been admitted to those jobs, they were low- paying, low-status jobs threatened by automation. Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

82 rural white Oklahomans.123 Referred to colloquially as the “Pep-Up Program,” the Washington,

DC version of Business Leadership Training sought to cultivate the achievement motivation of

Black male entrepreneurs as a route out of the ‘cycle of poverty.’ Participants—including the owner of a marketing firm, a flower shop owner, and a government employee—were nominated by community leaders as people who could use their training to benefit their own businesses, and in turn their communities. In groups of 10-20 people, participants were sent to ‘retreat’ settings near, but apart from, their community.124 They underwent the standard protocols of achievement motivation training, including projective tests and psychological surveys, education in the principles of motivational psychology, and business cases. The program incorporated two modules specifically for Black audiences. One module, “Food for Thought,” asked participants to discuss the relationship between race, identity, and participants’ own self-conceptions.125 The other module, the “Inner-city Investment Game,” tailored business cases to address the difficulties of business in segregated, inner-city environments. These modules served as the basis for McBer-affiliated programming designed to appeal specifically to Black business leaders in the mid-1970s. Intermedia, a media education company affiliated with McBer, developed videos featuring minority businessmen for motivation training courses that offered a “racially and occupationally identifiable” figure to Black audiences, demonstrating that the “achievements attained by this individual are realistic to and possibly attainable by the target audience.”126

123 David McClelland and David Miron, “The Impact of Achievement Motivation Training on Small Businesses”; Jeffrey Timmons, “Black is Beautiful—Is It Bountiful?” Harvard Business Review (Nov-Dec 1971): 85. 124 For more on the ‘retreat’ approach to training, see the discussion of National Training Laboratories in chapter 3. 125 Behavioral Science Center, “Business Leadership Training Project” (Report prepared for Economic Development Administration, October 1968). David McClelland Papers, Box 112, Harvard University Archives. 126 Correspondence from Gerd Stern (McBer & Co) to Herschel Kranitz (Intermedia), 22 February, 1974, David McClelland Papers, Box 112, Harvard University Archives. For more on diversity training, see chapter 4.

Although McBer and government officials deemed both populations targeted by the

Business Leadership program to be economically depressed, their description of the economic environment in inner-city D.C. evoked racialized understandings of motivation and of poverty.

Reports on the program described the rural Oklahoman environment as more “stable,” in contrast to the “dynamic” environment facing Black businesses in inner-city Washington, D.C. McBer described DC as marred by “severe capital, managerial, and personnel problems”; the dependency of Black businesses on the “segregated, 'captive' market for support” made them

“ill-prepared to meet competition from white small businesses.”127 Their communities found themselves trapped in conditions of un- or under-employment, facing stagnant business activity—a “cycle of community poverty.” These structural conditions were reinforced by a

“particular lifecycle” producing a cyclical, repeated, seemingly-inescapable loop of poverty.128

In arguing that Black poverty was perpetuated through a recursive cultural loop of poverty, McBer psychologists tapped into a deep wellspring of social science research on the intersection of poverty, race, and gender—research that grounded government reports and policy interventions. The Moynihan Report, commissioned by the Department of Labor and published in 1965, had catapulted decades of social science research into Black family structure, psychology, poverty, and employment into the public arena. Invoking conservative gender ideals, Moynihan lamented that Black families were too often headed by females and missing stable male breadwinners, a “pathological” condition that spiraled outwards to perpetuate a

“tangle of pathology” and a “cycle of poverty.”129 The report sutured the problem of Black male

127 Behavioral Science Center, “Business Leadership Training Project.” 128 Behavioral Science Center, “Business Leadership Training Project.” 129 Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: United States Department of Labor, 1965).

84 unemployment to the gendered dynamics of the pathologized family, shaping policy in the War on Poverty. Many of the job training programs in the War on Poverty were barred to women with young children, as the programs aimed to create employment for men so as to shore up the male breadwinner ideal.130 As evinced by McBer’s reference to the cycle of poverty, broader assumptions about race and poverty in urban America shaped the backdrop against which

McBer’s leadership training operated.

Business and political leaders in the 1960s, who were predominantly white, often claimed that lack of motivation—not segregation, discrimination, and structural economic constraints— explained the higher rates of poverty in African-American communities. For example, the

National Association of Manufacturers opposed the 1965 establishment of the Equal

Employment Opportunity Commission, which barred racial discrimination in employment, in part based on claims that racial inequalities in employment were due to a lack of individual motivation—by a lack of African-American capacity for “civilizational achievement.”131 In

1968, the National Alliance of Businessmen created a program to subsidize the projected costs in lost productive and increased training that came from hiring “hardcore unemployed” workers— a racialized term that described young, racialized males (Black or Hispanic) outside of the usual circuits of employment. The program garnered participation from companies like Western

Electric, Du Post, and General Motors. However, even with subsidies and training programs,

130 On the connections between the Moynihan Report, social science research, and the Black family, see Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). 131 Nancy Maclean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 63-67. For more on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its influence on corporate management, see chapter 4.

85 surveys of corporate leaders repeatedly cited “low motivation” as a barrier to hiring African-

American workers.132

In contrast to predominantly white business leaders who minimized the structural factors that had contributed to economic disenfranchisement—including corporations’ own role in employment discrimination—African-American psychologist Joseph White highlighted the failure of the work ethic to deliver on the promise of rewards for African-Americans. “Since hard work has not dramatically altered the future of Black people,” White wrote in 1970, white

Americans’ emphasis on the “value and virtues of hard work” rang hollow: the benefits of the white dream of hard work have not paid off for us.”133 Neither the material benefits of the work ethic, nor the psychological benefits of satisfactory work had accrued to African-Americans, who had been legally, socially, and economically excluded from the promises of meaningful work.134

One proposed solution to the cycle of poverty was the cultivation of psychological capacities associated with entrepreneurship—like the achievement motivation—as a route towards Black business success. The Business Leadership Training program was, at heart, a program of psychological capital development. As described by McBer reports, achievement motivation training operated by “activating and mobilizing previously dormant economic and human resources,” including the psychological and economic capacities of its participants—their

“job-creating and income-generating capacity” and their “capacity to think and act as high

132 Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 133 Joseph White, “Toward a Black Psychology’ Ebony 25, no. 11 (Sept 1970): 44-53. 134 See chapter 4 for a further discussion of employment discrimination and equal employment opportunity legislation in response to discrimination.

86 achievers.”135 The small entrepreneur served as the locus for community development projects— a “potential human resource.”136 Echoing McBer’s language, a 1971 Harvard Business Review article on the program described motivation training as activating the “latent entrepreneurial spirit” of participants.137 McBer trumpeted the psychological results of motivation training— increased levels of achievement motivation— in economic terms. For instance, the owner of the marketing firm, inspired by motivation training, expanded his business by purchasing a cosmetic franchise and hiring more women. The outcomes of this psychological capacity-building was framed in economic terms: McClelland and his collaborator David Miron reported that the most significant result of business leadership training was “profitability, which is not unexpected since the whole thrust of achievement motivation training is towards increased efficiency, or improved cost/benefit ratio.”138

Some Black business and community leaders also suggested that the psychological capacity for motivation was the foundation of Black economic empowerment—a claim that evoked an ideology of racial uplift. A largely elite ideology, racial uplift drew on a longer tradition of Black activism and scholarship to emphasize the cultivation of psychological capacities, including self-esteem and self-help principles, as one strategy to attain racial equality.139 One figure who embodied the intersection of motivational psychology and racial

135 David McClelland, “Business Leadership Training in Urban America,” (Behavioral Science Center, Sterling Institute, 1967): 1. David McClelland Papers, Box 2886, Folder 6, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 136 Behavioral Science Center, “Business Leadership Training Project.” 137 Timmons, “Black is Beautiful—Is It Bountiful?” 138 McClelland and Miron, “The Impact of Achievement Motivation Training on Small Businesses.” 139 The American government often enlisted Black elites (intellectuals, reformers, ministers) who shared this uplift ideology—and shared normative class-based ideas about urban pathology that fostered a class-based stratification of motivation in addition to its extant racial distinctions. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

87 uplift was Samuel Woodard, a Black professor of educational leadership at Temple, who attended achievement motivation training in the late 1960s. Woodard compared his experience with achievement motivation training to Black Power, declaring “Black Power” to be “analogous to achievement motivation theory and practice.”140 Woodard mapped the protocols of achievement motivation training onto the project of Black Power, beginning with cultivating self-image and ending with community and group support (see Figure 4). Participants in achievement motivation training, Woodard recounted, learned to “think, talk, and act like a person with a passion for achievement.”141 Similarly, Woodard described Black Power as a

“motivational force” that aimed to cultivate a strong sense of self that could “rise above the social, economic, and educational constraints imposed by society”—like the pernicious psychic effects of structural racism. 142 Woodard drew on Black Rage, a book written by Black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs that described the “cultural paranoia” and rage that characterized Black Americans living in a racist society.143 Woodard suggested that the Black power movement could help cultivate norms of achievement within the community by channeling “Black rage” into productive achievement. Taking structural racism as a premise, he

140 Samuel L. Woodard, “Black Power and Achievement Motivation,” The Clearing House 44, no. 2 (Oct 1969): 74. 141 Woodard, “Black Power and Achievement Motivation,” 74. 142 Woodard, “Black Power and Achievement Motivation,” 74. 143 Price Cobbs will feature in chapter 4 for his work running corporate diversity training seminars from the late 1970s to the 1990s. On the broader context of race and psychiatry, see Jonathan Metzl, Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

88 drew on achievement motivation and Black power to name the psychological capacities that allowed people to overcome racism.144

Woodard argued that Black high achievers exemplified Black power and the achievement motive. But their very success, Woodard argued, fostered a dissonance between their selves and their sub-culture, which produced a form of cultural paranoia. Woodard expanded on this point through a discussion of one important psychological capacity in an article in Ebony: anti- fatalism. In a 1977 article in the Black magazine Ebony, Woodard identified anti-fatalism, or

“fate control,” as the core characteristic of achievement motivation in children.145 The achieving child assumed a strong sense of responsibility, believing that “whatever good or bad happens to me depends on my behavior.”146 To instill values of achievement, he urged parents to encourage children to keep records of their personal accomplishments; encourage, and reward them, for household chores; ask children to talk about their heroes, and encourage pride in Black heritage

(the magazine included an image of a family visiting a Black heritage museum). Like Woodard,

Black nationalist projects like Black power and the Black Panthers also drew on psychological frameworks of self-esteem to advocate for anti-racist projects.147

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, policy-makers and the popular white press often championed Black entrepreneurship as the solution to poverty, which strengthened the appeal of motivational training programs. Such programs to encourage Black entrepreneurship appeared across American cities, often based on the partnership of community development corporations

144 Many of the male leaders in the Black Power subscribed to traditional gender norms that included the male breadwinner ideal. Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 145 Samuel L. Woodard, “Ten Ways to Help Your Child Succeed,” Ebony 32, no. 12 (Oct 1977): 52-58. 146 Gaines, Uplifting the Race. 147 Herman, The Romance of American Psychology.

89 and corporations.148 In 1969, Nixon’s administration established the Office of Minority Business

Enterprise, which sponsored McBer programs to train minority entrepreneurs.149 The emphasis on entrepreneurship reflects a more pervasive infiltration of human capital into policy interventions that targeted poverty, race, and unemployment in 1960s and 1970s America. It is not difficult to see why entrepreneurship and capitalism would appeal to American policy- makers. By suggesting that individual investment in training was both the explanation for poverty—people were poor because they lacked training—and a method to alleviate poverty, human capital made fighting poverty compatible with economic growth and free market capitalism.150 Motivation training, as framed in the language of human capital, promised a cost- effective way to spur economic development, compatible—indeed, celebrating—the virtues of

American capitalism. Moreover, the individualist framework of human capital suggested that failure—to find a job for instance—lay with the individual, rather than with larger structural conditions.

One job training program that embodied Black racial uplift was the Opportunities

Industrialization Commission (OIC), founded by Reverend Leon Sullivan in Philadelphia in

1964. The Opportunities Industrialization Commission was just one of many programs that sought to motivate the “hardcore unemployed.” Sullivan’s lifelong project promoted economic participation of Black Americans as the route towards political and social inclusion, including boycotts of businesses that refused to hire African-Americans, and job training at OIC.151 Such

148 Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, eds, The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012). 149 McClelland and Miron, “The Impact of Achievement Motivation Training on Small Businesses.” 150 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the 1970s infiltration of human capital ideas into policy. 151 Jessica Levy, “From Black Power to Black Empowerment: Transnational Capital and Racial Integration in the United States and Africa since 1969,” (PhD Dissertation: Johns Hopkins University, 2017).

90 economic participation began, according to OIC’s principles, by cultivating motivation— a psychological capacity encompassing self-esteem, pride, and confidence. Just as David

McClelland had argued in the context of modernization, Sullivan cautioned that material resources alone had limited effects on economic development: “no amount of money poured into a community can help…unless the people who live there are inspired and motivated to first help themselves.”152 Material resources would not suffice without “inner resources—motivation, discipline, and the will to succeed.”153

Participants in vocational training were required to begin with the ‘Feeder’ course, intended to foster “psychological, emotional and motivational preparation” for the remainder of job training.154 The initial course took place in a former jailhouse in Philadelphia, converted into a classroom plastered with motivational posters trumpeting phrases like “75% Attitude, 25%

Skill.” OIC participants all lived under the poverty line, in states of under- or unemployment; few held high school diplomas; some had criminal records, which reflected how the encroaching carceral state disproportionately affected African-Americans.155 Modules in the Feeder program covered personal grooming and hygiene, job-searching and work conventions; other modules taught Black history, focusing on the exclusions and successes of Black Americans in economic life. Although recognizing the economic and cultural disadvantages of participants as well as the

152 Leon Sullivan, “From Protest to Progress: The Lesson of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers." Yale Law & Policy Review 4, n. 2 (1985): 369. 153 Sullivan, “From Protest to Progress,” 374. 154 Opportunities Industrialization Center, “Philadelphia’s Unique ‘Self-Help’ Story,” (Philadelphia: 1971), Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 1.2 (FA387), Box 75, Folder 638. 155 Elizabeth Hinton argues that the War on Poverty reflected widespread social and political concern about Black urban crime, rather than a concerted attempt to address inequality. She further suggests that job training institutions that trained Black youth for employment were justified in part as strategies to counter crime and delinquency, attributed to lack of employment opportunities—and served as zones of “soft surveillance” of the behaviors of these same youth. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindedness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

91 necessity of government investment and social opportunities, OIC’s Feeder program emphasized self-help. As promotional materials declared, even “realizing the many frustrations and road blocks faced by the deprived individual, it is imperative that the trainee be motivated to develop a sense of self-pride and self-reliance to enable him to work and walk with human dignity.”156

Sullivan evocatively described the Feeder program as motivating students like “wind filling the sails of a sailboat" or like “a stream pushing the wheels of a water wheel.”157 A form of

“psychological conditioning,” Opportunities Industrialization Commission sought to “unwash the brainwashed minds” damaged by entrenched racism in America.158 This claim that Black

Americans had been psychically damaged by slavery and segregation shaped social science research and policy interventions in postwar America, among both white and Black social scientists and policy makers.159

Gendered expectations about the role of men and women in the workforce also influenced the format of OIC’s vocational training. Although both men and women participated in OIC training programs and attended the same initial Feeder course, as they moved into specific vocational training they were tracked into gendered streams that reflected available employment opportunities and gendered divisions of labor. Men were tracked into air conditioning repair, while women were tracked into punch-card operating, a form of feminized labor. This gendered vocational tracking reflected wider societal norms about the roles of men

156 Opportunities Industrialization Center Info Sheet (Philadelphia: January, 1969), Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 1.2 (FA387), Box 75, Folder 638. 157 Sullivan, “From Protest to Progress.” 158 Quoted in Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 139. 159 Damage imagery had notably bolstered arguments for desegregating schools in Brown v. Board of Education, as psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark testified that segregation caused psychological harm for Black children. Scott, Contempt and Pity.

92 and women in the workforce that were held by many male leaders of the civil rights and Black nationalist movements.160

The Feeder program’s explicit goal was to turn people seen as unemployable into desirable employees, and this was defined as an internalization of the work ethic: “By good employees we mean men and women who know, appreciate, and even enjoy their jobs.”161

Through “motivating the person who is difficult to reach,” OIC sought to convert economic disadvantage into a suitable work ethic.162 The Opportunities Industrialization Commission received large amounts of federal funding, appealing to federal government due to its braiding of self-help principles with motivation and the work ethic.163 Leon Sullivan explicitly lobbied to be included in federal acts to receive federal funding. President Johnson visited the OIC in 1967, and then committed money from the Office of Economic Opportunity. OIC leadership presented the program as an alternative to the protest and militancy associated with civil rights movement, incorporating the slogan “build, brother, build” as a counterpart to “burn, baby, burn,” the rhetoric associated with the 1965 Watts protests. In 1971, OIC received a large grant—over 30 million—from the Department of Labor under Nixon’s administration. 164

This section has shown how McBer training programs and the Opportunities

Industrialization Commission, in different ways, advocated for approaches to countering racialized poverty that emphasized individual motivation as a form of psychological capital that could lift individuals out of poverty. Their emphasis on individual motivation attracted funding

160 Spencer, The Revolution Has Come. 161 Opportunities Industrialization Center Info Sheet. 162 Opportunities Industrialization Center, “Philadelphia’s Unique ‘Self-Help’ Story.” 163 McKee argues that OIC represented a form of “Black self-help liberalism” that shifted away from more radical forms of protest. The approach combined a long tradition of Black uplift with a demand that the federal government provide resources to make self-help principles meaningful. McKee, The Problem of Jobs. 164 McKee, The Problem of Jobs, 126–38.

93 from government bodies, such as the U.S. Department of Labor, at a moment in the 1960s and early 1970s when invocations of individual responsibility, motivation, and the work ethic had political resonance in American politics. In contrast to the largely white corporate executives who were the target of McBer motivation training, motivation training in Black communities focused on alleviating the “cycle of poverty,” a term that evoked social scientific research into race and poverty. Motivation, in this section, was understood by psychologists and policy- makers as an individual capacity towards achievement and meaning in work that African-

Americans had to cultivate in order to achieve economic success—a model of individual empowerment that could serve to minimize the need to address structural conditions of segregation and racism.

2.5 Redesigning Work: Texas Instruments as Experimental Lab

Corporate training departments were not the only division to feel the influence of motivational psychology. In the 1960s and 1970s, major corporations, including General

Electric, IBM, AT&T, and Texas Instruments drew on motivational psychology and participatory management to experiment with job redesign.165 Unlike motivational techniques centered on the individual, job redesign was an experimental corporate strategy aimed at refashioning the motivational climate surrounding the worker. Job redesign entailed rearranging the responsibilities and managerial hierarchies of work in order to make workers feel a sense of responsibility and meaning in work. McBer’s longitudinal studies and surveys of organizational climate suggested how work arrangements, from managerial style to corporate reward structures, could stifle or elicit motivation. Like the Thematic Apperception Test and achievement

165 Harold Rush, Job Design for Motivation: Experiments in Job Enlargement and Job Enrichment (New York: The Conference Board, 1971). McGraw-Hill Research Information Centre, Box 14, John Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University.

94 motivation training, job redesign was an experimental technique rooted in assumptions about motivation’s connection to the work ethic—that people are motivated by the drives towards achievement and self-actualization at work.

Texas Instruments’ experiments in job redesign became widely cited in management literature as an exemplar of participative management in action, applied to all levels of the organization.166 Texas Instruments, a manufacturer of semiconductors, had begun in 1951 as a small company invested in an informal, entrepreneurial management culture. By the end of the

1950s aggressive expansion and merger strategies resulted in a tenfold increase in the workforce and more levels of management, challenging its entrepreneurial culture of motivation. M. Scott

Myers, industrial psychologist and architect of the job redesign project, pinpointed the problem using metaphors of energy: with increased complexity, motivation, once in high supply, had

“ceased to be self-generating.”167 In the mid-1960s, to counter the specialization and division that accompanied corporate growth, Texas Instruments remade organizational structures so that accountability to the team—the smaller unit within the organization—could create an effective motivational climate.168 Texas Instruments’ attempts to translate entrepreneurial motives into corporate hierarchies demonstrate how motivational psychology served as a resource for corporate job redesign strategies. Texas Instruments’ job redesign program rested on assumptions about work: namely, “that people want meaningful work and freedom to perform it.”169

166 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper Collins, 1982). 167 Frederick Herzberg, “One More Time—How Do You Motivate Employees?” Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 1968): 53-62. 168 M. Scott Myers, “Conditions for Manager Motivation,” Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 1966): 66. In chapter 3, I discuss work teams in greater detail. Here, I emphasize how assumptions about motives shaped corporate experiments in job redesign. 169 Rush, Job Design for Motivation, 45.

Job redesign at Texas Instruments was an experimental initiative designed to test out the

‘maintenance-motivator’ theory of influential industrial psychologist Frederick Herzberg.

Herzberg’s 1968 article “One More Time—How Do You Motivate Employees?” today remains one of Harvard Business Review’s most-cited articles; his theories were taught at supervisor training programs and at company-wide meetings in Texas Instruments. Based on corporate experiments at an Arizona bank branch in 1966, a company that sought new motivational strategies to address high employee turnover due to the mundane nature of auditing work and limited opportunities for growth.170 Existing corporate strategies to address these problems, like improving working conditions, did not seem to improve employee motivation. Drawing on these experiments, on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and on McClelland’s achievement motivation,

Herzberg distinguished between ‘maintenance’ and ‘motivator’ factors in employee motivation.

Corresponding to the lower rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy, maintenance factors, like working conditions and salary, could demotivate workers, but could not serve as active sources of motivation. Only higher-order needs—like achievement and self-actualization—could strengthen motivation. In the framework of motivation-maintenance theory, wages were treated as maintenance factors that, in themselves, could not motivate workers. If motivation needs were frustrated, workers grew more concerned with maintenance needs; if motivation needs were satisfied, changes to maintenance needs had little impact.

At Texas Instruments, consultants began by interviewing employees based on the maintenance-motivator framework; answers to questions like, ‘when did you feel particularly good or bad about your job?” were coded according to maintenance factor (like company policy or working conditions) and motivating factors (expressions of responsibility or autonomy). As

170 Rush, Job Design for Motivation, 45.

96 one corporate guide to job enrichment reminded their managers: “all the money in the world can't make a dull job interesting.” Maintenance factors like salary, benefits, or working conditions mattered, certainly; but it was only through “the work itself” that people could feel

“turned-on’ by a job.”171

Management implementation of job redesign programs responded to problems that management experts had themselves helped produce—subdivided work, made efficient but meaningless—a long-standing worry among Marxists, union activists as well as other cultural critics such as William Whyte. Since Marx’s 19th-century analysis of work under capitalism,

Marxian thinkers had criticized assembly lines for alienating workers from the products of their work. How might work be a source of achievement and self-actualization if the product of work was so far removed, or their control over their work so limited?172 As one management training manual from 1964 noted, if “my job is broken down so elementally that it, in and of itself, is relatively unimportant, then I will be hard-pressed to appear as anything but 'a pair of hands.'”173

The breakdown of work into its elements was the hallmark of scientific management practitioners of the 1910s-1920s, such as Lillian Gilbreth, who sought to create a universal science of work that harnessed the bodily capacities of workers for maximum efficiency. The hallmark technique of scientific management was the time-and-motion study, where experts watched workers perform tasks, broke tasks down into their constituent movements, and rebuilt

171 Susan Walima, “Job Enrichment: An Action Guide,” (Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation, 1974), 14. John Rapparlie Papers, Box 2802, Folder 15, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 172 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 173 William Underwood, “People’s Needs and Motivations,” (American National Red Cross Management School, 1964): 5. National Training Laboratories Papers, Box 256, Folder “The American National Red Cross Basic Management School.” For the history of the National Training Laboratories, see chapter 4.

97 the task into the “one right way.”174 But in pursuit of efficiency, scientific management’s standardized work often ended up standardizing workers and removing their participation in their own work. 175

Proponents of participatory management in the 1960s picked up one part of the critique of alienation and social critiques of conformity, while arguing that new arrangements of work could mitigate the experience of alienation. Maslow, in a corporate memo written for Non-Linear

Systems, also forged a connection between motivational capacity and redesigning work: it was not in the “boring and stultifying experience of performing repetitive operations” that one found self-actualization, but through “assuming more and more of the complete task,” thus providing workers with the “opportunity to uncover [their] latent abilities.”176 The same features of management once widely credited with improvements in productivity and living standards— division of labor, hierarchical management structure—were increasingly understood by

174 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Stephen Waring, Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 175 Human relations management proponents in the 1920s and 1930s had also criticized scientific management, although from a conservative, management-friendly stance. Human relations guru Elton Mayo, for instance, suggested that workers were not motivated by economic incentives, but by psychological and social dimensions of work, including good social relations. And furthermore, that the threats to motivation encompassed not fatigue, as a physiological problem, or inefficiency, but boredom—an inherently psychological phenomenon. Mayo argued that ‘monotony’ did not inhere in the job itself, but in their relationship to the job. A job which may appear externally boring—like assembling relay switches, or airplane parts—could be made interesting by the workers’ rich internal life, or their relationships with their coworkers. What motivated these workers was not the intrinsic interest in the work, or the sense of achievement, but these emotional and social elements of work. This was a particularly gendered vision of motivation: it was all women in the relay room, and Mayo’s emphasis on the social dimensions of work rested on a vision of women as less motivated by sense of achievement or meaning at work, and more in the emotional and social elements of work. 176 Abraham Maslow, “The Consultative Marketing Man,” (Nonlinear Systems Memo, June 1963), Abraham Maslow Papers, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron.

98 management practitioners as a source of alienation, removing the results of work from the work itself.177

Corporate job redesign projects, such as those at Texas Instruments, self-consciously described corporations as laboratories to test out these new motivational theories. Management practitioners presented job redesign as an alternative to scientific management—in that it adopted a more robust concern with worker motivation—that nonetheless retained its emphasis on efficiency and productivity.178 Herzberg positioned maintenance-motivator theory in the genealogy of scientific management, in that its goal was to design appropriate work flows and incentive systems, with the end goal being the efficient use of resources, human and material.

Similar practices as “time and motion” studies were incorporated under the rubric of “work simplification” in the 1960s and 1970s, but with one key difference—workers themselves, rather than expert consultants, were encouraged to improve their own work. Management and policy literature explicitly described job redesign as an experimental intervention. As one government- sponsored report on work reported, each attempt at job redesign “constitute[d] a unique experiment” that remained a perpetually ongoing and unfinished project: “the redesign of work would be experimental until the last workplace were restructured” because “the workers participate in the redesign of the work, and each of the resulting sets of working conditions must

177 Critical and historical labor scholarship in the 1970s were implicated in this same social concern over work in America, arguing that work had become irrevocably degraded and dehumanized. Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Historian of management Roy Jacques argues that the concern with motivation emerged with the separation of the worker from his output, through the division of labor. Roy Jacques, Manufacturing the Employee 178 Rush, Job Design for Motivation.

99 vary with the workers' choices.”179 The title of Myers’ book, Every Employee a Manager, captures how theories of participatory pushed managerial tasks down the corporate hierarchy.180

As part of their experiments in participatory management, Texas Instruments adopted the

Management of Motives Index, a psychological test that evaluated managers’ perceptions of their employees’ motives.181 Created by psychologist Jay Hall and published by Teleometrics, publisher of psychology based in Texas, the Management of Motives Index operationalized

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the format of a self-reporting personality inventory. Unlike the

TAT’s reliance on pictures and narrative analysis, this test asked managers to answer written questions by choosing among multiple choice options, coded to represent different motives in the hierarchy of needs. For example, one question asked managers, “In evaluating his job, the average employee is most concerned about? a) whether or not it will allow him freedom to grow as much as he can,” or “b) whether or not it pays well enough to satisfy the needs he and his family has.”182 The test manual encouraged managers to understand their workers’ differing motives: individuals motived by safety needs would respond differently to different incentives than workers motivated by self-actualization needs.

Yet more than just passively identifying workers’ needs, managers, given their authority, had the power to satisfy or frustrate workers’ needs; they acted as the “mediator of opportunities for need satisfaction.”183 As the test creator Jay Hall wrote, a good manager should “harness the more constructive and contributive motives of their subordinates, thereby channeling those

179 O’Toole et al, Work in America,. 83. 180 M. Scott Myers, Every Employee a Manager (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1970). 181 Myers, “Conditions for Manager Motivation,” 66. 182 Jay Hall, Management of Motives Index (The Woodlands, Texas: Teleometrics International, 1968), Saul Sells Papers, Box 1615, Folder 4, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron. 183 Hall, Management of Motives Index, 8.

100 subordinates’ activities toward the doing of the organization’s work.”184 Blending self- actualization with achievement, Hall described the “achieving manager” as attaining self- actualization through mediating her subordinates’ needs: “from a motivational standpoint the achieving manager needs to find meaning in his or her work and strives to afford such meaning to others.”185 Hall described the role of the manager in similar terms as McBer and McClelland: managers had to create the right motivational climate for their subordinates. Moreover, it was through mediating subordinates’ motives that managers could themselves attain self- actualization.

The company congratulated itself for creating a motivational climate in jobs not usually associated with meaning and responsibility.186 A training manager for Texas Instruments cautioned job designers not to assume that “people in low-skilled…jobs somehow have different values and motivations”; that “the poor guy who pushes a broom just wants to do the least he can get away with and take home his pay.”187 Workers across “all levels of jobs have similar needs, motivations, and values”—like the motivation for achievement and self-actualization in work— that could be channeled by appropriate job redesign.

Despite these claims that work could be redesigned at all levels, Maslow’s theory of motivation posited qualitatively different types of motives that could be unevenly distributed across individuals.188 One 1970 trade article, “Will Maslow work with the hardcore?” written by

184 Jay Hall, “To Achieve or Not: The Manager's Choice,” California Management Review 8 (1976): 5-18. 185 Jay Hall, “To Achieve or Not: The Manager's Choice,” California Management Review 8 (1976): 10. 186 Myers, “Conditions for Manager Motivation.” 187 Rush, Job Design for Motivation, 39. 188 Critical management scholar Dallas Cullen explains this aspect of Maslow’s theory—the uneven distribution of motives— according to Maslow’s early background in primate research. Maslow developed his theory of motivation while studying dominance motives as a primate researcher, working under Harry Harlow—who would be famous for experiments claiming love was a biological instinct. The motive that Maslow later referred to as the motive for esteem—the motive just below self-actualization—was first named the “dominance-feeling.” The recognition of

101 a vocational trainer who worked with the “hardcore unemployed,” described how motives differed depending on the individual’s position in the hierarchy of needs.189 Unlike middle-class

Americans, for the “hardcore unemployed,” needs for safety and security had not yet been met.

They could not be motivated, then, by appealing to their self-actualization (or intrinsic desire for achievement at work) but only by appealing to the needs at the lower rungs of the motivational ladder. Poor motivation often derived from trying to fill needs out of order, or appealing to the wrong needs. Supervisors thus needed to understand their employees and tailor their motivational approach according to their specific needs. The article offered a sample dialogue for foremen to tap into their subordinates’ needs for security: “Don’t be concerned about being a little scared…and remember, everybody makes mistakes.”190

In contrast, the job redesign program at Texas Instruments consciously sought to redesign jobs at all levels, including the unskilled and low-skilled work often left out of invocations of achievement and self-actualization—and work often performed by racial minorities. One intervention in 1967 targeted janitor staff in the Dallas headquarters, seeking to improve cleanliness standards and decrease turnover—attributed to low levels of motivation among workers. Staff were made responsible for their own cleaning inspections and equipment ordering; they were asked for input into work processes and suggestions for new products to order or new cleaning routines; supervisors of the cleaning staff were sent to seminars to learn theories of participatory management in workshops. In addition to these practices, the company increased wages, amplified efforts at recruiting personnel, and increased job-specific training. By re-engineering jobs and work teams, Texas Instruments gave work teams responsibility for

one’s superiority over others, then, was one of the preconditions for self-actualization. Dallas Cullen, “Maslow, Monkeys and Motivation Theory,” Organization 4, n. 3 (1997): 355-373. 189 Alan Hanline, “Will Maslow Work with the Hard Core?” Training in Business & Industry (March 1970): 72. 190 Alan Hanline, “Will Maslow Work with the Hard Core?,” 72.

102 setting goals and performance standards and completing a total unit of work. The company reported more cleanliness and less turnover, attributed not to the higher wages or better recruiting, but to the psychological benefits of job enrichment. It does not take too much analysis to challenge Texas Instruments’ causal claims and imagine instead that higher wages might have had a profound effect on turnover.191 My concern here, however, is to highlight how the company itself and the management literature that cited Texas Instruments’ study attributed employee changes to an altered psychological climate of motivation.

In the name of self-actualization and achievement, job redesign entailed giving workers more managerial responsibility—a logic that appealed to corporations aiming to rein in costs of their human resources amidst a rapidly-expanding managerial hierarchy. The employee relations director of a chemical firm that implemented job design stated baldly that the ultimate goal was not to “make people happy” but to make the company profitable by providing a greater return on investment in the company’s human resources, which required tapping into employees’ intrinsic motivation.192 Myers, for example, suggested that “satisfying motivation needs is not only the more realistic approach for satisfying personal goals and sustaining the organization, but it is also less expensive.”193 Similarly, Herzberg bluntly described “motivating factors” in contrast to good pay and benefits: “maintenance factors,” such as increasing wages and benefits had neither motivated workers to be more productive nor helped America’s global competitiveness, but had

191 Although the report did consider the impact of wages, its central conclusion was that increased productivity was due to a changed psychological climate. Similar conclusions were drawn in the trade literature that reported these experiments. 192 Rush, Job Design for Motivation, 36. 193 M. Scott Myers, “Who Are Your Motivated Workers?” Harvard Business Review (Jan 1964): 73-88.

103 only served to make workers feel entitled. “Industry,” Herzberg declared, “has outdone the most welfare-minded of welfare states…These benefits are no longer rewards; they are rights.”194

Herzberg’s claim that the welfare state had demotivated workers, and Nixon’s invocation of the threat of the welfare recipient, reflects the counter-figure of the work ethic: the looming threat (for political and business leaders) of subjects not properly inculcated into the work ethic—such as recipients of welfare.195 In every decade since the 1960s welfare has surged as a politicized issue, marked by racialized invocations of the figure of the “single Black mother.”

Long before Ronald Reagan’s reference to “welfare queens,” stereotypes about Black women’s

“immoral” sexuality permeated social science research and policies around welfare from at least the 1930s.196 Welfare policies often included punitive practices of surveillance: “substitute father” laws gave welfare agents rights to enter recipients’ home at any time to see if a man was present, as pretense to revoke welfare payments. These policies, strengthened by the ideological force of the work ethic, forced women into double binds—if they stayed single, they risked being labeled as sexually immoral; but if they entered into relationships, they risked having their welfare benefits revoked and their sexual life under surveillance.197 If they worked, they were called bad mothers for having abandoned their children; but if they stayed home, they were deemed lazy. Either way, their benefits were rarely enough to live on. Welfare policies were shaped by what one policy report referred to as a “deference to the work ethic” in unhelpful

194 Herzberg, “One More Time,” 55. 195 Nixon asked country musician Johnny Cash to perform the slanderous song, “Welfare Cadillac,” at the White House—Cash refused. Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace. 196 Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White. 197 Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace.

104 ways—encouraging workfare for single mothers, without taking adequate childcare needs into account.198

This section discussed how motivational psychology influenced experimental re- arrangements of work at Texas Instruments as evidence for my claim that job redesign represented a crucial site for the articulation of motivation as a component of psychological capital. The management practitioners at Texas Instruments explicitly promoted job redesign as an experimental initiative and pedagogical space for managers to encounter theories and techniques of motivational psychology. Moreover, this section has revealed how the class-based politics of the work ethic shaped management ideas and practices. Management attempts to make work more meaningful and to decrease workers’ sense of alienation involved redesigning jobs at all levels of the managerial hierarchy. However, corporate rationales for job redesign, even while citing motivation as a rationale, dovetailed with economic arguments of efficiency, productivity, and critiques of the welfare state.

2.6 Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the work ethic became wedded to motivational psychology and thus served as a crucial site for measuring and cultivating psychological capital. By tracing the achievement motivation seminar from the gendered, capitalist-inflected, and transnational origins of the Thematic Apperception Test through corporate training seminars among white managers, in government programs, and in entrepreneurial training for Black business owners, we have seen how motivational psychology became intertwined with changing understandings about the work ethic and its central importance in American society from the 1960s to the 1980s.

198 O’Toole et al, Work in America.

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I have argued that the Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological test, became a crucial technique not just to measure motives, but also to elicit them. The techniques and theories of motivation outlined in this chapter became, by the early 1970s, common in policy research on the work ethic.

Government policy reports demonstrate how the motives towards achievement and self- actualization had been glued to the work ethic in the minds of policy-oriented social scientists. In

1973, the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare published what became a best- selling report on the state of the American work ethic called Work in America, written by an interdisciplinary team of social scientists chaired by political scientist James O’Toole.199 A second volume, Work Ethic and Economic Vitality, was published in 1982 by pollster Daniel

Yankelovich’s social research firm.200 Both reports found that the work ethic, far from waning, had been deeply internalized in the American population, but they pointed to lags between the inner motivation to work and the external structures that blocked these motives. Citing Maslow’s theory, Work in America argued that the very success of this newly revised work ethic—the twinned motives for achievement and self-actualization—generated new need structures and new expectations that could not be met by just any type of work. Despite all the rhetoric of participatory management and attempts at job redesign, white-collar and blue-collar work alike was still too often arranged in an authoritarian styles, so that there remained too little opportunity for becoming “involved in the activity of work as a mode of personal self-expression.”201 The

199 O’Toole et al, Work in America. The popularity of Work in America reflects how institutionalized social surveys had become in American culture. On the history of social surveys, see Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 200 In 1982, McBer was briefly acquired by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, the survey research firm which published social surveys on the work ethic. McBer executive Richard Boyatzis also served as an executive of Yankelovich. 201 O’Toole et al, Work in America, 19.

106 most dissatisfied group of workers, Work in America concluded, were young, Black, educated white-collar workers; not only did they seek meaning in work and meaningful participation in

American life through their work, but their needs for security and survival had not even been met due to persistent discrimination within and outside the corporation.202

A decade after Work in America, survey research organization Yankelovich and Associates published the results of a social survey that confirmed a similar gap between the strength of the work ethic and its outputs.203 In contrast to the convictions of American business and political leaders that America’s productivity and global competitiveness had declined because workers had lost their “motivation and pride in their work.”204 The Work Ethic and Economic Vitality found that most people subscribed to the notion that work had intrinsic meaning beyond its economic relation.205 The crux of the puzzle was the gap between the internalization and the work ethic—this “large unexplained ‘residual’…[of] human investment—the amount of effort workers are willing to invest in their jobs.”206 Even if Americans tended to believe in an inner drive towards meaningful work, too few Americans believed that any benefits from increased

202 In the last chapter, I will discuss efforts to alter diversity in the white-collar workforce. 203 On social surveys, see Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 204 Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr, “The Work Ethic and Economic Vitality,” (New York: Public Agenda Foundation, 1982 [Working Draft]): 19. Ford Foundation records (National Affairs Division, Series I), Box 35, Folder 1, Rockefeller Archives Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 205 Their social survey posed its questions in the rhetoric of psychological motives: the ‘strong’ version of the work ethic held that “I have an inner need to do the very best job I can, regardless of pay,” whereas “money-motivated” respondents saw work merely as an economic transaction: “Working for a living is one of life’s unpleasant necessities. I would not work if I did not have to.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, responses to the two questions differed depending on the nature of work: educated knowledge workers were more likely to respond yes to the first question, whereas poorer blue-collar or service workers tended to respond yes to the second question. John Jeffries and Harvey Later, “The Work Ethic and Economic Vitality Databook,” (New York: Public Agenda Foundation, 1982 [Appendix]): Part II. Ford Foundation records (National Affairs Division, Series I), Box 35, Folder 1, Rockefeller Archives Center; Daniel Yankelovich, “We Need New Motivational Tools,” Industry Week (Aug 6, 1979): 62. 206 John Jeffries and Harvey Later, “The Work Ethic and Economic Vitality Databook.”

107 productivity would accrue to them. The task for policy-makers, psychologists, and corporate leaders was to tap into these “enormous reserves of withheld effort” and so harness the reservoir of latent energy towards productivity gains —just as Niagara Falls could be harnessed for electricity.207

As these policy reports suggest, the history from the 1960s to the 1980s traced in this chapter brings into view a deep tension between the presumption of achievement motivation and the realities of structural barriers that frustrated such motivation. McBer psychologists did recognize these limitations in individual motivation, and indeed developed theories of organizational climate to account for these conditions, even as motivation training programs remained a dominant intervention to cultivate psychological capital. As a category, achievement motivation presumed an atomized, unitary individual, who accepts personal responsibility and takes “calculated risks” towards achieving his own individual ends. After all, to score high in achievement motivation, you had to assume personal responsibility for your fate, to forge the causal connection between motives, your behaviour and your results (defined according to economic success). But what if you did not feel as if you were in charge of your own fate? What if companies refused to hire you? What if your manager didn’t promote you? What if banks refused to extend credit for your business? What if your segregated neighborhood failed to attract capital to invest in business? Likewise, self-actualization as a category presumes that work could and should be meaningful, an avenue for personal growth. But what if you just treated work as a paycheck? What if you didn’t want to give all of yourself to work? What if your work didn’t allow for personal fulfillment?

207 Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr, “The Work Ethic and Economic Vitality,” 19.

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In articulating the work ethic as a latent resource, to be harnessed for corporate and national value, this chapter has excavated how motivation became a core component of psychological capital. This chapter thus contributes to the first overall argument of the dissertation: that psychological techniques acted as techniques to measure and also to elicit psychological capacities as components of psychological capital. The Thematic Apperception

Test, as adopted in motivation training, sought to encourage the very motives it measured, and harness them towards organizational goals and economic success. This constellation of psychological techniques, motivational theories, and corporate interventions contributed to a specific and historically situated version of the work ethic that emphasized intrinsic motivation towards achievement and self-actualization through work.

Secondly, this chapter has furthered the overarching argument of the dissertation that corporate management served as a major site for the production and practice of psychological knowledge and techniques in ways that made psychology part of American work, management, and policy. Participants in motivation training seminars read the psychological theories of

Maslow, McClelland, and Herzberg; they took the Thematic Apperception Test; they learned to study their own motives, and those of their subordinates. For McClelland, Maslow, and

Herzberg, corporations in turn served as experimental laboratories to test out and validate their motivational theories. The entire enterprise of job design, moreover, was designed as an experimental initiative to put motivational psychology into practice.

The developments covered in this chapter thus cut to the heart of contemporary understandings of work and selfhood: the prevalence of the injunction to “do what you love” signals how thoroughly bound up many people are in ideas of work as a calling. Understood as intrinsic motivation towards meaning and pleasure in work, the work ethic, though, glosses over the uneven distributions of work and workers, between de-valorized work, not expected to bring

109 satisfaction, and over-valorized work, supposed to be all of life. I began the dissertation with motivation because psychologists and management practitioners have treated motivation— wedded to the work ethic—as the fundamental point of origin for other components of psychological capital. The notion that work should incorporate pleasure, meaning, and play is one thread that continues into the next chapter, which shows how corporations harnessed creative intuition towards corporate value with the promise of enriching the psychological lives of their workers.

Chapter 3 The Intuitive Leader

3.1 Introduction

At a lakeside cabin in North Carolina in the late 1980s, consultant Ned Herrmann hosted a small group of Shell executives at a “whole brain training” retreat to envision new corporate strategies. They began by taking a psychological test to determine if they preferred intuitive or analytical modes of thinking, and answering a series of binary questions about their psychological preferences: do you prefer theories or facts, abstract ideas or concrete experiences, routine or constant change, practicality or ingenuity, possibilities or actualities? On the first day of the retreat, participants used wood, wire, and feathers to build a physical model of the business problem that was puzzling them. They then rowed to the middle of the lake, hoping to generate metaphors from nature; upon returning to dry land, they physically remodeled the sculpture of their problem. The next day, Herrmann guided them on a hike to a point overlooking the same lake where they gained new perspective (quite literally) with which to view their problem; upon their return to lower altitude, they again refashioned their problem with fresh eyes. Education on the principles of “whole brain thinking” was peppered throughout the program: participants learned that they each had a natural preference for either intuitive or analytical styles, but that through training, they could learn to think with their whole brain.

Herrmann promised executives that they would return to their company with a “new level of conscious awareness of the brain itself [and a] feeling of confidence about your own mental function”—an attitude that would allow them to create novel corporate strategies.1

1 Ned Herrmann, “The Creative Brain,” NASSP Bulletin 66, no. 455 (1982): 44; Laurie Nadel, The Sixth Sense: The Whole Brain Book of Intuition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).

110 111

The promises of Herrmann’s “whole brain training” seminar—that personality tests and eccentric exercises could train the brain, increase self-awareness, and produce innovative corporate strategies—illuminate the key themes that animate this chapter. By the mid-1980s,

Herrmann International had administered “whole brain training” seminars to executives at many corporations including Shell, Proctor & Gamble, IBM, American Express, and AT&T.2 This small consulting firm was not the only company to run courses that promised to cultivate intuitive capacities among the American managerial class. In similar courses in the boardrooms and at lakesides across corporate America, executives and managers attended retreats, read self- help books, or participated in creative and colorful exercises to unleash a capacity that was variously referred to as their “inner voice,” “sixth sense,” “mind’s eye,” and “right brain”: the capacity for intuitive thinking. As examined in this chapter, consulting psychologists, such as

Ned Herrmann, assimilated an eclectic set of traditions, including creativity research, the neuroscience of split brains, and New Age psychology, in order to conceptualize and legitimate intuitive management; they created an equally eclectic set of exercises and protocols to promote intuition in corporate America. This coterie of largely white, male consulting psychologists packaged and sold intuition to corporations, mobilizing intuition as a concrete, measurable capacity that could be cultivated by corporations as a form of psychological capital.3

My argument is that a new archetype of the ideal leader crystallized in corporate America by the 1980s: the intuitive executive. Intuitive leaders were defined not by their calculative rationality or logical reasoning skills, but by their ability to think creatively, to see the big

2 The company, run by Ned Herrmann’s daughter, Ann Herrmann-Nehdi, continues to administer “brain training” workshops to major corporations, such as Coca-Cola. http://www.herrmannsolutions.com/ 3 On the history of consulting, see Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

112 picture, to perceive the present and future business environment in the context of the knowledge economy.4 Intuition, like motivation, was another psychological capacity that came to compose psychological capital through the interventions of consulting psychologists. The previous chapter showed how theories of intrinsic motivation depicted work as a site of self-actualization and fulfillment. This chapter picks up this thread by emphasizing how strategies for cultivating intuition sought to make work more “intuitive,” for the sake of individual empowerment and corporate value.

As articulated through the business texts and practices of the 1970s and 1980s, intuitive executives possessed the capacity to think creatively, process information holistically, and perceive the future in order to create innovative strategies amidst rampant downsizing and corporate restructuring—changes to the corporate landscape that they themselves helped to produce.5 In their best-selling 1982 management book, In Search of Excellence, McKinsey consultants declared that “only the intuitive leap…will let us solve problems in the complex world.”6 Prominent management theorist Peter Drucker described the central skill required for corporate leaders in the knowledge economy as the capacity associated with intuition: the

“ability to see, to understand, and even to produce a pattern”—a skill that required “imaginative ability of a high, almost of an artistic order.” 7

4 Peter Drucker, The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (New York: Transaction Publishers): 23. Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ in Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York, 1959). See chapter 1 for further discussion of the knowledge economy. See also, Weston Agor, “Managing Brain Skills to Increase Productivity,” Public Administration Review 45, no. 6 (1985): PG NUMBER 5 Karen Ho, “Corporate Nostalgia? Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective,” in Corporations and Citizenship, ed. Greg Urban, 267-288 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 6 Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies (New York: Harper Collins, 1982): 63. By 1986, this book had sold over 3 million copies, and it would go on to be one of the best-selling management books of all time. 7 As a postwar subject, the intuitive manager is an instance of a more general collapse of theories of perception and cognition that historian of science Orit Halpern traces across the postwar cognitive sciences and corporate design

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Business leaders in the 1970s and 1980s were convinced that the current and future business environment they faced was more turbulent, unpredictable, uncertain, and complex than before, and that this turbulence demanded new strategies for steering corporations. On the one hand, historians must be cautious of ascribing too much weight to this business imaginary; after all, when has the future ever not seemed complex and uncertain?8 At the same time, the sense among business leaders that the world was more turbulent and unpredictable did point to particular changes in the technological, economic, and political landscapes—including the energy crisis and stagflation—that seemed to make a particularly valuable psychological capacity.9 As the editors of Intuition at Work observed, the mid-1970s marked the inauguration of the “intuition industry”—an age defined by “the replacement of mind over matter and brute strength as the primary economic resource.”10 Corporations invoked intuition as a psychological capacity that could produce effective innovation and strategies. In a 1982 speech to human resource professionals, Harvard Business School management expert Paul Lawrence declared that the era needed a new “an executive who can cope with change and uncertainty, who is creative and adaptable; who can tolerate working in a business organization as fluid as the economic environment.”11

strategies, as perception came to be understood as a process that was “both affective and logical.” Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 133. 8 Jamie Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 9 Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2-3 (2010): 167-190. 10 Roger Frantz and Alex Pattakos, “Introduction,” in Intuition at Work (San Francisco, 1996), 138. 11 Paul Lawrence, “New Challenges to Human Resource Management (Speech to Connecticut Personnel Symposium, Sept 1982): p. 5. Paul Lawrence Papers, Carton 8, Folder 27, Baker Library Archives, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Intuition is a wily object of analysis because it never designated a consistent or coherent category, due to the divergent scientific, management, and religious traditions that influenced the core texts and ideas of intuitive management. One intuition researcher, Jeffrey Mishlove, noted seventeen connotations of intuition, ranging from a gut feeling to a cognitive form of information processing, and even a form of extrasensory perception.12 As an epistemological mode, intuition named the process of coming to know something without knowing how you knew it.13

Proponents of intuitive management who populate this chapter presented their work as a criticism of bureaucratic conformity, analytical decision-making, and logical reasoning. For them, the term intuition captured a heterogeneous, often contradictory mix of qualities defined in opposition to rational and analytical forms of reasoning. This chapter will gather the multiple meanings of intuition together while broadly defining it as a non-calculative epistemological capacity for thinking that encompassed processes of perception, cognition, and affect.14 In emphasizing how intuition braided together capacities of cognition, affect, and perception, this chapter bridges histories of “rationality” in the postwar human sciences and business with histories of creativity and emotions, to show how intuition became a second crucial component of psychological capital.15

12 Jeffrey Mishlove, “What Is Intuition?” in Intuition at Work, ed. Roger Frantz and Alex Pattakos (San Francisco: New Leaders Press, 1996). 13 Historians of postwar science Joy Rohde and Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi both show how intuition, as invoked in postwar foreign policy and scenario planning, respectively, was contrasted to computers as a form of expert human reasoning. In the case of Kahn, intuition was connected to his personal charismatic style. Joy Rohde, “Pax Technologica: Computers, International Affairs, and Human Reason in the Cold War,” Isis 108:4 (Dec 2017): 792- 813; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 14 Cinla Akinci and Eugene Sadler-Smith, “Intuition in Management Research: A Historical Review,” International Journal of Management Reviews 14, no. 1 (2012): 114. 15 Paul Erickson et al, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Sonia Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2014).

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Although an eclectic and pluralistic set of research methods and programs animated intuitive management, this chapter shows how the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs Type

Indicator threaded through disparate research traditions to become widely used as a measure of intuition. Management researchers argued that the Myers-Briggs, a personality test that included an axis to measure intuition as a component of personality, offered a way to make intuition measurable, to overcome business skepticism towards intuition, and to harness intuition towards corporate goals. As management writer Harold Leavitt noted, one could not expect to be taken seriously talking about “hunches and gut feelings—not until you can index them.”16 Offering a measure to index intuition, the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs served as what Susan Leigh

Starr and James Griesemer have called a “boundary object”: an object that became legible across the different domains and research paradigms that made up intuitive management.17 By narrating the history of MBTI’s intuition scale, this chapter thus contributes to the larger argument of the dissertation: that psychological tests served as techniques to cultivate and activate the very capacities they purported to measure. This chapter further demonstrates how the capacity for intuition became a crucial component of psychological capital during the 1970s and 1980s.

By 1991, the U.S. Department of Labor named intuition, described as the “ability to see with the mind’s eye,” as a core competency for the workforce, reflecting how intuition had become a crucial component of psychological capital during the 1970s and 1980s.18 Corporate departments of strategic planning, management development, and information technology all

16 Harold Leavitt, “Beyond the Analytic Manager,” California Management Review 17, no. 3 (1975): 9. 17 “Boundary object” refers to an object that can exist in multiple social worlds, and satisfy each of their requirements, even as each of these different social worlds conjure it differently. I am also inspired by Anne-Marie Mol in understanding the multiple meanings of intuition. Susan Leigh Starr and James Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (1989): 387-420; Anne-Marie Mol, The Body Multiple (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 18 For a more in-depth discussion and definition of psychological capital, see chapter 1.

116 embraced some elements of intuitive management. Techniques for measuring and cultivating intuition gained purchase in corporate America amidst changing paradigms of labor and corporate management, involving the decline and outsourcing of industrial work in America, corporate restructuring and accompanying lay-offs, the introduction of information technologies into managerial decision-making hierarchies, and changing demographics of management that brought more women, particularly white women, into corporate management positions—due to political and social changes that included women’s liberation movement, equal employment legislation, and economic pressures.19 Invocations of intuition reimagined the emotional and psychological capacities generally associated with women as valuable for both men and women in the corporation, depicting intuition as an androgynous capacity—even though the ranks of top executives, seen to embody intuition best, remained overwhelmingly male and white. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates how claims about alleged racial differences in the distribution of intuition mirrored the broader racial inequalities that pervaded corporate management practices.

I begin the chapter by considering the initial development and spread of the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs in the 1940s and 1950s to show how the creators and early adopters of the

Myers-Briggs defined intuition as a personality-based capacity linked to perception and creativity. In the next section, I show how management writers beginning in the late 1970s drew on the increasing prominence of neuroscience research into split brains to embody intuition in brains, which in turn reinforced gendered and racialized assumptions about the kinds of bodies and minds that displayed the most intuition. In the third section, I turn to the intuition training workshops run by consulting psychologists in the 1980s who presented intuition as an

19 For more on the impact of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, see chapter 4. In this chapter, I emphasize the gendered politics of intuition. Delaine Nicholson, “Management Training for Women — A Status Report,” Training HRD (September 1976). Hartman Center for Marketing, Advertising and Sales History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

117 organizational mode of decision-making and idea-generation that could be taught to develop new corporate strategies. Strategic management experts invoked the intuitive capacity for holistic, long-range planning as a particularly significant capacity for strategic planning at a moment when technological and economic changes made the future seem more unpredictable. This chapter concludes by reflecting on the affective dimensions of intuition, as reflected in its connection to corporate interest in New Age spirituality during the 1970s and 1980s.

3.2 Intuitive Personalities: Researching Creativity

“Do you believe that a logical step-by-step method is best for solving problems?” Or do you “rely on intuitive hunches and the feeling of ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ when moving towards the solution of a problem”? When making a decision, do you “write down all alternatives, arrange them according to priorities, and then pick the best” or take a walk to think?

“Do you think it is more important to be able a) to see the possibilities in a situation or b) to adjust to the facts as they are?” “Would you rather be considered a) a practical person or b) an ingenious person?”; "Is it harder for you to adapt to a) routine or b) constant change?”20 To business people in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, such questions might be encountered while flipping through a business magazine, opening a self-help book, or attending a corporate retreat. After answering the questions—heeding the instructions’ rejoinder that there are “no wrong answers”—test-takers would receive a personality profile that deemed them an “intuitive” or “right-brained,” “whole-brained,” or “creative” perceiver and decider: an overlapping set of terms that referred to their capacity for intuition.

20 These questions derive from several surveys, including: William Taggart and Enzo Valenzi, “Assessing Rational and Intuitive Styles: A Human Information Processing Metaphor,” Journal of Management Studies 27, no. 2 (1990): 149–72; Eugene Raudsepp, “How Creative Are You?” Personnel Journal 58, no. 4 (1979): 218–19; Consulting Psychologists Press, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Form G (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1976).

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The most popular psychological test in the genre, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, filtered through psychological research, conferences, self-help books and management training to become a widely-used measure of intuition. This section briefly traces the initial history and spread of the Myers-Briggs from the 1940s to the 1970s, examining how intuition as a personality trait became wedded to creativity through research at Berkeley’s Institute for

Personality Assessment and Research. The popularity of “creativity” across psychology, political discourse, and business in the 1950s and 1960s served as a crucial origin point for the later turn to intuitive management. In addition to shared institutional connections between the Myers-

Briggs network and creativity researchers, intuition and creativity shared a closely-associated cluster of meanings, that emphasized perception of patterns, preference for complexity, and originality of thought. Although the Myers-Briggs became one of the most popular techniques to measure and conceptualize intuition, its rocky early history and amateur origins posed challenges for its legitimacy that continue to haunt the Myers-Briggs to this day.21

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a general self-reporting personality test that assesses personality along four scales—extraversion/introversion, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving, and sensing/intuition—which combine to classify a person as one of sixteen possible psychological types.22 The intuition/sensing scale, which is of greatest concern here, described how people perceived information. While sensing described a preference for perception through

21 Anne Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests are Leading us to Miseducate our Children, Mismanage our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2004). 22 The extraversion/introversion scale refers to how people orient ourselves towards the world and gain energy; the thinking/feeling scale assesses the processes people use to come to decision, either based on impersonal considerations or subjective values; the sensing/intuition scale refers to the preferred form of perceiving information, either through the concrete five senses, or through the abstract “sixth sense” of intuition; judging/perceiving explains whether people preferred decisive closure or open-ended spontaneity. Isabel Briggs Myers and Mary McCaulley, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Manual, Second Edition (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1985), Isabel Briggs-Myers Memorial Library, Center for the Association of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida (hereafter CAPT).

119 the five empirical senses, intuition described perception through the “sixth sense”—the realm of images, symbols, ideas, and abstractions.23 As defined in the Myers-Briggs manual, intuition was a perceptual process that “reports meanings, relationships and/or possibilities that have been worked out beyond the reach of the conscious mind.”24 The test manual accompanying the

Myers-Briggs colorfully illustrated the difference between intuition and sensing. When asked to describe an apple, sensors tend to answer with sensory descriptions like “juicy”, “crisp,” or

“red.” In contrast, intuitive types evoked metaphorical imagery to provide more figurative answers, like “keep the doctor away,” “William Tell” or “grandmother’s apple pie.”25 Intuitive people, in contrast to ‘sensors’, preferred abstract ideas over concrete facts, potentialities over actualities, future over present, and holistic over sequential perception.26 Measured through binary questions and pairings of adjectives—theories or facts, abstract ideas or concrete experience, possibilities or actualities—the Myers-Briggs became a prevalent framework to theorize and measure intuition.

The origins of the Myers-Briggs itself lie in the work of a self-taught duo of amateur psychologists, Katherine Briggs, and her daughter Isabel Myers, who adapted Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types in the accessible format of a self-reporting personality test.27 In a 1926 article in The New Republic, “Meet Yourself,” Briggs cited Jung while describing intuition as an unconscious drive towards creativity, explaining how personality typology could foster personal

23 Carl Jung, Psychological Types (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 24 Briggs and McCaulley, The MBTI Manual, Second Edition 25 Briggs and McCaulley, The MBTI Manual, Second Edition 26 Isabel Briggs Myers, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Manual, First Edition (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press., 1962); Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press., 1980); Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: Form G (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1976), CAPT. 27 Jung, Psychological Types.

120 and professional success.28 Briggs’ daughter, Isabel Myers, created the modern version of the

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator by operationalizing Briggs’ interpretation of Jungian psychological types in the format of a standardized psychological test. Myers was inspired by the personnel selection tests common in American workplaces in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the popular

Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, to develop her own test that had corporate uses.29 Its amateur origins were apparent from the beginning: over the course of the 1940s in Philadelphia,

Myers validated the initial set of questions on her friends, family members, and their children’s high school classmates.

In 1956, Educational Testing Services (ETS)—a company now known for publishing standardized school admissions tests, like the Standardized Aptitude Test—became the first publisher of the MBTI.30 Although the MBTI, as a general personality test, seemed to speak to the company’s interest in developing standardized personality tests, ETS staff psychologists

28 Briggs compared the amateur psychologist to an amateur naturalist creating a taxonomy of types: “one need not be a psychologist in order to collect and identify types any more than one needs to be a botanist to collect and identify plants. Katherine Briggs, “Meet Yourself: How to Use Your Personality Paintbox,” The New Republic, Dec 22, 1926, 132. 29 Myers stumbled upon the burgeoning world of applied psychological tests after reading a Reader’s Digest article in 1942, called “Fitting the Workers to the Job.” The article featured a psychological test, the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, that had become popular in American corporations, including Lockheed Aircraft Company, as an efficient way to screen job applicants during the industrial build-up of World War II. The Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, created in 1935 by an industrial psychologist and a personnel manager in 1935, was a measure of temperament—asked 318 questions to measure “temperament”—defined as emotional adjustment—along seven discrete scales. After reading about the Humm-Wadsworth, Myers contacted the personnel manager of a Pennsylvania banking company, who agreed to let her use the Scale to implement an experimental personnel testing program. She found the Humm-Wadsworth dissatisfactory, both for its inability to predict behavior, and for its pathologized categories. However, it served as an important methodological model for Myers. Michael Zickar and Robert Gibby, “A History of the Early Days of Personality Testing in American Industry: An Obsession with Adjustment,” History of Psychology 11, no. 3 (2008): 164-184; Kira Lussier, “Temperamental Workers,” History of Psychology 21, no. 2 (May 2018): 79-99. 30 Myers contacted medical schools to see if they would use the assessment for their students, and 45 schools across America agreed to test their classes in the early 1950s. One of the deans of these medical schools introduced the Indicator to ETS. Frances Saunders, Katherine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1991).

121 expressed mixed feelings about the MBTI.31 As John Ross, head of test development, noted in his commissioned report from 1963: “A veil of suspicion hangs about it. It had an unorthodox origin, it is wedded to a somewhat unfashionable theory, and the enthusiasm it has aroused in some people has provoked sterner opposition in others.”32 One point of contention concerned the

MBTI’s reliance on personality typology—what Ross referred to as the “unfashionable theory” of Carl Jung—rather than a trait-based approach to psychology. Many of the ETS staff psychologists had been trained in factor analysis, a quantitative statistical approach to personality.33 Associated with the work of psychometrician Raymond Cattell, factor analysis proceeded atheoretically, by treating personality as reducible to a number of discrete traits that existed on a continuum, which would be discovered through statistical analysis.34 In contrast, the Myers-Briggs was rooted in a theoretical framework, which posited that each person was a distinct type of person. To measure these dichotomous preferences, the MBTI used a methodology that required test-takers to choose between two binary opposites.35 Like a preference for right or left-handedness, a preference for intuition over sensing represented an individual’s most comfortable and natural way of perceiving and making decisions.36 As test

31 Frances Saunders, Katherine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1991); Lawrence Stricker and John Ross, “Intercorrelations and Reliability of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Psychological Reports 12, no. 1 (1963): 287–93; Anne Murphy Paul, Cult of Personality; 32 Quoted in Frances Saunders, Katherine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1991), 134. 33 Ian Davidson, “The Ambivert: A Failed Attempt at a Normal Personality,” Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences 53 (2017): 313-331; Roderick Buchanan, “Ink Blots or Profile Plots: The Rorschach vs. the MMPI as the Right Tool for a Science-Based Profession,” Science, Technology and Human Values 22 (1997): 168- 206. 34 Danziger, Naming the Mind. 35 To score the Indicator, each question was weighed as either 0, 1, or 2, for each of the four scales; scoring could be done by computer analysis, or simply by overlaying a stencil over the response sheet, to easily count the point scores for each questions. Tallying the points converts the questions into a strength of preference, which then resulted in an assignment to one half of the scale. Each of the questions matched up to only one of the scales. 36 Without getting too mired in the nuances of type theory, I should note that the full theory of the MBTI moves beyond just the 16-type model to emphasize the “functional hierarchy” of the various cognitive preferences. For

122 developer Mary McCaulley noted, the MBTI assumed that people with a “sensing preference become qualitatively different from those who make the choice of the intuitive preference.”37

In addition to criticism of Myers’ reliance on typology, some ETS staff were disdainful of

Myers herself, dismissing her with distinctly gendered terms like “that little old lady” or “that housewife.”38 The gendered opposition to Myers reflects the broader gender dynamics of psychology itself, whose professionalization often marginalized female psychologists. As the field of psychology developed in the 1920s, it increasingly emphasized experimental and quantitative approaches taught in graduate training programs that generally barred women from admission.39 Against this background, Myers maintained a rocky relationship with ETS psychologists, whose attitude, Myers noted, “ranged from indifferent to hostile.”40 The MBTI was never a priority for ETS, which instead focused on the development of standardized academic tests.

But the MBTI reached public attention through various nodes, first at ETS and then at its new publisher, Consulting Psychologists Press. ETS mentioned it in their publications, sent copies to reviewers, and had the test reviewed in the Mental Measurements Yearbook, which since its first publication in 1938 was the most important journal for reviewing psychological tests. Crucial for the MBTI’s spread was its discovery by psychologist Mary McCaulley, based at

instance, an ‘INFJ’ (introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging) has the following stack of preferences: introverted intuition, extraverted feeling, introverted thinking, and extraverted sensing. The inferior function (in this case, extraverted sensing) represents one’s “shadow” function. True type development required being aware of, and developing, one’s auxiliary and inferior functions. Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing. 37 The emphasis is in the original text. Thomas Carskadon, Gordon Lawrence and Mary McCaulley, “Every MBTI User is a Researcher,” In Fifth National Conference on the MBTI (University of Maryland, June 1, 1983): 4, CAPT. 38 Frances Saunders, Katherine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1991); Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality. 39 Brown, The Corporate Eye. 40 Katherine Myers, “Takeshi Ohsawa Pioneer of the Cross-Cultural MBTI World,” Bulletin of Psychological Type 16, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 10, CAPT.

123 the University of Florida, who encountered the MBTI in the 1968 Mental Measurements

Yearbook, and began corresponding with Myers.41 McCaulley’s psychological credentials helped give Myers a wider audience: she made Myers’ data accessible, used computer programs to perform more sophisticated data analysis, and co-wrote the Indicator’s manual. Together,

McCaulley and Myers founded the Typology Laboratory in Gainesville, Florida, in 1972, which became the Center for the Application of Psychological Type in 1975, a non-profit organization that maintained a research database of Myers-Briggs results, and trained professionals to administer the MBTI.42 In 1975, a new publisher, Consulting Psychologists Press, took on the

Myers-Briggs and in 1977 published the revised versions that were most commonly used as measures of managerial intuition—the 126-question long Form G, and the abbreviated 50-item

Form IV, explicitly intended for administration in group training seminars.43

Beginning in 1975, annual conferences devoted to psychological type served as key hubs for negotiating research methods, circulating the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a measure of intuition, and promoting ideas about intuitive leadership. Conferences themselves were an experiential space for activating intuition. At that first 1975 conference, held in Gainesville,

Florida, the program reminded participants to submit their ideas to the “Idea Box,” and to

41 As MBTI practitioner and historian Peter Geyer noted, the Indicator spread almost entirely outside of the elite institutions of academic psychology. Aside from Berkeley’s IPAR, the universities that have supported MBTI research, where dissertations have been written, tend to be from non-elite state universities, like its hub in Gainesville, Florida. Myers never had the direct connections to networks of psychologists and psychometric instruments maintained by creators of other personality inventories. Peter Geyer, “Quantifying Jung: The Origin and Development of the MBTI,” (Masters Thesis: University of Melbourne, 1995). 42 Thomas Carskadon, Gordon Lawrence and Mary McCaulley, “Every MBTI User is a Researcher,” in Fifth National Conference on the MBTI (University of Maryland, June 1, 1983), 4, CAPT. Indeed, Gainesville remains the home of CAPT, where I visited as part of my research. They continue to maintain a research hub, the Isabel Briggs-Myers memorial library, the source of many of the conference proceedings and training materials that compose the primary source base for my dissertation. 43 The president of Consulting Psychologists’ Press, Jack Black, had discovered the MBTI as a graduate student at Minnesota and through his relationship with IPAR psychologist Harrison Gough.

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“Remember, intuition works best if captured in the moment it strikes!”44 Self-reflexivity was built into the conferences, encouraging participants’ own sense of selves as “intuitive” Myers-

Briggs researchers.45 In a presentation at the 1983 annual conference, Mary McCaulley presented an evocatively-titled paper, “Every Myers-Briggs User is a Researcher,” urging researchers to adopt naturalistic models of research, observing how people behaved in real-life situations—like conferences themselves. Conference participants included management professionals interested in training and development, who helped to circulate the Myers-Briggs as a valuable tool for management education.46

In those early years of Myers-Briggs conferences, one subset of psychological researchers found particular value in the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs: researchers interested in the creative personality.47 In 1981, at the fourth annual Myers-Briggs conference,

Berkeley personality psychologist Harrison Gough reported interesting results about the distribution of scores on the MBTI intuition scale among creative people.48 In the general population, intuition was the rarer preference, found usually in 25% of people.49 In contrast to the general population, intuition was preferred by 90 percent of creative personalities across a

44 Mary McCaulley, “Making the Most of Individual Differences in a Changing Society,” Conference on the Uses of the MBTI (Gainesville, Florida, Oct. 1975), CAPT. 45 Thomas Carsakadon, Gordon Lawrence and Mary McCaulley, “Every MBTI User a Researcher,” Fifth National Conference on the MBTI (University of Maryland, June 1, 1983), CAPT. On the way that psychologists understood self-reflexivity as an epistemic virtue, see Jill Morawski, “Epistemological Dizziness in the Psychology Laboratory: Lively Subjects, Anxious Experimenters and Experimental Relations, 1950-1970,” Isis 106, no. 3 (Sept 2015): 567- 597. 46 Chapter 4 examines how the MBTI was used as part of management team-building seminars. 47 Isabel Myers and Mary McCaulley, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Second Edition; S. Gryskiewicz, “Describing the Creative Leader,” MBTI-I: First National Conference (Gainesville, Florida, October 1975), CAPT. 48 Gough is an important figure in the history of psychological testing, as one of the creators of the widely used California Psychological Inventory, which he developed at IPAR. Harrison Gough, “Studies of the MBTI in a Personality Assessment Research Institute,” Fourth Biennial MBTI Conference (Stanford, 1981), CAPT. 49 Myers and McCaulley, The MBTI Manual, Second Edition.

125 range of professions, Gough reported. Creative people, the studies found, reveled in paradox, ambiguity, potentiality, and complexity—the precise forms of perception that Jung had associated with intuition. As Gough noted, “the person scoring high on [intuition] favors fantasy and the abstract to factuality and the concrete, likes imaginative more than sober-minded people, values possibilities more than probabilities, and prefers theories to facts.”50

The connections between creativity and intuition that Gough presented reflected decades of research he had conducted at Berkeley into the nature of the creative personality at a moment when creativity was becoming a political and business concern. 51 One of the first academic institutions to adopt the MBTI and to find particular value in its intuition scale was Berkeley’s

Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, a hub for research into the creative personality ever since its formation in 1949. IPAR’s significance to this history of intuition is twofold: first, it helped bring the Myers-Briggs Indicator to the attention of psychologists and management researchers; and second, it established a close relationship between creativity and intuition, as seen in IPAR’s focus on “the creative personality.” As one of the earliest psychological research centers to correlate scores on the Myers-Briggs with other psychological tests and experiments, IPAR was particularly valuable in providing MBTI researchers with evidence for its validity and utility as a psychometric instrument.52 In addition to developing an

50 Harrison Gough, “Studies of the MBTI in a Personality Assessment Research Institute,” Fourth Biennial MBTI Conference, (Stanford, 1981), CAPT. 51 On the history of creativity, see Michael Bycroft, “Psychology, Psychologists and the Creativity Movement,” in Cold War Social Science, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society,” Isis 100, no. 2 (2009): 219–62; Samuel Franklin, “The Cult of Creativity: Searching for the Source of Progress after the End of Ideology,” (PhD Dissertation: Brown University, 2016). 52 MBTI manuals cited IPAR studies, which correlated the MBTI with other psychological tests, as evidence of the MBTI’s construct validity. Myers and McCaulley, MBTI Manual, Second Edition.

126 intensive, multi-pronged assessment method for studies in personality, IPAR confirmed a high correlation between creativity and intuition, as measured by the MBTI scale.

Like much of mid-to-late twentieth-century psychology, IPAR’s roots lay in World War

II, when the Office of Strategic Services commissioned psychologists Donald MacKinnon and

Henry Murray to develop methods for officer selection.53 The assessment center at IPAR incorporated a diverse set of methods to study personality, including an early version of the

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, in order to experimentally study the qualities associated with creative personalities.54 In one colorful description, the poet Kenneth Rexworth described how

IPAR researchers brought candidates to a converted fraternity house on the University of

California-Berkeley campus for a long weekend in the mid-1950s. Candidates represented various professions across the arts and sciences, from poets to mathematicians, sharing a common trait of creativity. From the first morning to the final evening, researchers subjected the candidates to a barrage of interviews, simulations, games, and psychological tests that included the MBTI—what Rexworth described as a “distressing questionnaire” created by “two Jungian ladies.”55 After a day of testing, interviews, and games, the subjects came together for dinner and cocktails, still under the watchful eye of participant-observer psychologists who later turned these test scores and scribbled notes into candidate profiles to understand the characteristics of the creative personality.

53 Henry Murray, was one of the developers of the Thematic Apperception Test, described in chapter 2. The close link between military and business has been explored in literature on Cold War social sciences. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens eds, Cold War Social Science (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Donald MacKinnon and Henry Murray, “Assessment of OSS Personnel,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 10, no. 2 (1946): 76-80. 54 The Myers-Briggs arrived at IPAR in the late 1940s, after Donald MacKinnon met Isabel Myers while he was teaching at Bryn Mawr in the late 1940s. 55 Beat poet Kenneth Rexworth gave a colorful, and critical, firsthand account of being studied at IPAR. Rexworth, “My Head Gets Tooken Apart,” The Nation, Dec. 1957.

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In focusing on the “creative personality” by studying high-achieving people already deemed to embody creativity, IPAR researchers ended up studying largely white, middle and upper-class males—even as their research demonstrated connections between androgyny and creativity. One notable exception to the male subjects came in the longitudinal study of creative female mathematicians, spearheaded by female IPAR psychologist Ravenna Helson.56 At the first MBTI conference in 1975, Helson presented results that showed a correlation between high scores on the Myers-Briggs intuition scale and measures of androgyny—as measured by childhood interests in “tomboy activities” and psychological measures of masculinity/femininity developed at IPAR as part of its battery of personality tests. 57 This masculinity/femininity scale was also adopted by Donald MacKinnon to conclude that creative men displayed similarly high measures of androgyny.58 The capacity to transcend traditional gendered characteristics became wedded to understandings of the creative personality at IPAR.

Laden with gendered meanings, creativity took on ideological significance in 1950s and

1960s America when it was yoked to anti-conformist attributes such as independence and originality of thought that were valued in American psychology, politics, and business. One

IPAR experiment with the perception of visual lines became well-known as a study of conformity.59 In his early 1950s doctoral work with psychologist Solomon Asch, IPAR

56 Ravenna Helson, “Childhood Interest Clusters Related to Creativity in Women,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 29, no. 4 (1965): 352-361. 57 On the relationship between psychological testing and sexuality/gender in the work of Lewis Terman, see Peter Hegarty, ” From Genius Inverts to Gendered Intelligence,” History of Psychology 10, no. 2 (2007): 132-155. 58 Donald MacKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative Talent,” (Speech given at Yale University, April 11, 1962): 484-494; Ravenna Helson, “Childhood Interest Clusters Related to Creativity in Women,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 29, no. 4 (1965): 352-361. 59 In one study of independence of judgement, researchers placed subjects into the small dark attic in the IPAR research house. Subjects were asked to judge, by feel alone, if a line was vertical or horizontal, in the claim that perceptual processes of touch were associated with cognitive processes associated with creativity. As described disdainfully by Rexworth, “a very determined looking young woman took me in the attic, blindfolded me, led me into a dark room, and spent twenty minutes finding out if I could tell vertical from horizontal.” IPAR, Measures of

128 researcher Richard Crutchfield found that some naïve experimental subjects under (false) social pressure would err in judging the length of lines against the evidence of their own perceptions.60

Asch and Crutchfield’s research served as one inspiration for the dramatic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963, which studied obedience to authority and purported to show that ordinary individuals were willing to inflict pain on strangers under pressure from an authority figure.61 In American political, cultural, and intellectual life, fostering the capacity to decide independently—and hence capacities of creativity and intuition—was treated as a crucial protection against conformist thinking, associated in Cold War political discourse and psychological research with the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.62

Critics of conformity in 1950s and early 1960s America also focused on corporate bureaucracies, which they blamed for stamping out individuality. Social critic William Whyte, whose well-known description of the “organization man” lamented corporate conformity decried corporate psychological testing as a force for creating homogeneous, conformist corporate peons; he urged test-takers to offer the most boring, conventional response to tests, to avoid being screened out for psychological abnormalities. In psychological research and in business,

Independence and Conformity, 1955, RG 1.2, subseries 205, box 3, folder 20, Rockefeller Foundation records, Sleepy Hollow, New York; Rexworth, “My Head Gets Tooken Apart.” 60 Asch reported that between 30-35% of naïve experimental subjects would side with the majority, against the evidence of their own perception, if the majority falsely described one line as longer. Solomon Asch, “Opinions and Social Pressure,” Scientific American 193, no. 5 (Nov 1955): 31-35. On the methodology of deception in experimental psychology, see Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 61 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 62 In The Authoritarian Personality, Frankfurt-school psychoanalysts constructed psychological profiles that contrasted conformity—a key component of the authoritarian personality—to capacities for originality and independence of thought closely associated with the democratic personality. As historian Jamie Cohen-Cole has argued, the “open-minded self”—defined by psychologists as a flexible, creative subject— became an ideal model for the democratic subject in Cold War America, as an antidote to the conformist personality. Theodore W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind.

129 proponents of creativity thus opposed the “organization man:” a bureaucratized, rationalized, and homogenized figure, gendered male, and imagined by many social theorists to be the preeminent figure of the laboring white-collar subject in 1950s America.63

Businesses, on their end, worried that conformist thinking stifled the production of innovative ideas, particularly important in creative industries like advertising and marketing.64

Amidst widespread political and business concern about conformity, creativity research, as it infiltrated into business in the 1950s, offered strategies to counter the loss of individuality in bureaucratic management and to generate innovative new ideas. As creativity became publicly valued in 1950s America, businesses hired consultants and adopted creativity techniques that sought to generate original ideas. For example, they drew on the work of advertising executive

Alex Osborn, who in the 1940s had developed the technique of “brainstorming,” which operated by combining the irrationality of loose, playful thinking, with rational evaluation. After the freewheeling generation of ideas through brainstorming, executives then applied the rational mind to sort through unacceptable ideas.65

Texts promoting business creativity in the 1960s featured versions of the Myers-Briggs , reflecting and reinforcing the close relationship between definitions of creativity and intuition that IPAR helped to forge. Creativity consultants Eugene Raudsepp, for instance, adapted MBTI questions for a quiz to “test your creativity” that appeared in Nation’s Business in 1965,

63 Creadick, “Postwar Sign, Symbol, and Symptom: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” In Cultures of Commerce, eds. Elspeth Brown et al; Kira Lussier, “Managing Intuition,” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 708-718. 64 Matthew Wisnioski, “How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove: Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Fashioning of Technoscientific Innovators,” in Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counter-Culture, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 337-365. 65 Bregje van Eekelen, “The Social Lives of Ideas: Economies of Knowledge” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010); Samuel Franklin, “Creativity,” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 694- 701.

130 including anagrams and word association tests. 66 Indeed, a core component of the MBTI’s definition of intuition, as a perceptual capacity for pattern-seeking, mirrored research into perceptual complexity conducted by IPAR researcher-turned-creativity-consultant Frank Barron in the 1950s. Creativity, according to Barron, entailed a “perceptual system which is geared to allow into itself the widest variety of phenomena, even though the immediate consequence is apparent disorder, or even chaos.”67 In order to measure a perceptual preference for complexity,

Barron administered anagram and word association tests to subjects, in order to assess the novelty and rarity of their responses. Based on his research at IPAR, Barron became a consultant for businesses, part of the broader wave of “creativity consultants” who appeared in 1950s

American corporations and served as important predecessors to the intuition consultants featured later in this chapter.68 Indeed, many of the techniques adopted in intuition training seminars in the 1970s and 1980s would mirror creativity techniques like brainstorming.

By 1970, the assessment center methodology developed at IPAR and the Myers-Briggs intuition measure had converged in the newly-formed Center for Creative Leadership.69 The

Center adopted the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for leadership development workshops, sent their trainers to MBTI conferences, and even sponsored conferences on the relationship between psychological type and leadership. The Center’s rationale was to teach business leaders the capacity for creativity, based on the premise that “creativity and innovation are manageable and

66 Weston Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making (New York: Quorum Books, 1986): 102; Ed Everett, “Improving Creativity—One Organization’s Approach,” Public Management 65, no. 2 (Feb 1983). 67 IPAR, “Research Proposal to Rockefeller, 1954, RG 1.2, subseries 205, box 3, folder 20, Rockefeller Foundation records, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 68 Franklin, “Creativity.” 69 Founded in North Carolina in 1970, the Center received funding from the Office of Naval Research and an endowment from the executive of Vicks Vapo-Rub. After the first business assessment center was launched by Douglas Bray at AT&T in 1956, the assessment center methodology was transported to business settings as a way to select executives.

131 predictable processes, not random or magical forces.”70 By the 1970s, business invocations of creativity had become wedded to the rhetoric of “innovation,” a term which referred not just to the creation of new products, but also more generally to novel styles of organizing companies and managing people, as historian of technology Matthew Wisnioski has argued.71 Organizations like the Center for Creative Leadership viewed creativity in terms of an organizational process that could be trained, rather than a personality trait found in a select few individuals.72

From the conceptualization of the Myers-Briggs, with its roots in Jungian psychology during the 1920s, to the adoption of its intuition scale to understand the creative personality in the 1950s, intuition came to be understood by psychologists as a component of personality associated with originality, independence, and creativity. The creative person, who scored highly on the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs and who was gendered androgynous (despite being located mainly in male subjects), was held up as the ideal subject of personality research and the ideal type of democratic and anti-conformist subject. In contrast to the psychological tests

William Whyte lamented for stamping out individuality, the MBTI intuition scale, as adopted in creativity research, celebrated creative capacities in opposition to conformity.73 Indeed, in 1966, one of the earliest articles in a management trade journal on intuition explicitly described the age of intuitive management as marking a distinct historical break from the organization man and heralded a new type of leader, who relied not on established procedures or analytical reasoning,

70 Sarah Glover and Meena Wilson, Unconventional Wisdom: A Brief History of CCL’s Pioneering Research and Innovation (Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 2006). 71 Wisnioski, “How the Industrial Scientist Got His Groove.” For trade literature on innovation, see Eugene Koprowski, “Toward Innovative Leadership,” Business Horizons (Winter 1967): 79-87; J.D. Barrett, “Management by Creativity and Innovation,” Business Quarterly (Summer 1970): 64-71, Hartman Center for Marketing, Advertising and Sales History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 72 The majority of participants of CCL programs remained male—73%—and white — 82%. Ellen van Velsor and John Fleenor, “Leadership Skills and Perspectives, Gender and the MBTI,” Center for Creative Leadership, Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (1977). 73 William Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: 1956); Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American.”

132 but on the “visionary and anticipatory qualities” of intuition.74 Intuition’s connection to creativity and originality as well as its associations with political ideologies and business rationales would continue into the 1970s and 1980s, even as a new group of experts in psychology and business came to view intuition as a brain-based cognitive capacity that could be trained and harnessed to organizational goals.

3.3 Intuitive Brains: Race, Gender, and Split Brains

In a frequently-cited Harvard Business Review article from 1976, strategic management expert Henry Mintzberg declared that the intuitive leader was “involved, plugged in; his mode of operating is relational, simultaneous, experiential, that is, encompassing all the characteristics of the right hemisphere.”75 Like many proponents of intuitive management in the late 1970s and

1980s, Mintzberg drew on burgeoning research into hemispheric differences in the brain to describe intuition as a cognitive capacity linked to information processing in the brain. In showing how the brain became a crucial bodily site for intuition, this section makes two claims.

First, I show how research into the brain, which garnered widespread public attention, provided scientific grounding to shore up claims about managerial intuition as a legitimate cognitive capacity for managers. Even as the brain become one seat for intuition, the favored methodology for management researchers to investigate intuition often remained written personality tests, used as a measure of “cognitive styles.” Secondly, this section demonstrates how cognitive research, as it infiltrated management, education, and even policy, re-inscribed longstanding stereotypes about innate biological differences between races and genders. Given the influence of racialized

74 John T. Kimball, “Age of the Intuitive Manager,” Dun’s Review and Modern Industry (Jan. 1966): 42. 75 Henry Mintzberg, “Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right,” Harvard Business Review (July/Aug. 1976): 55.

133 and gendered assumptions about the brain, neuroscience serves as a crucial site for investigating the politics of intuition as a component of psychological capital in 1970s and 1980s management.76

The origin point of both management invocations of the intuitive brain and the racial politics of intuitive brains lies in neuroscientific research into the split brain, a prominent new research paradigm that garnered increasing scientific prestige (including a Nobel prize in 1981) and cultural cachet in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although the neuroscience of brain localization dates back a century, to the nineteenth-century research of neurologist Paul Broca, the modern neuroscience of split brain began with the work of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga in the

1960s at the California Institute of Technology.77 Sperry and Gazzaniga began experimenting on the brains of animals, first by cutting the optic nerves of cats and reattaching them to the other hemisphere. Continuing on to human subjects, they discovered that for patients with severe epilepsy, severing their corpus callosum—the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres—provided relief of seizure symptoms. These subjects, though outwardly normal and seizure-free, displayed strange behavior in cognitive tasks. If an image was displayed to their left visual field (an area controlled by the right hemisphere), subjects would report that they had not seen anything; but, if asked to feel around for that same object with their hands, they would

76 This section engages with science studies scholarship on neuroscience that shows how the brain has increasingly become the locus for ideas about the self. Joseph Dumit, for example describes how the popular circulation of brain scans beginning in the 1980s make claims on us because they purport to tell us what kind of brain we have, and thus what kind of person we are. Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nikolas Rose, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Natasha Dow Schull and Caitlin Zaloom, “The Shortsighted Brain: Neuroeconomics and the Governance of Choice in Time,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 4 (2011): 515- 538. 77 On the longer history of entanglements between political debates and neuroscience of brain lateralization, see Anne Harrington, “Nineteenth-century Ideas on Hemisphere Differences and ‘Duality of Mind,’” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 8 (1985): 617-660; Katja Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

134 locate the correct object. In another study reported in Mintzberg’s article, neuroscientist Robert

Ornstein showed a picture of a nude women to a subject’s right hemisphere; although unable to verbally acknowledge that she had seen anything, Ornstein reported that she blushed and expressed discomfort, indicating that the picture had resonated with her consciousness, even if she could not verbalize what she had seen.78 Neuroscientists attributed these surprising results— the inability of the right and left hemispheres to communicate with each other—to the lateralization of brain functions around verbal processing. They concluded that the left hemisphere processed language while the right hemisphere processed images and symbols, thus explaining why subjects reacted to visual and symbolic stimuli without verbalizing their reaction.79

Some management researchers adopted similar neuroscientific techniques and experimental set-ups in an attempt to study the difference between the right and left brains in management tasks, but with little success due to the impracticality and expense of the technology. 80 One common experimental set-up involved pairing and comparing the electroencephalography (EEG) scores of two different professional groups—like CEOs and operations researchers, or accountants and artists—to attempt to measure the neurological basis for the different cognitive styles associated with their professions: CEOs and artists were both hypothesized to prefer intuitive cognitive styles. Researchers placed electrodes on the skulls of experimental subjects, assigned them different tasks, presumed to involve either right or left

78 This anecdote appears in an article by management researcher Henry Mintzberg, “Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right,” Harvard Business Review (July/Aug. 1976): 49-58. 79 Motivational psychologist David McClelland, who featured prominently in chapter 1, cited this same research to support his psychoanalytic interpretation of motives, and justify projective tests as the superior technique to understand motives. McClelland suggested that people were as divorced from their own understandings of their motivations as someone who had a severed corpus callosum. David McClelland, “Some Reflections on the Two Psychologies of Love,” Journal of Personality 54, no. 2 (June 1986): 334-353. 80 Robert Doktor and David Bloom, “Selective Lateralization of Cognitive Style Related to Occupation as Determined by EEG Alpha Asymmetry,” Society for Psychological Research 14, no. 4 (1977): 385–87.

135 brain processes, and measured the brain activity in each hemisphere by analyzing the ratio between active (Alpha) and resting (Beta) states as a measure of hemisphereric activatation provoked by the different tasks. The results were, however, disappointing. Too often, no consistent pattern of hemispheric usage was found; nor did the EEG pick up changes in brain waves as they shifted from analytic to more intuitive tasks. EEG technology was expensive, slow at processing data, and impractical, allowing for only limited sample sizes—in the single digits.

Given the impracticality of actual neuroscientific research, management researchers instead turned to the familiar format of the personality test. They adopted variants of the Myers-Briggs to measure the distinction between “right-brained” intuitive processes and “left-brained” analytical processes. 81 As neuroscience research filtered into practical-oriented management research, researchers focused not on the neurological substrate of the brain, but on the more abstracted construct of “cognitive style,” a term that referred to differences in individuals’ cognitive and perceptual capacities that affected how people arrived at decisions.82 Connected to

81 Another similar psychological test, the Human Information Processing Survey, was developed by management researcher William Taggart in the early 1980s. Formerly an operations researcher for Standard Oil, Taggart left operations research after he grew disillusioned with the over-emphasis on rationality; the rest of his career, which included teaching business courses at the University of Florida, focused on techniques to study and cultivate the non-rational capacities of intuition. Indeed, his own career recapitulates some of the history of intuitive management, as a reaction against the overly-rationalized field of operations research. In courses like “Decision Styles Education” and “Intuitive Management,” Taggart advocated various unconventional techniques, including I- Ching, guided meditation, and collaging, to challenge the analytical dominance of business schools. To create the survey, Taggart took a hundred paired terms (eg. “yin/yang,” “Appollonian/Dionysian”, each classified into ‘rational or intuitive), and created a pool of 500 items, then paired and reduced, to assess how a person approaches tasks and prepares for the future: "When solving problems, I rely on hunches and first impressions, rather than accepted approaches,” was just one way of phrasing the types of questions that recurred throughout all these various surveys. Published by Scholastic Testing Service, Inc, the HIP would find an audience in business education—including Taggart’s business courses at the University of Florida. William Taggart, Daniel Robey, and Barbara Taggart, “Decision Styles Education,” Exchange: The Organizational Behavior Teaching Journal 7, no. 2 (1982): 17–24. 82 The adoption of “cognitive styles” as a terminology is further legible due to psychologists’ hostility suspicion of psychologists towards type-based personality theories, as reflected in the opposition of Educational Testing Services psychologists to the Myers-Briggs. Ernest Rossi, “The Cerebral Hemispheres in Analytical Psychology,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 22, no. 1 (1977): 32-59; Sheila Davis, “Why the MBTI is a Brain Dominance Instrument,” (9th Association for Psychological Type Conference: Psychological Type for the 1990s): p. 35C-40C, CAPT; David Schweiger, “Measuring Managerial Cognitive Style: On the Logical Validity of the MBTI,” Journal of Business Research 13 (1985): 315-328; Peter Keen, “The Implications of Cognitive Style for Individual Decision-Making” (PhD Dissertation: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1973), CAPT.

136 the increasing scientific and cultural prestige of brain sciences and the cognitive revolution in psychology, management researchers who adopted the Myers-Briggs by the 1980s more frequently described it as a measure of “cognitive styles,” rather than as a measure of psychological type, as in Myers and McCaulley’s original formulation. 83

The difficulties of actually showing how differences in brain hemisphere usage might translate into management practice did not stop proponents of intuitive management from proclaiming intuition to be, at times, a “right-brained” phenomenon, or sometimes, a “whole- brained phenomenon.” This research into the differences between the right and left brain was drawn on by a range of management writers and psychologists, like Mintzberg, to understand how the brain perceived and processed the world (Figure 1). In 1977, promotional materials from the Center for Creative Leadership—an organization that explicitly took intellectual inspiration from Mintzberg—proclaimed the seat of creativity to be the right hemisphere of the brain: “If you've ever had a hunch about something, sensed it was right but could not express it in words, the likelihood is that the hunch was based on data stored in the hemisphere with no voice.”84 The right brain, understood as the seat of non-verbal, symbolic information processing, was often invoked by management writers as the location of intuition. Mapping managerial hierarchies onto apparent cognitive differences, intuition consultant Ned Herrmann claimed that visionary executives preferred a right-brained, intuitive cognitive style, while middle-managers

83 It drew on the field of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary research paradigm that came together at the nexus of psychology, computer science, and neuroscience to focus on the internal processes of cognition, including cognitive processes linked to perceiving and processing information. On the history of cognitive science, see Jamie Cohen- Cole, “Instituting the Sciences of Mind: Intellectual Economies and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies.” British Journal for the History of Science 40, no. 4 (2007): 567-597; Christopher Green, “Dispelling the ‘Mystery’ of Computational Cognitive Science,” History of Psychology 3, no. 1 (2000): 62-66; Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 84 Jenny Godwin, “Manuals from an Applied Creative Leadership Development Program: Can You Learn to be Creative?” Center for Creative Leadership Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (1977), John Rapparlie papers, Box 2802, Folder 10, Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron, Ohio.

137 tended to prefer a left-brained, analytical style. 85 The over-simplified claims about right brains and left brains became the target of some management writers: critics of the “mythology” of brain lateralization attacked the scientific legitimacy of invoking split brains to explain intuition in management.86 For example, management practitioner Terence Hines compared the simplified claims about split brains made by management advocates to phrenology, the nineteenth-century movement which held that psychological traits were localized in particular regions of the brain, accessible to analysis through reading bumps on the skull.87

Although management writers like Mintzberg often located intuition in the non-verbal right hemisphere, proponents of intuitive management were more likely to use split brain research to claim that intuition was a flexible psychological capacity that incorporated both hemispheres. 88 Herrmann, for example, emphasized the necessity of adopting “whole-brained” styles of thinking: the ideal executive should integrate the right hemisphere’s “intuitive flash” with the left hemisphere’s analytic ability to implement this intuitive insight (Figure 2). Like

Herrmann, business books often described the ideal style of management as “whole-brained”: a

85 One of the first conferences on the Myers-Briggs, in 1977 included a presentation on the use of an early version of the HBDI alongside the Myers-Briggs in a training program for project managers in the federal government. Michael Krause, “The Herrmann Participant Survey,” In The Association for Psychological Type Conference Proceedings VII (1987), CAPT. 86 Terence Hines, “Left Brain/Right Brain Mythology and Implications for Management and Training,” The Academy of Management Review 12, no. 4 (1987): 600-606. As Joseph Dumit points out, for neuroscientists in the 1980s who studied the localization of brain function, the comparison to phrenology was not as damning as it may seem. Some brain imaging researchers in the 1980s welcomed the comparison to phrenology, identifying phrenology as a field asking the right questions, and making the right assumptions about the localizations of brain functions, even if their techniques and specific localization claims were crude. Dumit, Picturing Personhood. 87 On the history of phrenology as a techniques of self-assessment, see Fenneke Sysling, “Science and Self- Assessment: Phrenological Charts, 1840-1940,” The British Journal for the History of Science (Online first, March 26, 2018): https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087418000055. 88 The work of anthropologist Emily Martin has shown how “flexibility” became a desired trait and powerful metaphor across biomedical fields like immunology and corporate management practices. Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Day of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

138 flexible style of management tolerated complexity and ambiguity, through tapping into the capabilities of both hemispheres.89 He further claimed that stronger connections between the right and left hemispheres in women’s brains made them more suited to the flexible, “whole- brain thinking” associated with intuition. Women, Herrmann declared, were “on average more whole-brain oriented, more intuitive, and less fact-based” than men.90

As Herrmann’s claims reflect, management writers and popular media articles alike appropriated neuroscience research to claim that women’s brains were better suited to intuition— a capacity ostensibly located in their thicker corpus callosum—a site of dense, connective nerve fibers stitching together the left and right hemispheres. The corpus callosum became, in the words of historian of science Anne Fausto-Sterling, the “perfect medium on which to project” cultural assumptions about gender.91 One 1995 Newsweek cover story attributed women’s “better intuition” to their thicker corpus callosum, which allowed them to connect to the “left brain’s rationality and the right’s emotions simultaneously.”92 Longstanding social claims about

89 My first chapter explored how participatory management suggested new arrangements of people, jobs, and management structures to elicit worker motivation by giving workers greater participation in decision-making. Here, we see how intuition similarly demanded new organizational arrangements, prioritizing flexibility. Eugene Raudsepp, “Establishing a Creative Climate,” Training and Development Journal 41, no. 4 (1987): 50; Jacquelyn Wonder and Priscilla Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking: Working From Both Sides of the Brain Performance (New York: Quill, 1984), 246. 90 Quoted in Nadel, The Sixth Sense, p. 84; Moira Bailey, “New Insights on Intuition,” The Record, Aug 3, 1986. This emphasis on the flexibility of the brain resonates with contemporary neuroscience’s emphasis on neural networks and the malleability of the brain. Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 91 As Fausto-Sterling argues, given that the corpus callosum is, by definition, a connective tissue difficult to extricate from the rest of the brain, converting it into a laboratory object and political object entailed complex statistical, technological, and rhetorical techniques. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000): p. 119. 92 This Newsweek article, “Why Men and Women Think Differently,” was quoted in Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, p. 117. Another US News & World Report article showed images of brains from experiments with men and women sounding out words, which claimed to show that men used a smaller portion of left brain for verbal reasoning, whereas women used their whole brain: "Some scientists,” the article declared, “think this may help explain the male's famous inability to express emotion: Information flows less easily form the right side to the verbal, left side.” Quoted in Dumit, Picturing Personhood, 146.

139 biological differences between the sexes were in this case, appropriated to claim that women were more adept at intuition.93

In the late 1970s, human resources consultant Alice Sargent theorized the “androgynous manager” as a figure that combined the strengths of both genders, including both hemispheres of the brain.94 Just as androgyny had been connected to intuition in creativity research at IPAR,

Sargent also connected androgyny to intuition: the androgynous manager, Sargent wrote, was

“well-developed in both the right hemisphere (creative skills such as intuition)...and the left hemisphere.”95 For Sargent, activating the capabilities of the androgynous manager required both sexes to adapt: women should adopt the “analytical skills” of males, while “men could improve their managerial ability by developing intuition, the ability to express emotion, and personal support systems.”96 Similarly, in a 1975 summary article on intuitive management, management researcher Harold Leavitt noted that the privileging of intuition meant that rather than “trying to train the female into the tough and orderly male way,” it was the male manager who was being encouraged to change, and “add intuitiveness to his own repertoire.”97 While affirming gender differences in modes of reasoning, authority, and emotional expression but also suggesting their

93 In the previous chapter, I showed how motivational researchers found women to score highly on achievement motivation, even as their expression of achievement motivation differed from that of men. 94 Alice Sargent, “The Androgynous Blend: The Best of Both Worlds,” Management Review (Oct, 1978): 60-65; Alice Sargent, “The Androgynous Manager,” Planning Review, Vol 7, no. 7 (Nov, 1979): 37-42; Alice Sargent, “Training Men and Women for Androgynous Behaviors in Organizations,” Group & Organization Studies, 6, no. 3 (Sept 1981): 302-311. 95 Sargent, “The Androgynous Manager.” 96 Sargent, “The Androgynous Manager,” 39. 97 Harold Leavitt, “Beyond the Analytic Manager.” California Management Review 17, no. 3 (1975): 11. Leavitt further suggested that both the turn to intuitive management and the women’s movement could in part be understood as part of a societal critique of the dominance of analytical reasoning. The women’s movement, after all, advocated for women to occupy roles of power, arguing both that women could think and decide as well as men and that traditionally feminized modes of thought might be valued.

140 malleability, this work sought to revalue historically feminized modes—like intuition—as important attributes for male and female managers alike.98

Given intuition’s historic association as a mode of knowing associated with women, the revival of intuition in management entailed a reconfiguration of the gendered norms of management. The historic expansion of white-collar corporate work in the twentieth-century had positioned the vision of the ideal manager as a rational male decider, leaving women to perform the clerical and emotional work that sustained corporate spaces.99 Indeed, the revival of intuition in management had to contend with the longstanding biases against intuition as a feminized way of knowing. As one 1987 trade article in American Banker noted, “In this too-macho world of business, intuition is seen as a feminine trait, one that can be overcome with some good, old fashioned common sense.”100 But, the article reminded its readers—an audience of largely white male banking executives—that men “had always used intuition too,” under the name of

“something more macho—like a gut feeling or a hunch.”101 By the late 1970s, equal employment legislation and second wave feminism had increased the numbers of women in managerial positions. In this context, a growing body of management literature described how good managers should add intuitive skills to their repertoire.

98 The Center for Creative Leadership even developed a suite of leadership development programs for women that encouraged them to channel their intuitive capacities into management decision making—even while the majority of participants of CCL programs remained male—73%—and white—82%. Ellen van Velsor and John Fleenor, “Leadership Skills and Perspectives, Gender and the MBTI,” Center for Creative Leadership, Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (1977). 99 Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 455–83; Michelle Murphy, Sick-Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2006); Clark Davis, Company Men: White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000); James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 100 Paul Willax, “Intuition Packs Powerful Punch for Managers Under the Gun,” American Banker (July 8, 1987): 4. 101 Willax, “Intuition Packs Powerful Punch for Managers Under the Gun,” American Banker (July 8, 1987): 4.

141

One 1984 business book on intuition, Whole-Brain Thinking represents the ways that brain research was deployed to justify ostensible differences in not just gendered expressions of intuition but also in its racial distributions. The authors of The Whole Brain Business Book, two white female management consultants, described women as more adept at “whole brain thinking” because of the thicker connective tissue that sutured together their right and left hemisphere. While declaring women to be more adept at whole-brain thinking, the book also presented sweeping, stereotypical claims that left brain values predominated in white, middle class, mainstream American society, while right-brained values predominated among African-

Americans, Indigenous peoples, and lower socioeconomic classes: groups who ostensibly used more “rhythmic and pictorial” language.102 These claims about the racial and gendered distributions of “whole brained thinking” were not unique to this one management text, but instead drew on a broader American scientific discourse on race and the brain.

To understand the racial politics of split brains underpinning management research requires first unpacking how neuroscience was already shaping educational research. In the

1970s and 1980s, neuroscientists, educational researchers and policymakers drew on split brain research to understand racial gaps in education, adopting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a measure of learning styles. Many of the white educational experts who invoked split brain research self-identified as progressives and sought in split brain research scientific support to challenge the conservative claims about the connections between race and intelligence. From the earliest development of American intelligence testing in the 1900s and 1910s, intelligence tests were used to explain and justify racial differences, wedded as they were to eugenics.103 In 1969,

102 Wonder and Donovan, Whole Brain Thinking. 103 Steven Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1981).

142 conservative psychologist Arthur Jensen’s renewed racist invocations of intelligence testing to claim biological differences in intelligence between the races. However, a growing body of criticism within professional psychology by the late 1960s challenged these racist claims about intelligence. White liberal critics of intelligence tests used split brain research to argue that minority groups had right brain skills that could not adequately be measured by left-brained standardized tests. More broadly, educational psychologists and policy-makers argued that

Western culture privileged the left brain, and thus ignored the different learning styles of other racial groups.104 In a multi-part series of essays, neuroscientist Joseph Bogen argued that the cultural values of Indigenous peoples and African-Americans emphasized right-brained skills, in contrast to Western culture and education systems that emphasized left-brained thinking.105

Indeed, for some white and Black educational psychologists, the Myers-Briggs as a measure of

“learning style” seemed to provide a less biased tool than intelligence tests. 106 However, as white neuroscientists, management researchers, and educational psychologists used split brain research to locate racial differences in the brain, they contributed to a century-long tradition of scientific racism, that located biological differences between the races in the brain.107

104 Michael Staub, “The Other Side of the Brain: The Politics of Split Brain Research in the 1970s and 1980s.” History of Psychology 19, no. 4 (Nov 2016): 259-273. 105 Joseph Bogen and G.M. Bogen, “The Other Side of the Brain. 3. The Corpus Callosum and Creativity,” Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society 34 (1969): 191–220. Michael Staub, “The Other Side of the Brain: The Politics of Split Brain Research in the 1970s and 1980s.” History of Psychology 19, no. 4 (Nov 2016): 259-273. 106 Levy, Murphy, Jr and Carlson, “Personality Types Among Negro College Students,” 652; Claudia Mealer and Flora Pitchford, “African-American Science Student Learning Style, Association for Psychological Type Conference: Psychological Type for the 1990s, p. 8C, CAPT. 107 The nineteenth-century field of craniometry included anthropologists and eugenicists who measured skulls of different races to bolster up racist claims about intelligence. In one 1906 study, for instance, the early twentieth century, researchers claimed that African-Americans had smaller frontal lobes, which explained their supposed “impulsivity” and lack of “self-control.” Anne Fausto-Sterling, The Brain’s Body; Zenderland, Measuring Minds.

143

The Myers-Briggs, and particularly its intuition scale, was adopted by some educational psychologists in order to theorize the different “learning styles” of Black children. 108 In 1972, a mixed-race team of three Howard University researchers conducted the first large-scale comparative study of Myers-Briggs scores between white and Black college students. They found marked differences in the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs: researchers concluded that

Black students were significantly more likely to display “sensing,” rather than “intuitive” preferences than white students. The researchers hypothesized that Black Americans, as a minority living in a white-dominated, racist society, were required, for their very survival, to pay more attention to more immediate, concrete details: a requirement that constrained the development of intuitive modes.109 Given the connections that other MBTI researchers had noted between intuition and academic achievement, the authors of the Howard student concluded that the “predominance of sensing-judging orientations” among Black undergraduates “suggests a degree of concreteness and need-for-closure diametrically opposed to the imagination and openness of the ‘idealized’ liberal arts.”110 Their conclusion that the Myers-Briggs was a

“psychometrically stable instrument capable of reflecting important group differences” was taken up in the larger body of literature on Black cognitive styles.111 Some educational psychologists

108 The intuition scale was treated as particularly important for education: from Isabel Myers’ earliest experimental studies with the Myers-Briggs in the 1940s and 1950s, she had found a correlation between preference for intuition and high academic achievement, with intuitive types more adept at timed tests because of their ability to quickly grasp patterns. Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980). Mealer and Pitchford, “African-American Science Student Learning Style; Madge Gill Willis, “Learning Styles of African- American Children: A Review of the Literature and Interventions,” The Journal of Black Psychology 16, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 60. 109 The study compared 750 Black college students at Howard with white college students at Amherst. Nissim Levy, Clennie Murphy, Jr and Rae Carlson, “Personality Types Among Negro College Students,” Educational and Psychological Measurement 32 (1972): p. 649. 110 Nissim Levy, Clennie Murphy, Jr and Rae Carlson, “Personality Types Among Negro College Students,” Educational and Psychological Measurement 32 (1972): 648. 111 Levy, Murphy, Jr and Carlson, “Personality Types Among Negro College Students,” 652.

144 claimed that Black children preferred a right-brained learning style that included

“experimentation, improvisation,” rather than the left-brained “atomistic-objective-analytical” style characteristic of American classrooms, which emphasized standardized testing and impersonal methods of teaching.112

The claim that Black Americans held distinct cognitive styles was also made by a small number of Black psychologists and educators who argued that Black Americans had different learning styles that made them prefer more intuitive approaches to learning.113 In the 1970s,

Black psychologists set up institutional networks, journals, and research paradigms as a counterpoint to the overwhelming whiteness of mainstream psychology—a whiteness that biased the kind of research conducted on Black subjects, and often led to discrimination that kept Black psychologists out of academic psychology.114 Black psychologists Joseph White and A. Wade

Boykin both sought to theorize a distinct Black psychology, that had been shaped by African culture and white supremacy in America, that described Black psychological capacities as more attuned to ambivalence and ambiguity and being more holistic, spiritual, affective, creative, and experimental—capacities associated with intuition. Some Black psychologists, publishing in the newly-founded Journal of Black Psychology, took up Boykin’s and White’s claims to theorize a distinct Black learning style that included these affective traits associated with intuition.115

112 Madge Gill Willis, “Learning Styles of African-American Children: A Review of the Literature and Interventions,” The Journal of Black Psychology 16, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 47-65. 113 Joseph Berger, “What Do They Mean By ‘Black Learning Style,’” New York Times, July 6, 1988, B004. 114 he Association of Black Psychologists was founded as a wing of the American Psychological Association in 1968. They began publishing the Journal of Black Psychology in 1974, where some of these studies of Black cognitive style appeared. A. Wade Boykin, “Experimental Psychology from a Black Perspective,” Journal of Black Psychology 3, no. 2 (Feb 1977): 29-49; Joseph White, “Toward a Black Psychology,” Ebony 25, no. 11 (Sept 1970). 115 White, “Toward a Black Psychology”; Boykin, “Experimental Psychology from a Black Perspective”; A.Wade Boykin, “On Academic Task Performance and Afro-American Children,” In Achievement and Achievement Motives, ed. J.R. Spencer (Boston: W.H. Freeman & Co, 1983), 324-371; Barbara Shade, “Is There an Afro-American Cognitive Style,” Journal of Black Psychology 13, no. 1 (1986): 13-16.; Willis, “Learning Styles of African- American Children.” See chapter 2 for a discussion of damage models of Black personality.

145

Rather than describe racial differences according to biological differences, Boykin and White rooted cognitive capacities in the distinct history and culture of Black Americans.

Meanwhile, critics within the Black psychology community like psychologist Dorothy

Strickland, argued that over-generalizations—by white and Black researchers—risked perpetuating longstanding racist stereotypes about the inferiority of Black children, which continued to be made by American politicians and educational experts.116 Critics of the Black learning style pointed out the persistent discrimination, poverty, and underfunded public schools were better explanations for academic performance than claims of a shared racial “learning style.” Moreover, despite sweeping generalizations among many white educators and policy- makers and some Black psychologists, experimental results never actually proved these claims, rooted as they were in the assumption that there could even be a single Black “learning style.” 117

As presenters at a MBTI conference on cross-cultural types noted, this “claim of holistic learning preferences” was “most elusive to document”—not just because experimental results were inconsistent, which they were, but because the very paradigm of research presumed that there might be one Black “learning style.”118

As theories of brain lateralization moved into educational psychology and policy in the

1980s, they were also used to shore up claims, rooted in settler colonialism, that identified North

American indigenous populations as more “right-brained” and thus more intuitive. In a 1986

116 Berger, “What Do They Mean By ‘Black Learning Style.’” 117 In contrast, Barbara Shade found that African-American high school students scored higher on the “perceiving” and “intuition” scales of the Myers-Briggs, which Shade attributed to cultural differences in visual perception. Shade, “Is There an Afro-American Cognitive Style.” In another study of Black high school students in science classes, Myers-Briggs researchers found sensing to be much more frequent, when compared with Isabel Myers’ original studies of white high school students. Mealer and Pitchford, “African-American Science Student Learning Style.” 118 Mealer and Pitchford, “African-American Science Student Learning Style.”

146 article in Journal of American Indian Education, Oneida psychologist Roland Chrisjohn criticized the recent flurry of educational research that advocated for educational interventions based on the claim that indigenous culture was more “right-brained.”119 Articles in educational journals claimed that right-brained characteristics mapped on to the “traditional Native American mode of thinking,” citing Jung’s work on archetypes and the collective unconscious to emphasize how Native Americans purportedly thought in symbols rather than words.120 Studies published in education and neuroscience journals in the 1980s tried to use brain scan technology on Indigenous children in an attempt to understand different hemispheric preferences.121

Experimental results were entirely inconclusive, finding no pattern to suggest differential hemisphere development; but this did not stop researchers from making bold, misguided, claims about hemispheric differences. Chrisjohn concluded that claims about the right-brain in education, rooted in a “bogus neuropsychology,” were a fad comparable to patent medicine, the sales pitch of the “veritable right-brain industry” of experts who gave “expensive workshops about to improve one’s skills by using the right brain.”122 But for Indigenous education, the problems with the right-brained fad ran deeper than allegations of charlatanism: the declaration that Indigenous children were “right-brained,” and less capable of learning “left-brained skills,”

119 Roland Chrisjohn and Michael Peters, “The Right-Brained Indian: Fact or Fiction?” Journal of American Indian Education 25, no. 2 (Jan 1986): 1-7. 120 A.C. Ross, “Brain Hemispheric Functions and the Native American,” Journal of American Indian Education (May, 1982): 2-5. 121 For instance, one study had white and Navajo children were fed spoken syllables into two ears, to see which ear (and thus which hemisphere) identified sound better. As Chrisjohn pointed out, researchers failed to account for the fact that most Navajo children were bilingual, while white children were unilingual. G.W. Hynd and S.A. Scott,, “Propositional and appositional modes of thought and differential cerebral speech lateralization in Navajo Indian and Anglo Children,” Child Development 51 (1980): 909 –911; W. McKeever, “Evidence Against the Hypothesis of Right Hemisphere Language Dominance in the Native American Navajo,” Neuropsychologia 19 (1981): 595–598; D.R. Vocate, “Differential Cerebral Speech Lateralization in Crow Indian and Anglo Children,” Neuropsychologia 22 (1984): 487–494. 122 Chrisjohn and Peters, “‘The Right-Brained Indian,’” 5.

147 made by the white educational experts who organized Indigenous education, had perilous implications. Settler Canadian educational policy had already taken education out of Indigenous hands, through a long-standing national policy of residential schooling, and placed education in the hands of settler-policy-makers wielding dangerous stereotypes about the capacities of

Indigenous children.123

As this history of educational psychology has shown, claims about differences in brains or learning styles could often reinforce pernicious and pervasive stereotypes about the capacities of

African-Americans and Indigenous peoples. Given that flexible, “whole-brained” capacities were valorized as crucial to economic success, claims about racial differences in the expression of intuition had ideological implications for the kind of bodies assumed to be intuitive. As in claims about the gendered distribution of intuition, management researchers also drew on split brain research to characterize mainstream white American society as overly rigid, analytic, and rational and to depict non-white Americans as more adept at “right-brained thinking,” and thus more intuitive.124 However, in describing Black Americans or Indigenous peoples as more right- brained, this rhetoric could also cast aspersions on their ability to attain the “whole-brained thinking” so valorized in management literature.125 The racial and gender politics reflected in

123 STS scholars have shown how biomedical experimental on North American Indigenous populations accompanied settler colonial governance strategies. Kim Tallbear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genomic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 2013); Joanna Radin, “’Digital Natives,” Osiris 32 (2017): 43-64; Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science,” Social History 91 (May 2013): 615-642. 124 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking. 125 I am inspired by the work of affect theorist Sara Ahmed, who described how certain bodies become treated as bodies that obstruct the circulations of happiness. On the ways that psychological traits are differently measured and valued when they appear in different races, see Jonathan Metzl, Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). In her study of manic depression, anthropologist Emily Martin shows how the traits associated with mania were differently valued depending on their embodiment: for white male executives of corporate America, the manic drive presented as a constant scanning of the changing towards ambition and adaptation; for Black Americans, manic states were stereotyped as impulsivity and volatility. Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Manic and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): 239-245.

148 popularizations of split brain research continued to shape corporate understandings of intuition as differentially distributed across types of bodies.

In addition to analyzing the racial and gender politics of intuition, this section has further shown how the brain become one bodily site to locate intuition, connected to a broader cultural and scientific interest in split brains that permeated management and education in the 1970s and

1980s. As a cluster of brain-based terms attached themselves to the capacity for intuition and to the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs—right brained, whole brained, cognitive styles, and information processing styles—intuition became wedded to the cultural and scientific prestige of neuroscience and cognitive psychology and described as a cognitive capacity for perceiving and processing information.126 As the next section will show, intuition consultants continued to draw on the rhetorical power of the brain to market intuition training seminars as “brain skill management” or “whole brain training” seminars. Such seminars depicted intuition as a brain- based capacity that served as a crucial economic resource for the corporation.

3.4 Intuitive Futures: Training Intuition for Corporate Strategy

In 1978, an article in a management journal noted at least a dozen conferences on “brain training,” a number that had rapidly increased by the 1980s.127 In his Harvard Business Review article, Henry Mintzberg rooted corporate strategies in the intuitive brain of the visionary leader:

“creative, integrated strategies seem to be the products of single brains, perhaps of single right hemispheres.”128 Continuing to draw on the rhetoric of the brain, consulting psychologists, such

126 Dumit, Picturing Personhood. 127 Thomas Isaack, “What Trainers Need to Know about Both Halves of the Brain,” Training HRD (Jan 1978): 27- 30. Hartman Center for Marketing, Advertising and Sales History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 128 Henry Mintzberg, “Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right,” Harvard Business Review (July/Aug. 1976): 56.

149 as Weston Agor, developed an array of training courses to activate intuition in corporate management. By doing so, they presented intuition training as an investment in psychological capital. Retaining the association with perception and creativity, and continuing to be measured through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, intuition during these years became a perceptual capacity to “see” the future and produce innovative planning strategies, amidst downsizing and technological changes. In this section, I show how intuition training reinforced ideas of visionary, intuitive leaders whose capacity for seeing the future explained and justified their position atop the corporate ladder. Given the predominance of white males in executive positions in the 1980s, this understanding of the intuitive leader thus marked intuition as the property of white, male, elites.

One significant figure for translating intuition from a personality type to a more general capacity that could be taught and harnessed for corporate value was Weston Agor, a consultant and professor of public management. In the mid-1980s, Agor launched a consulting firm, ENFP

Enterprise, which ran “brain skill management” seminars to teach managers in public and private organizations how to harness their capacity for intuition towards organizational goals. Also in the mid-1980s, Agor launched the “Global Intuition Network” as a hub for research on intuition, and organized “intuition clubs” for major corporations, like 3M and Du Point.129 Agor explicitly described intuitive brains as a corporate resource, making him an important figure to understand the emergence of intuition as a form of psychological capital. The intuitive “human brain,” Agor declared, “is potentially the most important single resource an organization has for its present

129 Marcia Yudkin, “Are you Intuitive,” Natural Health 24, no. 3 (May 1, 1994).

150 and future survival.”130 Agor’s depiction of the brain as a resource reflects how the capacity for intuition became a component of psychological capital.

In addition to amplifying intuition as a brain-based resource for companies, Agor is important for adapting the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs for use in the first major empirical survey of managerial intuition.131 Beginning in 1981, Agor mailed 6500 questionnaires to a random sample of executives across the private and public sectors—civil servants, politicians,

CEOs, and middle managers—in California, Florida and Michigan.132 To conduct the survey,

Agor altered the protocols and format of the Myers-Briggs in several ways. First, he selected a small sample of 12 questions from the intuition scale. Second, he changed the contrast category for intuition. According to the psychological type theory of the MBTI, intuition’s opposing category was sensing, understood as a preference for perception through the five senses. Instead of using sensing, Agor contrasted intuition with “thinking,” defined as a process of judgment that relies on impersonal values and analytical approaches.133

But, rather than view Agor’s conflation as a misappropriation of the Myers-Briggs, I suggest that this adaption is better understood as part of a more widespread categorical collapse between

130 Weston Agor, “Managing Brain Skills to Increase Productivity,” Public Administration Review 45, no. 6 (1985): 864-868. 131 Agor ended his career teaching at the University of Texas, after teaching stints at the University of Florida, and the University of Miami. Agor was introduced to the Myers-Briggs while teaching management at the University of Florida, the major geographical hub for MBTI research. On the history of consulting, see Christopher McKenna, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the 20th Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 132 Around half of his respondents returned their surveys, making the sample pool about 3200 surveys. 133 According to principles of psychometric test validation, altering the arrangement of test questions and the very construction of the scales would invalidate the test. Indeed, the Bulletin of Psychological Type, a newsletter affiliated with the Myers-Briggs, criticized Agor for conflating the analytical processes of judging and deciding with perceptual capacities. In the psychology type theory of the Myers-Briggs, thinking was considered to be a process of decision-making, separate from the processes of perception. “Placing intuition in the decision making category,” the Bulletin argued, was a “fundamental error” that made Agor guilty of “mixing perception apples with decision making oranges.” Charles von Wrangell, “Review of Weston Agor's Logic of Intuitive Decision Making,” in Bulletin of Psychological Type 10, no. 2 (Summer 1987): p. 19. Isabel Briggs-Myers Memorial Library, Center for the Association of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida.

151 the categories of perception and deciding that occurred in the cognitive sciences and in their adoption by management researchers.134 In the original framework of the Myers-Briggs, intuition was understood as a capacity of perceiving information, distinct from the capacity for coming to decisions based on that perception. As management researcher Peter Keen observed in his 1973

Harvard Business School dissertation on cognitive styles, however, the very concept of decision- making had become “almost synonymous with information processing.”135 The decision-maker, after all, had to “gather, assimilate and evaluate the floods of information with which he must deal.”136 Thus intuition, as adopted by Agor’s managerial survey and in management discourse more broadly, came to explain both how managers perceived and processed information and how they arrived at decisions on the basis of this perception.137

Moreover, Agor’s concern reflected methodological differences between basic psychological research and management research. As a management researcher, Agor’s major concern was not in creating a scientifically valid psychological test, but in garnering responses from subjects— busy business professionals— in order to understand their use of managerial intuition. He found the contrast between intuition and the analytic process of thinking easier to explain than the contrast between intuition and sensing to the managers and executives he was surveying. The survey paired Myers-Briggs questions with open-ended questions about how executives actually used their intuition to make decisions: “Do you use intuition to guide your most important

134 Halpern, Beautiful Data 135 Peter Keen, “The Implications of Cognitive Style for Individual Decision-Making” (PhD Dissertation: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1973), 3, CAPT. 136 Keen, “The Implications of Cognitive Style.” 137 Steven Armstrong, Eva Cools and Eugene Sadler-Smith, “Role of Cognitive Styles in Business and Management: Reviewing 40 Years of Research.” International Journal of Management Reviews 14 (2012): 238-262; David Schweiger, “Measuring Managerial Cognitive Style: On the Logical Validity of the MBTI,” Journal of Business Research 13 (1985): 315-328.

152 decisions? What kind of feelings and signals does your intuition give you? Was there an instance when you followed intuition and it was right or wrong? Do you share your intuition with others or keep it a secret?138”

On the basis of survey results, Agor concluded that intuition clustered at the top of the corporate hierarchy, populated by top executives who had the capacity, and the authority, to use their intuition in making decisions.139 Newspaper articles and trade journals from the mid 1980s to mid-1990s reported similar findings: that the capacity for intuition was differentially distributed along the managerial hierarchy, clustering in high-level executives.140 Of the 70 top executives Agor surveyed, all received top scores for their use of intuition, leading Agor to conclude that their successful capacity for intuitive thinking explained their very rise to the top.

69 out of 70 were white males, a statistic that represents the more general predominance of white males in top executive positions in the 1980s.141 The remaining executive was a white woman, who reported reluctance about admitting the importance of intuition in her decision-making process because male executives often treated intuition as "suspect, female, and unscientific,” not as “properly rational.”142 Not only did this response reflect the way that “intuition” had been historically feminized, but it also reflected the entrenched biases that had kept women out of top

138 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making. 139 Based on respondents’ Myers-Briggs scores and their responses to open-ended question about using intuition, Agor gave each participant a score out of 12 that represented their degree of intuition. 140 Roy Rowan, The Intuitive Manager (Boston: Little & Brown, 1986); Daniel Isenberg, “How Senior Managers Think,” Harvard Business Review (Nov, 1984); Barbara Block, “Intuition Creeps out of the Closet and into the Boardroom,” Management Review 79, no. 5 (May 1990): 58; Janice Dineen, “Do you just KNOW what this story is about,” Toronto Star, Aug 21, 1992, C14. 141 Agor himself did not remark on the overwhelming predominance of men in the sample of top executives. Although he found intuition to be clustered at the top of the managerial hierarchy, he also did not reflect on the way that top executives would have much more power and scope to use their intuition than those lower in the managerial ranks. 142 Agor, “The Logic of Intuition,” 15; Michael Dixon, “Survey of Management Education: Intuitive Feelings,” Financial Times, March 28, 1989, 19.

153 management. However, Agor’s survey also found that the female middle managers he surveyed scored high on the intuition scale. In fact, the national average for female respondents was higher than male respondents, a statistic cited by newspaper articles and self-help books that reported on intuition.143 Indeed, Agor urged women to “consider more actively marketing and developing their intuitive skills as one effective vehicle for career advancement.”144

In contrast to his findings about women being high in intuition, Agor found intuition to be lower among Black managers than white managers—a claim that echoed the claims about the racialized distribution of intuition made by educational researchers discussed in the previous section.145 These claims were based on very small sample numbers of Black managers—only

115 Black respondents out of 3200 total managers surveyed—which reflected the historical and persistent discrimination within corporations and the wider society that made management positions overwhelmingly white. Agor did not suggest that racial differences in intuition were rooted in biology, but rather suggested that the psychological capacity for intuition was a skill that could be cultivated. Although Agor further argued that cultivating the capacity for intuition could help African-American managers attain positions in top management, he also suggested that their lower capacity for intuition had implications for the kind of work they were most suited

143 Yudkin, “Are You Intuitive?”; Nadel, The Sixth Sense. 144 Weston Agor, “Using Intuition to Manage Organizations in the Future,” Business Horizons (July-Aug 1984): 52. 145 Black psychologist Pat Clark Battle argued in a presentation at a MBTI conference that Black responses to self- reporting personality tests like the Myers-Briggs could not be taken in a straightforward manner, but rather had to be situated in light of Black Americans’ sense of double-consciousness. “When the Myers-Briggs ask, which answer comes closer to telling how you usually feel or act,’’ Clark Battle noted, psychologists must ask whether they answer “reveals true type” or, rather, reveals the persona they have learned to be, “in order to succeed or survive in a land that has been hostile to their ancestors as well as themselves.” Pat Clark Battle, Two Warring Ideals in One Dark Body: A Phenomenological Journey Toward Appreciating the Life-World of the African American Experience, “Navigating Global Transformations and Inner Explorations (Montreal, August 24-26, 1994): 148. See also, Pat Clark Battle, “The Effect of Race and Culture on Black MBTI Preferences,” Frontiers of Psychological Type Conference (University of Colorado, June 28-July 2, 1989), CAPT.

154 to.146 Indeed, Agor used these survey results to argue that African-American managers were ill- suited to tasks requiring big-picture, holistic thinking, advocating that African-American managers “would function best in situations where authority patterns are clear, and where the management task requires precision.”147 As one review of Agor’s Intuitive Management pointed out, Agor’s racist assertions about Black managers risked discriminating against racial groups in ways that might implicate hiring and promotion decisions. 148 As part of Agor’s brain skill management courses, managers were encouraged to compare their scores to national norms, to understand how they compared to others at the same management level, sex, ethnicity, and occupation—a process that only confirmed the skewed numbers of women and people of color in positions of management.149 As the next chapter will show, attempts to change inequality in the ranks of corporate management would be one major impetus for psychologically-oriented diversity training.

Agor described the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, as used in his “brain skill management” training courses, as a practical tool that could solve human capital management problems.150 As a form of human capital, intuition was key to the survival of the organization; the “source for creative solutions to existing problems, and the foundation from which new products and

146 Based on the demographic classification provided by Agor, the sample contained no Black women. Indeed, the very fact that business, as a persistently white population, had become one important site for Myers-Briggs studies meant that there was much less data on Black subjects’ response to the Myers-Briggs. Charles Wurster, “MBTI: A Cultural and Ethical Evaluation,” Executive Research Project (Washington, DC: Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 1993). 147 Agor, Intuitive Management, 29. 148 Linda Gasser, “Book Review of Intuitive Management,” Administrative Science 32, no. 2 (June 1987): 312-315. 149 On the gendered uses and politics of social surveys, see Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (Durham: Duke University Press); Alexandra Rutherford, “Surveying Rape: Feminist Social Science and the Ontological Politics of Sexual Assault,” History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 4 (2017): 100-12. 150 Weston Agor, “Managing Brain Skills to Increase Productivity,” Public Administration Review 45, no. 6 (1985): 864.

155 programs will flow.”151 Agor, like other consulting psychologists, marketed intuition training as a strategy to develop innovative new products and corporate strategies. Brain skill management courses began by evaluating managers’ existing capacity for intuition through the Agor Intuitive

Management Survey, his modified version of the Myers-Briggs intuition scale. Measuring existing levels of intuition, Agor urged, offered a “key to unlocking the door to increased personal and organizational productivity.”152 Companies could identify and harness the “creative resource potential that exists inside of you and your own organization which is available for use and further development.”153

Intuition training, Agor argued, could serve as a way for extracting more out of existing employees at a moment of downsizing.154 Unlike physical resources, Agor noted, the capacities of the human brain were almost infinitely expandable, and if properly trained, could serve as a

“boundless source of enhanced productivity.”155 Agor depicted the human capacity for intuition as a particularly valuable resource for organizations that were slashing budgets and staff. A book review of Agor’s Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making specifically linked intuition to the intertwined phenomena of downsizing and concerns about foreign competitiveness: the “flood of quality items at attractive prices has devastated American industry, forcing thousands of US firms to close or engage in ‘downsizing’…It is in this era of downsizing” that encouragement must be given to the use of creative, intuitive skills in management.”156 Agor marketed this

151 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making, 77. 152 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making, 53. 153 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making, 69. 154 Weston Agor, The Measurement, Use and Development of Intellectual Capital.” 155 Agor, “Managing Brain Skills”; Agor, “Intellectual Capital,” 176. 156 Wrangell, “Review of Weston Agor.”

156 intuition training for organizations, either private or public, that faced limited financial resources due to downsizing or budget cuts.

Waves of corporate downsizing in the 1970s and 1980s form an important backdrop to the rise of intuition as a prized capacity of management.157 As hierarchical firms reorganized themselves as “project-oriented networks” with decentralized management structures, mergers and acquisitions became more common, as did outsourcing of work to other countries to save on labor costs.158 Massive corporate restructurings of the 1980s frequently accompanied mass firings of workings, or the euphemistic term “downsizing.”159 The corporate landscape of hostile takeovers and job cuts in the 1980s disproportionately affected women and people of color, who had only recently been admitted to corporate management positions as the result of affirmative action programs.160 The bureaucratic organizations decried by social critics for having produced conformity in the 1950s had only recently admitted women and people of color to management positions due to civil rights activism and equal employment legislation of the mid-1960s. In countering employment discrimination, these bureaucratic corporations had allowed for some socioeconomic mobility.

Against this landscape, tracing intuitive management through genres such as popular management books and training manuals helps to capture historical changes in the business environment in the 1980s. The prevalence and familiarity of downsizing as a phenomenon in the corporate landscape at this moment permeated literature on the value of intuition in corporate

157 Megan Brown, “Survival at Work: Flexibility and Adaptability in American Corporate Culture,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 713-733. 158 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Blackwell, 1990); Karen Ho, “Corporate Nostalgia? Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective,” in Corporations and Citizenship, ed. Greg Urban (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 267-288. 159 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 149. 160 Ho, “Corporate Nostalgia.”

157 settings. In Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems, a MBTI manual from the early 1990s, one exercise designed to teach differences in decision styles used downsizing as a case study to show how different personality types make decisions. Seminar participants were divided into different types, and then asked to make a hypothetical decision about who would get laid-off and to specify the criteria they would use to make a decision. One consulting firm run by two psychologists, Drake-Beam Associates, even incorporated the MBTI into their work as an

“outplacement firm”—a euphemistic term referring to companies that helped corporations manage their lay-off process. In personal development seminars, newly-fired employees learned their Myers-Briggs type to assess their future career options. The seminars promised to help them manage their “transition”—while serving as strategies for companies to avoid wrongful termination lawsuits.161

The organizations that hired intuition consultants such as Agor were often in the midst of major corporate restructurings and sought intuition consultants to help formulate new corporate goals and strategies. In one iteration of the brain training course for city managers in Phoenix,

Agor divided managers into teams based on preferences for intuitive or analytical reasoning. But the point was to demonstrate the value of combining intuition and analytic reasoning.162 In the first round, the intuitive group was responsible for brainstorming ideas, whose practicality the analytical group of managers would assess in the second round. In the third round, a meeting was led by an “integrative manager” who combined the approaches and insights of both groups. Agor suggested that organizations replicate this format in their teams, so that intuitive people could be

161 Drake Beam Morin, “Company Profile” (http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/12/Drake-Beam-Morin- Inc.html). 162 Weston Agor, “The Measurement, Use and Development of Intellectual Capital.”

158 placed where their skills were most valuable—generating ideas—while the evaluation of these ideas, so generated, could be left to those with analytical skills.

In encouraging companies to combine intuition with analytical processes, Agor’s courses reinforced a more widespread claim that innovative corporate strategies required combining intuitive and analytical processes. As one 1984 business trade article proclaimed, the innovative business executive needed to be able to incorporate intuitive and analytic processes: the innovation process began with a “looseness of thought, an unstructured, ambiguous, holistic focus” before incorporating the rational evaluation of ideas generated through intuition.163

Intuition consultant Ned Herrmann, whose whole brain training seminars featured in the introduction to this chapter, urged companies to create work teams composed of mixed cognitive styles, that cut across traditional departmental lines, in order to develop a “composite whole brain staff” that had the “capability of synergy within the organization.”164 Corporate trainers recognized that this free-wheeling thought did not come naturally to everyone. One popular

Myers-Briggs manual from 1985 noted that teaching creative problem solving processes to non- intuitive participants—especially those trained in engineering or accounting-type disciplines— could prove difficult, as non-intuitive participants were reluctant to suspend their critical judgment.165 Through the MBTI seminar, participants learned why the traditional, analytic problem-solving process came more easily to them, but also that they could overcome this discomfort in order to suspend their rational judgments and accept the freewheeling, intuitive brainstorming processes necessary to incubation and ideation stages of creative problem solving.

163 Philip Olson and Debra Bosserman, “Attributes of the Entrepreneurial Type,” Business Horizons (May-June 1984): 53-56. 164 Ned Herrmann and Elizabeth Shey Gorovitz, “The Creative Brain II: A Revisit with Ned Herrmann,” Training and Development Journal 36, no. 12 (1982): 82. 165 Sandra Hirsh, Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Organizations: A Resource Book (Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1985), CAPT.

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Agor’s courses were part of a larger coterie of psychologically-inspired courses that sought to unleash this freewheeling thinking and harness it to business goals. Marketing researcher and psychoanalyst Ernest Dichter, for instance, hosted creative problem-solving workshops through his Hudson Valley consulting firms in the 1970s that encouraged marketing executives to

“unharden the arteries” of rationality and unleash their creativity.166 Dichter promoted creativity as a powerful force that could provide an “answer to the energy crisis and inflation” and lead directly to increased business profits.167 “Business executives,” as one promotional brochure trumpeted, “measure their creativity in dollars and cents.”168 Dichter’s creative problem-solving courses involved a litany of techniques that promised to unleash creativity, beginning with quizzes that assessed if you were an “intuitive planner”;169 tests of “divergent thinking” that asked participants to dream up as many possible uses of a paper clip as they could imagine; and

“psychodrama” that asked participants to act out a product, like butter or margarine, to better understand how to sell the product to consumers.170 Drawing on brainstorming techniques developed by marketers decades earlier in the 1940s, these exercises encouraged managers to

166 Ernest Dichter was an Austrian psychoanalyst best known for bringing depth psychology into the study of marketing and developing “motivational research,” which sought to uncover, and activate, the emotional, psychic, and sexual drives that motivated consumers. believing that motivational research. Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Stefan Schwarzkopf and Rainer Gries, Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Ernest Dichter, “Manuals for Applied Creativity Workshop,” (1974), Box 145, Folder 24. Ernest Dichter Papers, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, Delaware. 167 “Manuals for Applied Creativity Workshop,” (1974), Box 145, Folder 24. Ernest Dichter Papers, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, Delaware. 168 Dichter, “Manuals for Applied Creativity Workshop.” 169 Ernest Dichter, “Are you an Intuitive Planner,” Box 127, Folder 3. Ernest Dichter Papers, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, Delaware. 170 One 1974 course, attended by advertising and marketing executives, took place at Dichter’s institute in the Hudson Valley. At the end of a long day of acting as margarine and reciting uses for paper clips, participants were treated to dinner served by Dichter’s wife, an evening cocktail hour, and an indoor swimming pool “for the adventurous,” as pamphlets described. Box 144, Folder 21. Ernest Dichter Papers, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, Delaware.

160 indiscriminately imagine and mash-up strange analogies, fantasies, and metaphors to free the mind: to make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.171

These creativity techniques also incorporated futurist imaginaries from the scenario planning approach of futurist Herman Kahn, whose conservative think tank, the Hudson

Institute, was just down the road from Dichter’s Institute for Motivational Research.172 One exercise borrowed from Kahn, “testing extremes,” asked the audience of executives to imagine possible future scenarios as a way of expanding their creative problem-solving. One of the

“extreme” future scenarios was the election of a Black president in America: Dichter asked the executives, who were nearly all-white and mostly male, to imagine the social reactions: would there be revolution? Democratic triumph? Less racism? More polarization? Better social welfare policies? Or no change at all?173 The very possibility of a Black president in these training courses, considered to be an “extreme” scenario that could potentially engender social revolution or a reduction in racism, served as a hypothetical “creativity” exercise for white executives to train their minds, so as to come up with better marketing ideas. Brochures for creativity training credited these “testing extremes” exercises with the creation of a successful advertising campaign for marketing 7-Up.174

Agor marketed brain skill management programs, including these incubation techniques, as particularly useful for companies who sought to develop new corporate strategies. In 1986,

Tenneco, a Texan Fortune 500 energy company, hired Agor to run a corporate intuition seminar

171 Franklin, “Creativity.” 172 Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn. 173 “Manuals for Applied Creativity Workshop.” 174 Ernest Dichter, “Everyday Creativity Course brochure,” Box 144, Folder 33. Ernest Dichter Papers, Hagley Archives, Wilmington, Delaware.

161 to help develop new corporate strategies after a recent spree of mergers and acquisitions.175 At a retreat outside of Houston, Agor began by giving participants the intuitive management survey, and divided the group into two teams based on the results. One team had scored higher on intuition, while the other team had scored higher on analytical thinking. Each team was given a problem to work on —identifying high growth areas for corporate investment and specifying the major goals of the organization —then asked to complete a modified version of the Delphi technique, a form of futurist projection that operated by pooling expert opinions on the future and making projections based on this consensus.176 The seminar encouraged the group to reflect on how their psychological differences affected the scenarios they imagined and the process they had used to arrive at these scenarios. Agor reported that intuitive groups had a looser, more playful style that generated a longer list of suggestions, even though not all their ideas were realistic; analytical-minded executives were better suited to evaluating ideas.

Strategic management experts and corporate planning departments treated intuition as a particularly important capacity for strategic management, a corporate domain that by definition had to concern itself with the long-range, uncertain future. As popular business writer Roy

Rowan noted in The Intuitive Manager, as managers ascended the corporate ladder, intuition became increasingly important because their decisions had to reach “further into the unpredictable future.”177 At a 1994 conference on the Myers-Briggs and leadership, MBTI developer Mary McCaulley cited the swaths of type table data collected from decades of Myers-

Briggs research to confirm that intuition correlated with visionary strategic planning. “As you ascend the corporate ladder,” McCaulley proclaimed, researchers found a higher proportion of

175 Ho, “Corporate Nostalgia.” 176 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making. 177 Rowan, The Intuitive Manager, 6.

162 intuitive types, particularly in “leadership positions where they are breaking new ground or concerned with long-range planning.”178 Some strategic management researchers used the

Myers-Briggs to understand the psychological capacities associated with intuition. Strategic management expert Roger Evered, for example, argued that a corporation that wanted to think strategically should hire intuitive people: intuition allowed people to richly imagine the future and feel comfortable amidst turbulence, making them “organizational change-makers.”179

Similarly, strategic management researchers at the 1989 MBTI conference emphasized the high intuition scores of the founders of major Inc. 500 company founders. Strategic planning, they concluded, required intuitive founders—who were uniquely responsible for directing the future growth of their company— because founders had to consider future scenarios and constantly adjust in terms of this unknown future.180

Furthermore, consultants and strategic planners depicted intuition as a future-oriented capacity that could be trained, so as to improve corporate strategies at a moment when economic and technological changes made the future seem more unpredictable. 181 Thus, it should come as no surprise that strategies for cultivating intuition resemble the strategies in other future-making endeavors, like scenario planning, an approach to planning inspired by Herman Kahn and adopted by corporate planning departments at Royal Dutch Shell. Scenario planning incorporated an eclectic set of influences that included counter-cultural movements, psychedelic research, and

178 McCaulley, “Every User a Researcher,” 7. McCaulley also noted that the correlation between intuition and leadership was especially important for non-white males; for “minorities and women entering formerly white-male- dominated professions,” their role entailed a kind of forward-looking, visionary planning characteristic of intuition. 179 Roger Evered, “Organization Activism and Its Relation to ‘Reality’ and Mental Imagery,” Human Relations 30, no. 4 (1977): 311-334. 180 Charles Ginn and Donald Sexton, “MBTI Profiles of Inc. 500 Company Founders and Their Spouses,” Frontiers of Psychological Type Conference (University of Colorado, June 28-July 2, 1989), CAPT. 181 Melinda Cooper, “Turbulent Worlds: Financial Markets and Environmental Crisis,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2-3 (2010): 167-190.

163 speculative science-fiction type narratives.182 The invocation of intuition among strategic management experts speaks to a broader investment among corporate planning departments in the 1970s and 1980s in experimental techniques for imaging and managing a future perceived as increasingly unpredictable and uncertain.

Like scenario planners, proponents of intuitive management pointed to the failures of traditional economic forecasting techniques. The Whole-Brained Business Book, for instance, described traditional economic forecasting tools as rooted in “left-brained assumptions” and instead advocated that organizations and individual adopt “forecasting methods that employ more balanced brain usage.”183 The proclamation of intuitive management sought to legitimize it as a form of reasoning that was superior to traditional analytic techniques for envisioning the future. Aided by computers, inspired by military operations research, and reaffirmed through business schools, analytical decision-making techniques—such as the decision tree—sought to break down decisions into their components, search for operational rules, and order alternatives.184 Critics of this analytical approach to managerial decision-making argued that such models failed to take into account how managers actually made decisions, namely by using their intuition. In a frequently-cited Harvard Business Review article from 1974, “How

182 Bretton Fosbrook, “How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies,” (PhD Dissertation: York University, 2017); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn. 183 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking, 292. 184 Leavitt, “Beyond the Analytic Manager.” Histories of the decision sciences have shown how military operations research was one genealogy of management sciences: techniques of forecasting and prediction that were developed in wartime military operations research—and the computers who could calculate such models— were transported to management sciences in the 1950s. Quantitative approaches were reinforced by business schools, where quantitative methods had dominated, in part due to the priorities of the Ford Foundation in their 1950s funding of business schools. On business schools, see Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Stephanie Dick, “Of Models and Machines: Implementing Bounded Rationality,” Isis 106, no. 3 (September 2015): 623–34; William Thomas, Rational Action: The Sciences of Policy in Britain and America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015); Sonia Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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Managers’ Minds’ Work,” James McKenney and Peter Keen argued that intuition, far from being a sloppy or mysterious method, was the superior mode of decision making for unstructured problems in conditions of uncertainty.185

On the flip side, management trade literature described intuitive leaders as ill-suited for detail-oriented, routine tasks, thus contrasting intuition to both computational and clerical work.186 For example, a 1989 article in the trade journal Business Horizons described intuition as the capacity for perceiving information that distinguished humans from computers: “in the middle of the computer revolution, the intuitive skill to sift through all the information—to see the forest through the trees—may be as important as the information itself.187” Capturing the imaginary of the visionary, perceptive executive, this trade article described intuition as the capacity that separated mid-level managers and clerical workers from top executives—and, moreover, the capacity that justified their high executive salaries.188 By the 1980s, increasingly user-friendly computers and software, packaged as “decision support systems,” offered

185 Moreover, analytical approaches to decision-making processes forced managers to articulate and make explicit elements of their reasoning that were best left unconscious, in their intuitive processes. As cultural critics Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus argued in their popular critique of artificial intelligence, unconscious intuitive processes constituted the backbone of human expertise; they could never be replicated by computing systems based on the manipulation of formal rules and symbols. Dreyfus and Dreyfus were responding to the arguments of Herbert Simon, cognitive scientist and founding father of artificial intelligence, who described intuition not as a uniquely human capacity, but as an algorithmic process that could be replicated by artificial intelligence. Like a chess master who could quickly decide on the next move without consciously performing every calculation, intuition was an unconscious heuristic suited for complex situations. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Herbert Simon, “Making Management Decisions: The Role of Intuition and Emotion,” Academy of Management Executive 1: 1 (February 1987): 57–64; Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: The Free Press, 1986). 186 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking, 135. 187 Stephen C. Harper, “Intuition: What Separates Executives from Managers,” Business Horizons, 31, no. 5 (September-October 1989): 16. For more on the ways that intuition was carved out in relationship to computers, see Kira Lussier, “From the Intuitive Human to the Intuitive Computer,” Technologies Stories, March 12, 2018, http://www.technologystories.org/category/artificial-intelligence/. 188 Harper, “Intuition.”

165 corporations new tools to liberate and enhance humans’ intuitive capacities.189 Proponents of these information systems argued that automating routine aspects of managerial decision-making would free top management to perform the higher-level decision-making and creative work that computers could not perform and to become visionary, intuitive executives. 190

Despite intuition’s association with women, this contrast between big-picture executive work and clerical labor portrayed in trade literature drew on older gendered divisions of labor in the workplace. Since the expansion of the corporation in the early 20th century, women performed clerical and computational labor as typewriters or punch-card operators. 191 Trade articles counseled their executive readers on how to use secretaries most effectively in order to free up time and cognitive capacity for executives.192 By the 1980s, although more women had entered positions of corporate management, the highest executive ranks remained overwhelmingly male.

This section has showed how intuition, as a capacity for big picture, strategic thinking, became associated with the visionary leader and thus comprised a crucial component of psychological capital. As embodied in the visionary executive—a figure marked as white and

189 Counter-cultural-inspired organizations depicted a vision of interactive computing technology as resulting in an enhancement of human capacities. Even in the 1960s, IBM marketing its computing systems to companies as ways to liberate human creativity. In her analysis of the way that discourses of creativity were mobilized in the knowledge economy, historian Bregje van Eekelen argues that the history of creativity must be understood in relation to the history of automation. The capacity for intuition, like the related capacity for creativity, represented what was “distinctly human and distinctly valuable in the face of automation.” Bregje van Eekelen, “The Social Lives of Ideas” (PhD Dissertation: University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010): p. 243; John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Lussier, “Technology’s Stories.” 190 Similar claims about the role of information systems in enhancing intuition were made in American foreign policy in the late 1970s-1980s, as historian of science Joy Rohde has shown: automated computer systems were promoted under the guise of freeing humans from routine labor in order to enhance humans’ intuitive expert judgement. Rohde, “Pax Technologica.” 191 Light, “When Computers Were Women”; Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business; Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017); Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). 192 Robert Bloomfield, “The Changing World of the Secretary,” Personnel Journal 52:9 (September 1973): 793-798.

166 male—intuition remained a form of perception, as it had been in the formulation of the “creative personality” at IPAR. But here, in the intuition training seminars and in strategic management texts, intuition became a more general mode of organizational decision-making and strategy. By the 1980s, discussions about the capacity for intuitive perception existed within a changed corporate context that included rampant downsizing and new information technologies that made strategies for imagining the future and extracting more productivity out of intuitive thinking seem particularly crucial for corporations. In adapting the Myers-Briggs into a survey of managerial intuition, Weston Agor helped translate intuition from an individual personality trait into a capacity useful for perceiving and changing corporate futures. Agor promoted intuition as a capacity that could be trained as an investment in the psychological capital of an organization.

In the next section, I show how Agor depicted the intuitive leader as a spiritual guru.

3.5 Intuitive Awakenings: The Visionary Leader

Intuition, as this chapter has shown so far, became a component of psychological capital through its roots in a diverse array of research traditions, including psychological research into creative personalities, personality testing, and neuroscience research. By braiding together these strands, consulting psychologists depicted the intuitive executive as a visionary leader whose capacity for perceiving the future justified their position at the top of the corporate hierarchy. In this section, I turn to one last strand that plaited to produce the idea of the intuitive leader: New

Age spiritualism. The corporate New Age movement described intuition with a contradictory mix of bodily metaphors—inner voice, gut feeling, or sixth sense—and suggested that intuition was a transpersonal, spiritual, but nonetheless embodied capacity that could be harnessed for professional success. In addition to management training seminars, business self-help books in

167 the 1980s spread ideas and exercises about intuition.193 Self-help books and spiritual management development, as this section shows, depicted intuitive leaders as spiritual leaders, whose “awakened” intuition confirmed the certainty of their gut feelings and justified their position of leadership.

Agor’s writings on intuition cited a larger body of popular self-help books, such as Frances

Vaughan’s Awakening Intuition, which defined intuition as a spiritual way of knowing that needed to be “awakened” through exercises ranging from the mundane to the quirky. 194 One exercise that Agor promoted for running “intuitive meetings” began with meditation practices:

“Close your eyes and imagine that you are surrounded by a warm white light,” the script read.

“Think warmly of the many things you admire and like about your co-workers here…Now focus your mind’s eye to the problem on the agenda today. Relax, think about it, toss it around in your mind lightly.”195 Another exercise, “Individual in the Middle,” required one individual to sit in the middle of a circle of their colleagues, who all held hands around them, with closed eyes.

After touching the individual in the middle, those in the outer ring had to take turns “reading” the person in the middle, and sending “energy flows or shifts in the room” to observe how an individual’s intuitive energy was combined into a synergistic group intuition.196 Yet another exercise invited the supervisor and subordinate to face each other—seated, eyes closed—and hold hands. “Relax and concentrate now. Focus your minds on words like cooperation, support, help” and ask your subordinate how you could perform your job more effectively. Then, reverse

193 Although I use popular management literature throughout the dissertation, this chapter most explicitly engages with it as a genre for cultivating psychological capital. Nadel, The Sixth Sense; Frances Vaughan, Awakening Intuition; Nancy Rosanoff, Intuition Workout. A Practical Guide to Discovering and Developing Your Inner Knowing (Lower Lake, CA: Aslan Publishing). 194 Frances Vaughan, Awakening Intuition (New York: Anchor Books, 1979). 195 Weston Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision Making, 101. 196 Weston Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision Making, 67.

168 the process, and reflect. The exercise, Agor assured readers, would “force you back to your own intuitive self and the intuitive self of your subordinates.”197 (One suspects that for some managers, such exercises that ask you to hold hands with your colleagues, or read the energy auras of your boss, might provoke nightmares.)

These sensory exercises were part of a broader diffusion of “New Age spirituality” into management development. An eclectic and pastiche movement whose emergence is usually dated to the mid-1970s, the New Age movement combined the legacy of the counter-culture with elements of non-Western religious traditions (such as Buddhism), psychological strands from humanistic psychology and consciousness research, neuroscientific research into split brains, and alternative brain-based techniques, such as biofeedback.198 Amidst this eclecticism, key themes that animated the movement were also central to discourses of intuition. These included a commitment to expanding consciousness, the personal transformation of self, and channeling awareness of one’s “inner voice” through a profusion of techniques that acted at the nexus of body and mind—from meditation and hypnosis to holistic crystal healing and astrology. This section concludes by showing how associations with the corporate New Age movement contributed to critiques of the scientific legitimacy of the Myers-Briggs in ways that continue to echo today.

The texts of the New Age movement criticized the rationality of mass industrial, bureaucratic society, and the mechanistic, atomistic view of the self, citing research into split brain and Carl

Jung’s work to understand intuition as a spiritual form of coming to self-awareness.199 One of the key texts of the New Age, and an assigned reading in business school courses on creative

197 Weston Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision Making, 77. 198 David Hess, Science and the New Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 199 Hess, Science and the New Age.

169 intuition, was Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy.200 Ferguson cited futurist Willis

Harman and historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts to describe the Aquarian Age as a new stage in human history, marked by an inner-directed, personal revolution in consciousness.201 Starting in 1975, Ferguson published a popular newsletter called the Brain/Mind Bulletin, which reported on scientific research into consciousness alongside reviews of books on intuitive management and interviews with intuition consultants, such as Ned Herrmann, that described CEOs as “merchants of vision” whose leadership had a spiritual, transformative purpose.

New Age writers in the 1970s rediscovered Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as a realm of transpersonal, collective memory below the individual unconscious, and used it as a justification for explorations into spiritual dimensions of consciousness.202 This realm of the collective unconscious dovetailed with parapsychology investigations into the mystical dimensions of human consciousness, which drew on a longer relationship between psychology as a scientific and academic enterprise and spiritualism and mysticism.203 Some prominent advocates of intuitive management identified as parapsychologists, a field of study that attempts to empirically study phenomena that did not adhere to conventional understandings of physical

200 This book was on the syllabus of some business school creativity courses, like Stanford’s “Creativity in Business course.” Starting in 1975, Ferguson published a popular newsletter called the Brain/Mind Bulletin, which reported on scientific research into consciousness alongside book reviews and interviews with intuition consultants, such as Ned Herrmann. Marilyn Ferguson, Aquarian Conspiracy (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980). 201 Futurist Willis Harman, who worked at Stanford Research Institute, expanded on scenario planning techniques along psychedelic experimentation to foster changes in consciousness. Bretton Fosbrook, “How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies.” 202 Historian of religion and science David Hess has shown how New Age and its associated traditions, like parapsychology, are interesting as movement precisely to study the kinds of boundary work undertaken by scientific and religious traditions. Hess, Science and the New Age; On the looping interactions between the counterculture and corporations, see Groovy Science: The Counter-Cultures and Scientific Life, 1955-1975, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 203 William James, one founding figure of modern psychology, was famously interested in psychic mediums, even hosting his own séances Peter Lamont, Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

170 laws, such as extra-sensory perception or hypnotism. Jeffrey Mishlove, founder of the “Intuition

Network” alongside Weston Agor, identified himself as the first person to receive a doctorate diploma (1980) from Berkeley in the field of parapsychology, for a project on extra-sensory perception and ‘psychic exploration.”

The genre of self-help books inspired by the New Age mixed an array of references and theories, incorporating neuroscience studies and cognitive psychology with New Age spirituality and ideas from religious traditions, such as Buddhism, packaged in the form of practical management advice. They shared strikingly similar templates. Almost invariably, they began with a self-test to assess your existing preference for intuition—“do you prefer following rules or breaking them? Planned or spontaneous social events?”—before enumerating exercises for cultivating your intuition. They promised that self-awareness would come from tapping into one’s intuitive capacities and offered exercises to cultivate intuition for personal and professional success.

One such self-help book was Whole-Brain Thinking: Working from Both Sides of the Brain to

Achieve Peak Job Performance (1984), co-authored by management consultants Jacquelyn

Wonder and Priscilla Donovan. Like much of the genre, Whole Brain Thinking is an interactive book that enumerated a dizzying litany of techniques. From the start, Whole Brain Thinking pulls its reader in with a series of first-person vignettes, encouraging readers to place themselves in the shoes of the hypothetical manager: “I’m a manager…expected to do extraordinary things in my division, yet my staff and workers are simply ordinary people. How do I get ordinary people to do extraordinary things?"204 Its interactivity continues with a survey that interrogates whether you prefer spontaneous or planned social interaction; which activities you enjoy (tennis or

204 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking, 2.

171 reading?); how you hold your pen (with a “hooked” or regular grip, with the right or the left hand). After answering the questions, circling my hobbies (reading, not tennis), and clutching a pen to see how I hold it (hooked grip, right hand), I received a score of 4.67 on the scale from 1-

10, placing me in the coveted category of a “whole-brained thinker.” The book, like any self-help book worth its purchase price, enrolls and enlists its readers. Readers were encouraged to harness their inner voice for professional success by “dreaming purposively”: reflect on a particular tricky business problem before bed, hoping that the solution emerges through dreams. (For readers of business self-help books, even your sleeping life was not safe from the reaches of the corporation).

Wonder and Donovan urged readers to apply intuitive techniques to imagine and plot their own future. “Take what you know about your work world, your city, state and country,” the book urges you. “Project it onto a cinematic screen and forecast your own life-trends as they fit into your milieu. Then be ready to adapt to your scenario.”205 Sample futurist exercises from Whole-

Brain Thinking were adapted in Myers-Briggs training manuals as examples for teaching about the difference between intuitive and sensing types: the “2020 Incident,” narrated a speculative future scenario of terrorist groups infiltrating the United States in the year 2020, in order to show how intuitive people remembered different details about the same scenario.206 One common suggestion to tune into intuition was to keep an “intuition journal,” where you recorded moments of intuitive flashes in order to understand how intuition helped your decision-making capability.

Incorporating intuitive visualization techniques was even presented as a strategy for women to act assertively in the workplace. One example, encountered in one of their corporate training programs, involved a female engineer who found out that a male coworker made more

205 Wonder and Donovan, 288-289. 206 Hirsh, Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Organizations.”

172 money than her; upon confronting her boss, she faced a cold response. To respond, Wonder and

Donovan suggested that the imagined female engineer intuitively visualize of a more “assertive you,” who could foster a new perception in the boss’s mind.207 They did not discount sexism as one reason for the mismatch in salaries, but focused attention on actions that the manager could take. Given the audience and the nature of the genre—a management self-help book—it is not surprising that the focus was on the self. Indeed, critical management scholars have shown how spiritually-inflected management development ended up enjoining individuals—such as women facing sexism—to draw on their own inner resources to cope with organizational demands.208

In describing their experiences with intuition, self-help books and trade journals also described intuition as a visceral, bodily, affective experience, or as a feeling of certainty that could counter uncertainty. One section of Whole Brain Thinking, “Mind Movers,” included varied strategies for imagining, perceiving, thinking, and hearing differently that borrowed metaphors from the five senses. This included new forms of “seeing” and “visualizing” and a section called “Hearings,” which suggested strategies for tuning in to the “faint, small voices” that vocalized one’s intuition. In a 1984 book which brought the Myers-Briggs to bear on managerial decision-making, Warren Keegan suggested sensory deprivation as a technique for cultivating intuition: close your eyes, disconnect your phone, and let your intuition guide your answer to decisions; think, “Should you hire person X for the product manager’s job? Or would

207 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking, 180. 208 Emma Bell and Scott Taylor, “‘From Outward Bound to Inward Bound’: The Prophetic Voices and Discursive Practices of Spiritual Management Development.” Human Relations 57, no. 4 (2004): 462.

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Y be more effective in this position?”209 Remember, Keegan exhorted, don’t hire someone who might “look good on paper” without the affirmation from the gut feeling of your intuition.210

These repeated claims that intuition entailed physiological elements of comfort or discomfort suggest that invocations of intuition, rather than functioning as an iconoclastic form of thought, reinforced traditional politics of corporate hierarchies.211 Equal employment legislation and standardized hiring protocols had been put in place precisely to counter the “gut feelings of hiring managers—gut feelings that all too easily led to hiring practices that replicated class, race, and gender biases in corporate management. As popular business writer Roy Rowan evocatively described in The Intuitive Manager, “gut feelings could congeal in the corporate body” and prevent true intuition from shining forth.212 Agor quoted a state governor who credited intuition with his decision to increase numbers of police officers in Detroit, against the more logical process of cost/benefit analysis: “I made the decision without all the facts, or what the costs would be to carry the decision out…something click[ed] and I said, “let’s go!”213 Rather than represent iconoclastic thinking, invocations of intuition as tuning into gut feelings and inner voices could instead serve to reinforce the status quo. As my next chapter will show, anti- discrimination laws and policies were implemented in corporations precisely to counter the gut feelings and unconscious biases of corporate managers.

Executives who responded to Agor’s survey mentioned the physiological feelings of excitement or harmony that accompanied decisions they had made intuitively—a “feeling of total

209 Warren Keegan, Judgments, Choices and Decisions: Effective Management through Self-Knowledge. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984): p. 133, CAPT. 210 Keegan, Judgments, Choices and Decisions. 211 Affect theorist Sara Ahmed describes how certain kinds of bodies—the “killjoy figures”—get pinpointed as the source of bad feelings. The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 212 Roy Rowan, The Intuitive Manager, 138. 213 Weston Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making, 31.

174 harmony”; “growing excitement in the pit of my stomach”; a “burst of enthusiasm, energy.”214

Conversely, at moments when they had ignored their intuition, they felt physical nausea, or a headache—an anxiety located in the body.215 Indeed, techniques to tune into your intuition included attuning yourself to bodily clues—headaches or the sense of unease in the pit of your stomach— that accompanied making a decision that went against one’s intuition. 216 Creativity consultant Eugene Raudsepp described the affective charge of intuition as a feeling of certainty that could counter doubts of uncertainty: “when you get a valid hunch, you know it's of value: when it hits, you're imbued with a glowing amalgam of energy and certainty.217

By the late 1980s, corporate America was spending billions of dollars a year on “spiritual management development,” much of it focused on this language of inner renewal and self- awareness connected to intuition.218 At one 1986 conference, executives from major corporations, such as IBM, General Motors, and AT&T, met to discuss how mysticism and occult practices could provide a competitive advantage to corporations at a moment of increasing foreign competition. As filtered through corporations, this “New Age corporate spiritualism” emphasized how the pursuit of spiritual growth for American employees could be harnessed towards organizational goals. 219 As critical management scholars have argued, “spiritual

214 Agor, The Logic of Intuitive Decision-Making. 215 Agor, “The Logic of Intuition.” 216 Rowan, The Intuitive Manager, 81. 217 Eugene Raudsepp, “So You've Got a Really Hot Hunch,” Boston Globe, 1982. 218 Majia Nadesan, “The Discourses of Corporate Spiritualism and Evangelical Capitalism,” Management Communication Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Aug 1999): 3-42; C. Neck and J.R. Milliman, “Thought Self-Leadership: Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Organizational Life,” Journal of Managerial Psychology 9 (1994): 9-16. 219 Critical management scholar Majia Nadesan defines “New Age corporate spiritualism” as a “nondenominational, privatized, and largely individualized” spiritual movement. Majia Nadesan, “The Discourses of Corporate Spiritualism and Evangelical Capitalism,” Management Communication Quarterly 13, no. 1 (Aug 1999): p. 10. On the broader relationship between religion and capitalism, see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

175 management development” served as one strategy for corporations to cultivate forms of intrinsic motivation and commitment to work that management saw as particularly crucial in moments of downsizing and foreign competition, connecting the training seminars here to the previous chapter’s discussion of motivation.220

Spiritual management development often entailed the adoption of elements of Asian religious traditions, such as Buddhism, in ways that reinforced stereotypical views about Asian cultures.221

East Asian cultures were often described as particularly spiritual, intuitive cultures, at a moment when American business leaders were concerned about the increasing business power of Japan and China.222 American management writers attributed the different religious traditions of Japan as one reason for its economic success, in addition to Japan’s management style and economic culture.223 A 1982 business book written by management consultants, The Art of Japanese

Management, for instance, contrasted the Western tradition of separate spheres of church and state to Japan’s history of unified realms of political and spiritual leadership, and presented this as one explanation for different attitudes towards the corporation. While the West had cleaved the spiritual nature of man from the economic role at work, Japanese had kept spirituality and

220 On the history of humanistic psychology, see Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (New York: Harper-Collins, 2012); Jenna Alden, “Bottom-Up Management: Participative Philosophy and Humanistic Psychology in American Organizational Culture, 1930– 1970” (PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2012). For a discussion of Maslow’s influence on the human potential movement, see Bell and Taylor, “’From Outward Bound to Inward Bound’”; Nadine Weidman, “Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s,” In Groovy Science: The Counter-Cultures and Scientific Life, 1955-1975, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 109-134. 221 Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 222 Peter Drucker, “What We Can Learn From Japanese Management,” Harvard Business Review (Apr 1971): 110- 122; Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executive (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). 223 In chapter 4, I show how American management writers turned to Japanese management’s adoption of “quality circles” as justification for arrangements of teams in American workplaces.

176 economic production together.224 Pervading business trade literature in the 1980s were stereotyped claims about differences between Western and East Asian cultures connected to

American business anxieties about foreign competition.

Even as executives trumpeted the validity of their gut feelings and hunches as central elements of intuition, employees did not always appreciate being forced to submit to New Age initiatives in the workplace. In 1987, for example, the telecommunication company Pacific Bell was the target of a lawsuit for sending 15,000 employees to Leadership Development, an organization based on the work of mystic George Gurdjieff, that sought to change employees’ thought patterns through bizarre exercises, including “primal screaming.”225 Corporate training departments that adopted elements associated with the New Age provoked great criticism, and even lawsuits, from employees who charged that the spirituality embedded in the seminars intruded in their spiritual life.226

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was directly implicated in both the practices of the corporate New Age and in the backlash against this corporate spirituality, as indicated in a 1991 report by the National Research Council, In the Mind’s Eye. The report aimed to review and critique assessment techniques that stemmed from the intertwined human potential and New Age movements, including the Myers-Briggs, that had been adopted in military career counseling programs.227 The report concluded that the Myers-Briggs showed little retest reliability—a core

224 Some management researchers adopted the Myers-Briggs to measure apparent cultural differences in cognitive styles, finding that Japanese experimental subjects were more likely to prefer intuitive modes of decision-making. Neil Abramson, Henry Lane, Hirohisa Nagai and Haruo Takagi, “A Comparison of Canadian and Japanese Cognitive Styles: Implications for Management Interaction,” Journal of International Business Studies 24, no. 3 (Third Quarter 1993): 575-587. 225 Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich, Cults in Our Midst (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1996). 226 In 1988, the EEOC ruled that New Age training programs in the workplace were a matter of religious accommodations, to be settled on case by case basis. Singer and Lalich, Cults in Our Midst. 227 The research for this report began in 1984, with the preliminary version published in 1988, and the final version, In the Mind’s Eye, in 1991. It was commissioned by the Army Research Institute and published by the NRC’s

177 concern of psychological testers—little connection between the test and performance, and above all, an “absence of proven scientific worth.”228 As a powerful institution in the American science establishment that privileged systematic scientific research, the National Research Council expressed deep skepticism of the claims of the Myers-Briggs. Association with the more mystical dimensions of New Age movement, as this critical report reflects, did not help the legitimacy of the Myers-Briggs among psychologists or among management practitioners.229

To respond to the criticism of the report, MBTI practitioners wrote rebuttals and convened conference panels that accused the report’s authors of neglecting a vast array of literature that demonstrated the Indicator’s validity, reliability, and usefulness. Moreover, MBTI practitioners noted the peculiar results that the report confirmed about users’ qualitative engagement with the

Myers-Briggs. Even while damning the Indicator for its lack of psychometric validity, In the

Mind’s Eye showed that the MBTI had a significantly larger impact on memory, self-insights, and planning than other instruments. People who took the Myers-Briggs remembered their experience, affirmed that the test’s results matched their own self-understanding, and changed their behavior based on their results.230 Indeed, at the same time that the National Research

Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance. Daniel Druckman and Robert Bjork, In the Mind’s Eye: Enhancing Human Performance (Washington, DC: National Research Council: 1991). 228 Druckman and Bjork, In the Mind’s Eye, 101. 229 Unfavorable associations with astrology, one tradition associated with the New Age revival, dogged the MBTI since the 1970s. In a post-mortem report on the 1978 MBTI conference, one participant worried that the increasing popularity of the MBTI might make it “take on the trivial quality of the daily newspaper horoscope version of astrology. Dorothy Emerson, “Where Do We Go From Here? Commentary and Evaluation of the Second MBTI Conference,” MBTI News 2, no. 2 (Summer 1978). Isabel Briggs-Myers Memorial Library, Center for the Association of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida. Read in another light, the kinship between the MBTI and astrology might help explain its popularity. Indeed, organizational theorists Peter Case and Garry Phillipson argue that premodern cosmologies, including astrology, help explain the very success of the Myers-Briggs, as they were folded into the very framework of psychological types. Peter Case and Garry Phillipson, “Astrology, Alchemy and Retro-Organization Theory: An Astro-Genealogical Critique of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Organization 11, no. 4 (2004): 473-495. 230 The National Research Council found the results inconsistent, because while the test’s results seemed to change behaviour, it didn’t seem to do so by telling test-takers something new about themselves, but confirming their findings. Druckman and Bjork, In the Mind’s Eye, 195.

178

Council criticized the MBTI, this critique showed how popular the Myers-Briggs had become, and how central it was to management techniques. The report devoted more time to the MBTI than other personality inventories, and stated that an estimated 1.7 million people took the

Myers-Briggs annually in the United States. The National Research Council concluded that the

MBTI’s popularity was not due to its psychometric validity, but to two other reasons: 1)

“aggressive marketing” tactics of its proponents, as in selling type-themed merchandise to an

“audience eager for self-improvement”; and 2) its ability to provide positive, vague, but applicable feedback to individuals.231 By contextualizing the Myers-Briggs in relation to the New

Age movement, my intent is not to relegate it to the realm of pseudoscience, but rather to show how corporate management and a mix of consulting firms, experts, and writers crafted a historically situated scientific and spiritual discourse that promoted ideals of the intuitive leader.232

This final section has shown how self-help books and corporate spiritualism contributed to frame the intuitive leader as a visionary, even spiritual guru who could harness his inner voice for the sake of professional success and organizational goals. Self-help books from the mid to late 1980s portrayed the intuitive leader as a spiritual guru whose ability to “awaken intuition” and listen to their “gut feelings” could lead American corporations into a new era of economic success. Wonder and Donovan credited the very foundation of American corporate capitalism to intuition: the early titans of American industry, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and the Vanderbilts had all “founded and ran their businesses guided by hunches, guesses, and feelings.”233 Indeed,

231 Druckman and Bjork, In the Mind’s Eye, 101. 232 Many academic psychologists today agree with the National Research Council’s assessment of the Myers-Briggs as an unscientific tool, more akin to astrology than a legitimate psychological measure. David Pittenger, “Cautionary Comments Regarding the MBTI.” Consulting Psychology Journal 57, no. 3 (2005): 210-221. 233 Wonder and Donovan, Whole-Brain Thinking, 135.

179 one titan of American industry who co-authored a business self-help book in the late 1980s, at the apogee of the intuitive management trend, was current American president Donald Trump.

Trump’s 1987 Art of the Deal celebrated executives who perceived the “big picture” and came to decisions based on their “gut feelings” rather than expert wisdom or analytical reasoning.234 At the apex of the corporate ladder, the ideal subject of American corporate capitalism, was the intuitive leader.

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the intuitive leader became an archetype for the corporate leader in 1970s and 1980s America. This chapter has traced ideas about the intuitive leader from creativity research in the 1950s that treated intuition as a personality trait residing in highly- creative individuals through neuroscience in the 1970s, which described intuition as a cognitive capacity rooted in brains, to the 1980s understanding of intuition as a future-oriented capacity needed to perceive the future and develop effective management strategies, and lastly to techniques that awakened intuition as a spiritual “inner voice.”

As this chapter has argued, the figure of the intuitive leader embodied intuition in elite, white, executive bodies, even as intuition had been associated with femininity, androgyny and iconoclasm. Although embodied, intuition was never quite embodied in the same spot; nor was it equally embodied in all kinds of people. According to the white, male consultants who packaged and sold intuition, intuition could be found most often in people like them: white, male executives who had the capacity and the scope to use their intuition. The ways that intuition, so

234 Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987). Schwartz has recently revealed that he essentially ghost-wrote the entire book.

180 often described by management writers as a lively, affective exuberance, rhetorically justified longstanding hierarchies of power, race, and gender in corporations offers an important historical lesson about the intertwined histories of affect and corporate capitalism.235

In urging executives to listen to their “gut feelings” and “inner voice” while making decisions, such as hiring decisions, intuition consultants could also justify the entrenched biases of those in power. Moreover, in encouraging women to visualize success to counter corporate sexism, or in suggesting that African-American managers cultivate their intuition to counter racist hiring practices, texts on intuitive management reflect how relations of power, gender, race, and class in the workplace became framed in psychological terms, to be addressed through individual strategies—such as Wonder and Donovan’s suggestion that women should channel their intuition to visualize business success. As the next chapter will show, anti-discrimination efforts in corporations, such as diversity training, zeroed in on “unconscious biases” as one salient cause of racial discrimination. They developed techniques to counter the very kinds of

“gut feelings” that self-help books urged business executives to heed.

It may be tempting to dismiss intuition’s popularity in corporate America as just another management fad.236 To be sure, intuitive management, as this chapter has shown, was a prominent fad that peaked in the 1980s, as consulting psychologists packaged and sold

“intuition” as corporate strategies for visionary executives. Management experts promised corporations that group training seminars and transformations in the social environment at work were worth spending billions of dollars on because they would help to nurture and activate the desired intuitive capacity.237 Beyond a fad, the multitude of domains that intuitive management

235 Patricia Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 1 (2010): 1-22. 236 Margaret Brindle and Peter Stearns, Facing Up to Management Faddism (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2001). 237 Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

181 assembled together makes intuition a significant object of analysis for understanding how psychological capital circulated across management and psychology in 1970s and 1980s corporate America. In the forward to Intuition at Work, futurist Willis Harman described intuition as “a code word for referring to a major transformation of modern society.”238

Intuition was not a stable category, but rather there were varieties of intuition, as seen in the braiding of rhetorical devices and techniques that constituted intuition. Indeed, part of the resonance of intuition at this moment derived from its ability to shapeshift, appearing at times as an algorithmic form of reasoning, and at times as an embodied affective capacity. To call intuition a form of “right-brained thinking,” as many management scholars did, was to situate intuition in the research tradition of the neuroscience of split brains, a field that had growing cultural cachet and scientific legitimacy in the 1980s. To describe intuition as an “inner voice” that had to be “awakened” situated intuition in the spiritual dimensions of consciousness associated with the New Age movement. Throughout this chapter, psychologists and management practitioners sought to localize intuition in the guts, brains, and minds of managers in multiple ways, attaching a variety of bodily metaphors to intuition: “gut feeling,” “sixth sense,” “mind’s eye,” “right brain,” and “inner voice.”239

In narrating a history of intuition, this chapter contributes to the two broad arguments of my dissertation. First, it shows how attempts to measure intuition became inextricably linked to attempts to channel and cultivate intuition as a crucial form of psychological capital, particularly for elite executives of corporate America. Consulting psychologists argued that cultivating the capacity for intuition could help companies foster innovation, productivity, and long-range

238 Willis Harman, “Business Discovers Intuition,” in Intuition at Work (San Francisco: New Leaders Press, 1996), xv. 239 On the way that bodily metaphors are used across scientific thought and economic imaginaries, see Martin, Flexible Bodies.

182 planning. Second, this analysis reveals how corporate management became a crucial epistemological site for psychological knowledge. Business self-help books and management training seminars oriented around intuition served as a site to translate, spread, and mobilize psychological knowledge, including research into split brains, creativity, and information processing. To make sense of the neuroscience of split brains or of psychological research into creativity, we need to consider their importance to American business and politics, which attached political meanings and business values to brains, gut feelings, and creativity.

In this story, the Myers-Briggs’ intuition scale has acted as a “boundary object.” It stitched together the manifold, often contradictory meanings of intuition as it travelled through different worlds, including psychological research into creativity, neuroscience, and corporate planning practices. In the next chapter, I pick up the thread of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the thread of the gendered and racialized politics of corporate management to address another core component of psychological capital in the late 20th century: the capacity to “interact across differences.”

Chapter 4 Managing Differences

4.1 Introduction

In 1985, Digital Equipment Corporation, a Massachusetts-based computer company, launched their much-touted diversity program, Valuing Differences. In the words of its developer

Barbara Walker, the program’s goal was to teach Digital employees to “pay attention to their differences as unique individuals and as members of groups, to raise their level of comfort with differences and to capitalize on differences as a major asset to the company’s productivity.”1

Walker, a white woman who became the first executive in corporate America to assume the title

“Vice President of Diversity,” organized the program around small “core groups” that met monthly for unstructured, emotion-laden discussions with the professed goal of stripping away stereotypes, unpacking unconscious bias, and raising awareness of differences.2 Core groups sought to convert the conflicts engendered by differences into corporate value by reframing participants’ understanding of conflict. “Conflicts and tension created by differences,” Walker declared, were “not always irreconcilable clashes in values and principles, but sometimes are mere differences in perspective.”3 Walker described race and gender as the “metaphors for all differences” because they were the divides that engendered the most “emotional issues” in

America.4 Although core groups began by focusing on racial and gender differences, they spread throughout the company as discussion groups that aimed to improve communication across all

1 Frederick Lynch, The Diversity Machine: The Drive to Change the ‘White Male Workplace’ (New York: Free Press, 1997). 2 Lynch, The Diversity Machine 3 Barbara Walker, “Valuing Differences: The Concept and a Model,” in Managing Learning, eds. Christopher Mabey and Paul Iles (London: Thompson Business Press, 1994), 214. 4 Walker, “Valuing Differences,” 217.

183 184 kinds of divides, from personality conflicts to disagreements between smokers and non-smokers.

Digital’s diversity program became widely cited in the American management literature, with the term “valuing differences” becoming a catchphrase of the corporate case for diversity that swept through American corporations in the late 1980s and early 1990s.5

This chapter focuses on a coterie of consulting psychologists who developed training seminars, videotapes, and manuals to help managers develop their capacity to “interact across differences.”6 In the late 1980s, hundreds of books, trade articles, speeches, and videos in the late

1980s began to trumpet the value of diversity for American corporations.7 Proliferating numbers of consulting firms devoted to “managing diversity” ran diversity training seminars to teach corporations how to manage and derive value from diverse workforces. 8 Instead of justifying diversity in terms of legal compliance or redressing historical exclusions, the “business case for diversity” argued that a diverse workforce provided a competitive advantage to corporations in a globalized economy.9 Concurrent shifts in corporate marketing that sought to harvest value from differences in lifestyles and categories of race, ethnicity, and sexuality combined to make diversity a corporate buzzword.10

5 Michael Wheeler, “Diversity: Making the Business Case,” Business Week (Dec 1996): Special Advertising Section. 6 Lynch, The Diversity Machine; Beverly Geber, “Managing Diversity,” Training 27, no. 7 (July 1990): 23-30; John Fernandez, Managing a Diverse Work Force: Regaining the Competitive Edge (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 1991). 7 Diane Grimes, “Challenging the Status Quo? Whiteness in the Diversity Management Literature,” Management Communication Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2001): 381-409. 8 Beverly Geber, “Managing Diversity,” Training 27, no. 7 (July 1990): 23-30. The first consulting firm specifically dedicated to corporate diversity consulting was R. Roosvelt Thomas’s Institute for Managing Diversity. 9 Erin Kelly and Frank Dobbin, “How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management,” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 7 (1998): 960-984. 10 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage, 2004); Daniel Guadagnolo, “Segmenting America: Historical Approaches to Niche Marketing (Dissertation in progress, University of Wisconsin-Madison); Jason Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line: African Americans in the Advertising Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

185

Digital’s Valuing Differences programs illustrates how the longer history of psychologically-oriented anti-prejudice training combined with newer economic rationales about the competitive advantage of diversity for corporations. In the 1970s, Digital had hired psychiatrist-turned-diversity-consultant Price Cobbs to run “encounter groups” for white managers that used psychological techniques in an attempt to break down their prejudices.

While Valuing Differences retained a focus on small groups as a site for breaking down psychological prejudices, by 1990, Digital’s diversity program had deviated in two ways that echoed broader changes in corporate diversity management. First, Digital defined “differences” capaciously, to include not only legally protected classes of race and gender, but also psychological differences that were expressed in personality, work habits and lifestyle. Walker distinguished this new wave of diversity training from previous corporate race relations efforts by its “inclusive” aims for the “empowerment of all groups, including white males.”11 In describing its diversity program as applicable to white males who continued to comprise the majority of corporate management positions, Digital’s diversity program indicates a departure from the aims of Affirmative Action and equal employment to redress historic and structural inequality.12 Secondly, Valuing Differences illustrates how the psychological capacity to understand, value, and interact across “differences” became a core component of psychological capital. Cultivating this psychological capacity was justified as an investment in the human resources of the organization amidst reorganizations of work teams that sought to teach manager to interact across differences of personality. Indeed, Digital reorganized its corporate structures

11 Walker, “Valuing Differences,” 221. 12 Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters, “A Retrospective View of Corporate Diversity Training from 1964 to the Present,” Academy of Management Learning & Education 7, no. 3 (2008): 359.

186 into “self-managing teams,” wherein managers adopted the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a strategy to integrate individual personality differences into the unit of the team.

My argument is that the social-psychological capacity to “interact across differences” became a component of psychological capital by the late 1980s amidst a burgeoning business case for diversity, which wedded corporate rationales about the economic value of differences with psychological techniques that sought to teach managers to combat their prejudice and celebrate difference.13 As a technique developed to combat racism and prejudice and to teach managers to interact across differences, the “psychological training seminar” was a form of management training intended not to train managers for particular roles, but to cultivate their psychological capacity to interact across differences. For consulting psychologists and the corporate departments who adopted management training programs, the small group psychological training seminar became a laboratory for studying and intervening in relations in the corporation and a site for converting individual differences into corporate productivity.

Psychological training seminars sought to cultivate a multitude of capacities, including empathy, self-understanding, and awareness and appreciation of other differences; they sought to tame discomfort and counter the emotional responses engendered by such encounters. Above all, psychological training seminars sought to foster a manager who was attuned to differences and able to generate value from relations across cultural, racial, and psychological differences.14

“Differences” and “diversity” were terms defined in contradictory and inconsistent ways by psychologists, management practitioners, and corporate executives. Race, and to a lesser

13 The term “business case for diversity” comes from a 1996 article that summarized the key features that had been developed over the past decade. Michael Wheeler, “Diversity: Making the Business Case,” Business Week (Dec 1996): Special Advertising Section. 14 Mary Pat McEnrue, “Managing Diversity: Los Angeles Before and After the Riots,” Organizational Dynamics 21, no. 3 (Dec. 1993): 18-29.

187 extent gender, were frequently invoked as the central “differences” to be managed, particularly since they were protected legal classes in employment discrimination legislation enacted in the mid-1960s. However, by the late 1980s, managerial understandings of “differences” had shifted to became an expansive term that encompassed, folded in, and remixed race with differences of culture, personality, and lifestyle. The rationales and practices developed in the business case for diversity thus served to detach race from political claims about equity and the specific historical meanings of racial differences in the American context of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy.15

At stake in the capacity to interact across differences was not only the attempt to cultivate positive skills and emotions, but also an attempt to suppress and redirect affects and emotions that might be harmful to corporate productivity: racial prejudice, but also white discomfort, frustration, and anger engendered by the diversity training itself. This chapter draws on critical scholarship on whiteness and racial capitalism to demonstrate how corporate diversity initiatives re-centered the experiences, emotions, and power of whiteness.16 Worries about the emotional

15 As sociologist Ellen Berrey argues, the business case for diversity “posed human attributes that were the basis of disenfranchisement as equivalent with attributes that managers deemed necessary for workplace effectiveness”— which included the capacity to work in teams. Berrey recounts sitting in on a diversity training seminar in a major American corporation, which illustrated diversity using an example of lifestyle preferences, such as the preference for working late at night or early in the morning. Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 213. 16 “Racial capitalism,” as defined by legal scholar Nancy Leong, names a regime of value where mainly white institutions derive social and economic value from nonwhite racial differences, in order to accrue this capital for themselves. Bringing Nancy Leong’s analysis of racial capitalism into corporate advertising, Shalini Shankar argues that advertising has been one corporate domain where racial differences accrue a “market value,” but in ways that end up confirming and furthering “the culture of whiteness that pervades corporate America. Nancy Leong, “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (June 2013): 2151-2226; Shalini Shankar, Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian-American Consumers, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) This argument draws on critical race scholars Cheryl Harris and George Lipsitz, who have argued that whiteness has a cash value, as a form of property and as a thing in which white people possessively invest. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised Edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707-1791; Diane Grimes, “Challenging the Status Quo? Whiteness in the Diversity Management Literature,” Management Communication Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2001): 381-409.

188 state of the white male manager—their comfort or discomfort, their frustration or anger— profoundly influenced the approach, techniques, and rationales of diversity training. 17 This attunement to white discomfort indicates what scholar Robin DiAngelo refers to as concerns about “white fragility”: an attitude produced when white racial understandings are challenged, engendering emotional responses of anger, denial, guilt, or defensiveness.18 Diversity training, as sociologist Andrea Voyer has argued, aimed at minimizing managers’ “negative reactions to difference.”19 Concerns about white fragility, combined with the institutional context in which diversity training operated, curtailed the potential impact of diversity training.

In highlighting how management training seminars have been important pedagogical sites for learning about psychology, prejudice, and race, this chapter contributes to the second overall argument of the dissertation: that corporate management practices have been central sites for the production and circulation of psychological knowledge. Corporate diversity initiatives were

“racial projects,” in the words of critical race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant; they served as significant sites where Americans worked out, inhabited, transformed, and elided understandings of racial difference. 20

This chapter traces a prominent strand of racial understanding among post-World War II psychologists that described both racial differences and racial prejudice as psychological phenomena, to be countered through small-group training.21 Prejudice was an important object of

17 Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54-70. 18 DiAngelo, “White Fragility.” 19 Andrea Voyer, “Disciplined to Diversity: Learning the Language of Multiculturalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 11 (Nov 2011): 1890. 20 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, Third Edition (New York: Routledge, 2015). 21 Histories of Affirmative Action, employment law and workplace discrimination have shown how discrimination often became framed as an individual issue. In contextualizing the continuing white backlash to Affirmative Action among elite white professionals, Jennifer Pierce, for instance, argues that a liberal individualist discourse has recast

189 research for postwar social and personality psychologists, particularly in the wake of the

Holocaust’s revelations of the horrors of biological racism.22 In 1950, an interdisciplinary group of social scientists commissioned by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) published a statement on race that sought to challenge the biological understanding of race underpinning scientific racism. Social scientists instead emphasized the psychological and cultural dimensions that composed racial consciousness and racial difference.23 In drawing on psychology to understand the nature of racial consciousness and the nature of prejudice, UNESCO social scientists treated individual racial prejudices as an important target for anti-racist training.24

The psychologically-oriented small group approach to combating racist prejudice influenced corporate diversity training into the mid-1990s, circumscribing both its possibilities and its limitations at effecting changes in the racial composition of corporate management.25

Midcentury psychologists argued that the small group could not only serve as a microcosm of the larger society, but could also became as a crucial site for countering the psychological attitudes

discrimination as “individual, isolated acts of personal prejudice.” Jennifer Pierce, Racing for Innocence: Whiteness, Gender, and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 9. 22 Sam Binkley, “Anti-Racism Beyond Empathy: Transformations in the Knowing and Governing of Racial Differences,” Subjectivity 9, no. 2 (2016): 181-204. 23 UNESCO social scientists, described race as a “category of social analysis, whose reality rests in the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs held by individuals about themselves and others at a given moment in time,” Sebastián Gil- Riaño, “Relocating Anti-Racist Science: The 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and Economic Development in the Global South,” British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 2 (June 2018): 281-303. 24 Gordon Allport, one of the psychologists involved in drafting the UNESCO statement, described prejudice as an irrational individual attitude: an antipathy towards those who were different that was rooted in flawed categorical thought, that entailed cognitive and emotional dimensions, and that became woven into patterns of personality. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954); Frances Cherry, “The Nature of The Nature of Prejudice,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 36, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 489–498. 25 Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice. On the importance of small groups in Cold War social sciences, see Paul Erickson, Judy Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

190 and prejudices associated with racism. Many psychologists, such as Kurt Lewin and Gordon

Allport (one psychologists involved in the UNESCO statement), emphasized how American racism and white supremacy had been fostered and sustained by legal, political, and social institutions, while also identifying individual psychological attitudes as one key target of intervention.26 For example, African-American psychologists Mamie and Kenneth Clark used psychological research into racial awareness and prejudice to understand the psychological effects of American segregation and white supremacy—research that provided evidence for the damages of segregation used in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.

The possibilities and limitations of corporate diversity training were also curtailed by corporations’ own role in fostering and sustaining racial inequality, even as corporations became one key site to challenge racial inequality.27 Corporate attempts to respond to the integration of workforces occurred against a backdrop of profound racist segregation, sustained by deeply-held attitudes. Legal segregation in the southern states, instituted as part of Jim Crow laws in the

1880s, turned schools, workplaces, and public commercial places into segregated zones.

Overwhelmingly, mid-century employment practices had generated and sustained inequality by tracking people of color and white women into positions with lower pay and status, while reserving managerial positions for white men.28 The expanding white-collar corporation of the

26 Sebastián Gil-Riaño, “Historicizing Anti-Racism: UNESCO’s Campaigns against Race Prejudice in the 1950s” (PhD Dissertation: University of Toronto, 2014); Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jonathan Kahn, Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong about the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 27 DiAngelo, “White Fragility.” 28 David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Differences: Race and Management in U.S. Labor History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006);

191 early 20th-century, for example, brought white women into the office as secretaries and typists, excluding women and men of color. Ongoing overt and systematic discrimination accompanied softer forms of discrimination, such as a reliance on college and familial networks for hiring and promotion.29

For decades, civil rights activists and liberal scholars, including prominent social scientists, identified economic participation as crucial to the full participation of African-

Americans in American life. They targeted segregated spaces, like schools, as in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, and workplaces. Landmark anti-discrimination employment legislation passed in the mid-1960s had major implications for the trajectory of management training interventions discussed in this chapter.30 The 1964 passage of Title VII of the Civil

Rights Act prohibited workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or religion in employment and education.31 One of the most significant upshots of these executive orders was the establishment of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) in 1965, which established a legal body that allowed workers to sue their employers for workplace discrimination based on protected classes of race, sex, or religion. By 1966, companies with over fifty employees were required to have a written plan describing goals and timetables to hire and promote racial minorities and women. EEOC legislation launched a network of corporate departments, specialists, and programs dedicated to complying with equal opportunity and

Jennifer Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 29 Pamela Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 30 Kelly and Dobbin, “How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management”; Laird, Pull. 31 In 1961, the Kennedy administration established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which mandated racial non-discrimination in hiring for government contractors. Kennedy’s executive order was the first government use of the term “Affirmative Action.”

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Affirmative Action legislation that helped to bring more women and people of color into the corporation.

From the origins of anti-discrimination employment legislation in the mid-1960s, management positions became a key battleground in attempts to promote equal opportunity and to desegregate white-collar corporate work. Many of the companies profiled in this chapter— including Digital, Xerox, and Procter &G Gamble—instituted Affirmative Action and Equal

Employment programs beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s to actively recruit and promote more Black managers. Given the history of slavery and segregation against African-

Americans, corporate Affirmative Action policies in the immediate wake of the 1965 EEOC had been often synonymous with Black inclusion. Although gender also became a protected legal class under EEOC legislation and an important context for corporate inclusion, the genealogy I am tracing in this chapter centers attempts to combating racism and prejudice.32

By the late 1980s, however, the rationales for corporate attention to race and diversity policies had shifted. The 1987 publication of a report by conservative think tank Hudson

Institute, Workforce 2000, catalyzed a new “business case for diversity.”33 Workforce 2000 projected major demographic shifts in the racial and gender composition of the American workforce: namely, that by the year 2000, only 15% of the newly entering workforce would

32 Although gender also became a protected legal class under EEOC legislation, also leading to training in sexism and attention to sexual harassment, the genealogy I am tracing in this chapter centers attempts to combating racism and prejudice. Gender was added to the Civil Rights Act at the last minute, in part as an attempt to prevent the legislation from passing, but ended up being a major component of Affirmative Action. Indeed, white women have been some of the greatest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and employment opportunity. The first complainants at the newly-established EEOC were white female flight attendants, who targeted airlines’ sexist age discrimination policies, which forced women who had married to quit. Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough. 33 William Johnston, Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1987).

193 comprise American-born, white males, while 85% of the workforce would comprise women, immigrants, and racial minorities. The Hudson Institute’s projected statistic—the “15”—came to be repeated across the diversity management literature.34 Workforce 2000 has acquired a mythic status for launching the corporate diversity movement of the 1990s; almost every article on corporate diversity programs written between 1988 and the late 1990s cites this 1987 report.35 Its impact serves as a powerful example of how projections of the future have palatable impacts on the present.36 Rather than depict diversity in terms of redressing historical oppression and segregation, Workforce 2000 framed concerns about workplace demographics in the context of human capital in the knowledge economy, particularly the shift to the service economy and the growth of communication technology.37 The “foundation of national wealth,” the report proclaimed, is “really people—the human capital represented by their knowledge, skills, organizations, and motivations.”38

This chapter furthers the central argument of my dissertation, by showing how the psychosocial capacity to interact across differences came to be framed as a crucial managerial capacity and a component of psychological capital. The emphasis on individual differences has been critical to the operations of psychological capital, which accumulates value from individual variability.39 Moreover, corporate executives and diversity trainers justified diversity policies as

34 Limaye, “Responding to Work-Force Diversity.” 35 To cite the diversity literature that references this report would be to cite almost every source in this chapter from the late 1980s and early 1990s—this report and its statistics about the 85% were so pervasive. 36 Bretton Fosbrook, “How Scenarios Became Corporate Strategies” (PhD Dissertation: York University, 2017). 37 For more on human capital, see Chapter 1. 38 Johnston, Workforce 2000, 116. 39 In making this claim, I draw on critical scholarship on human capital that emphasizes the importance of individual differences. Morgan Adamson, “The Human Capital Strategy,” ephemera 9, no. 4 (2009): 271-84; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Niels Van Doorn, “The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies,” Cultural Politics 10, no. 3 (2014): 354-375.

194 necessary to cultivating self-actualized, motivated, intuitive managers—the precise capacities identified in this dissertation as components of psychological capital in late 20th-century corporate America.40 While previous chapters featured psychological training seminars—namely achievement motivation training and intuition training—this chapter most explicitly takes up the psychological training seminar as a technique to cultivate psychological capital. In contrast to the capacity for motivation and intuition examined in the previous two chapters, the capacity to interact across differences was explicitly relational: it was a capacity about interacting with others in the workforce.

Each section in this chapter takes up a related type of psychological training seminar. I begin with a pre-history of the diversity training group, locating its origins in the “training group” or “encounter group” approach developed at National Training Laboratories and Esalen from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The encounter group format is one crucial origin point for both diversity training and team-building, and an analytic origin point for the claim that the small group could counter individual prejudice through emotion-laden encounters across differences.41

40 As sociologist Steven Vertovec notes, the body of management literature on diversity consistently paired diversity with “positively charged rhetoric” that wedded corporate value, profits and productivity to the psychological capacities of the workforce: “leveraging the benefits, unleashing talent…working to full potential. Steven Vertovec, “‘Diversity’ and the Social Imaginary,” European Journal of Sociology 53, no. 3 (2012): 299. 41 The influence of psychology in this historical transition from Affirmative Action to the business case for diversity remains unexplored. My analysis builds on, but differs in important ways from the work of intellectual historian Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, who has also examined the intertwined genealogy of race relations and psychology from the T-group to 1990s diversity training. In a polemical critique of the “psychologization” of race relations, Lasch-Quinn argues that by focusing on emotions and interpersonal interactions, “race experts”—network of psychologists and diversity trainers—have reinforced and prolonged racial differences and tensions, turning away from the promises of the civil rights movement in favor of a “therapeutics of race.” Although she offers an important critique of the psychological stakes of diversity training, her conservative racial politics flatten out importance distinctions in motivations and politics of diversity experts. She claims, for instance, that the “harangue-flagellation ritual” of Black assertion and white submission, rooted in the encounter group methodology, has become a pervasive ritual in American life and popular culture. By claiming that people who point out racism are the ones that further entrench racial divisions, Lasch-Quinn’s analysis partakes in the problem identified by Sara Ahmed: that those who talk about racism or discrimination become pinpointed as the killjoy figures, who perform injury to whiteness. “To talk about racism,” Ahmed argues, “is to become the problem you pose.” Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 153; Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts:

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The next section turns to examine the techniques, protocols, and media adopted in the diversity training seminar in the 1980s and the early 1990s. I situate diversity training in the context of the white backlash against Affirmative Action. 42 In the final section of the chapter, I examine the protocols and manuals of the Myers-Briggs team-building seminar. While the previous chapter showed how the intuition scale of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator became adopted to measure and cultivate the intuitive capacities of corporate executives, this chapter examines protocols and manuals for MBTI team-building seminars that trumpeted the productive integration of individual personality differences into the unit of the team. In pairing team-building and diversity training seminars, I am not claiming that personality and racial differences are equivalent, but rather showing how a historically specific understanding of “differences” and “diversity” oriented a broad set of management training practices. This chapter is crucial to understand how and why corporate personality testing schemes, such as the Myers-Briggs, became deployed in the context of larger managerial interventions that included diversity training.

4.2 The Encounter Group

In 1967, the California institute Esalen, a hub for the human potential movement, hosted a weekend-long seminar, “Racial Confrontation as Transcendental Experience,” which advertised itself as a space of interracial encounter. The two seminar facilitators—Price Cobbs, an African-

American psychiatrist, and George Leonard, the Vice-President of Esalen and white

Southerner—encouraged participants to express their honest, open emotions about race in the

How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). 42 Pierce, Racing for Innocence; Michael Mobley and Tamara Payne, “Backlash! The Challenge to Diversity Training,” Training & Development 46, no. 12 (Dec. 1992): 45-52.

196 confines of the encounter group, without attempting to “theorize or rationalize” the emotions incited through the interracial encounter.43 In a marathon all-weekend session, the 35 participants—half of whom were Black, half of whom were white, and some of whom were part of interracial couples—spent their days in unstructured discussion and in exercises that sought to break down stereotypes. Participants spent their Saturday performing “sensory awakening” exercises: blindfolded, individuals had to communicate through verbal interaction and touch, ostensibly blinded to the presence of racial stereotypes.44 Another sensory exercise asked individuals to walk around the group in a circle formation, stand in front of each group member, look them in the eye, touch them, and share an honest feeling. Over the course of what Cobbs described as a “boisterous, often angry, and quite confrontational” weekend, arguments ensued among Black participants and between Black and white participants, as white participants confronted their internalized prejudices and emotions.45 By 1970, Esalen hosted two interracial confrontation weekends each month based on the same template as Cobbs’ and Leonard’s inaugural workshop, each co-led by one Black and one white leader.46 Interracial encounter groups served as templates for other confrontations between different groups: “Racial confrontation,” promotional material trumpeted, “can be an example for all kinds of human encounter.”47 Another Esalen encounter group modelled after the interracial encounter group

43 George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy (New York: Delacorte, 1968); Price Cobbs, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement (New York: Atria Books, 2005). 44 As the previous chapter showed, sensory techniques like these were adopted by corporations to cultivate intuitive creativity. But here, the goal was not to cultivate creativity, but to cultivate the psychological capacity to encounter difference. 45 Cobbs, My American Life, 197. 46 Leonard was apparently so committed to the interracial encounter groups, and disappointed with the “transpersonal” dimensions of Esalen that he resigned as Vice-President. Esalen Institute Newsletter, Vol 1, no. 1 (1970), Abraham Maslow papers, Box 4450, Folder 7, Archives of the History of American Psychology, Akron (hereafter AHAP); Letter to Abraham Maslow, Abraham Maslow papers, Box 4450, Folder 7, AHAP. 47 Quoted in Leonard, Education and Ecstasy, 197-98.

197 brought together police and revolutionaries to teach them “alternative ways of reacting and behaving” by “channeling anger and aggression” engendered by the hostile encounter. 48

Interracial encounter groups depicted the encounter between white and Black Americans as inherently emotionally-charged, potentially hostile confrontation across differences and, moreover, as an encounter that could serve as a stand-in for other kinds of encounters across differences. As this section shows, this format of the small group training seminar—known variously as the encounter group, the training group, the T-group, or sensitivity training—is an important site for understanding the nature and importance of the psychological capacity and techniques examined in this chapter. Firstly, trainers steeped in the methodology of the encounter group, such as Price Cobbs, brought the methodologies and theories of the encounter group into both team building and diversity training, while managers and executives from corporate

America participated in these encounter groups. By situating the encounter group in midcentury psychological research into prejudice and racial awareness, this section illuminates the development of “interacting across differences” through the technique of the small group.

Although this section focuses on the legacies of training groups for diversity training, such- groups also had important legacies for social movements, particularly feminist consciousness- raising groups.49

The encounter group’s origins lie in National Training Laboratories (NTL), a not-for- profit research center founded by liberal social psychologists Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and Kenneth Benne in Bethel, Maine in 1947. NTL founders chose the term “laboratory” to

48 Esalen Institute Newsletter, Vol 1, no. 1 (1970), Abraham Maslow papers, Box 4450, Folder 7, AHAP. 49 Laura Kim Lee, “Changing Selves, Changing Society: Human Relations Experts and the Invention of T Groups, Sensitivity Training, and Encounter in the United States, 1938-1980” (PhD Dissertation: UCLA, 2002); Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

198 emphasize their goal of experimentally studying and intervening in human relations through the apparatus of the small group.50 As National Training Laboratories grew in popularity, it expanded from their original location in Maine to other regional nodes: in 1954, National

Training Laboratories launched a regional California node, Western Training Laboratories, which became closely affiliated with the business school at University of California, Los

Angeles, and Esalen in Big Sur, California, the location of Price Cobbs’ interracial encounter groups.51 Although the encounter group at Esalen was not identical to National Training

Laboratories, the shared promise of the encounter group was that the small group psychological training seminar could serve as a technique to incite and channel the emotions, beliefs, and behaviors engendered by encounters across difference.

Grounding NTL’s hope that the small group could serve as the site for democratic social change was the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin, a German-Jewish émigré who died in

1947, but whose psychological theories of group dynamics left a significant mark on NTL.52

Given Lewin’s background as a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany and left lost his family in the Holocaust, Lewin’s concern with understanding and countering prejudice was both personal and professional, as it was for many German emigres who influenced the field of social psychology.53 Out of experiments on the leadership style of children in the 1930s, Lewin

50 Bradford compared the behavioral sciences laboratory to a laboratory in the physical sciences: like a physicist isolating and mobilizing sub-atomic particles, the behavioral scientist in the T-group sought to reproduce behaviours, emotions, and social relations under the monitored conditions of the behavioral sciences laboratory. Leland Bradford, Key Executive Conference Workbook (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1962), Leland Bradford Papers, Box 1050, AHAP. 51 On the human potential movement, see Jessica Grogan, Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self (New York: Harper-Collins, 2012). 52 NTL was initially funded by the National Education Association and the US Navy. Lee, “Changing Selves, Changing Society; Jenna Alden, “Bottom-Up Management; Participative Philosophy and Humanistic Psychology in American Organizational Culture, 1930-1970” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2012). 53 Katherine Pandora, Rebels Within the Ranks: Psychologists’ Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

199 developed his concept of “field theory”: a topographical theory of psychosocial group dynamics that conceptualized the intersecting psychosocial forces constituted by the interaction of individuals and their environment. 54 What NTL took from Lewin was the emphasis on the small group, not the isolated individual, as the space where such force fields were manifested.55

Moreover, NTL and Lewin understood the small group as the unit to convert participants into

“change agents” who could produce democratic change in their communities—including reducing prejudice through small group training. 56 The experimental origins of the National

Training Laboratories lay in studies of race relations.57 In 1946, the Connecticut State Inter-

Racial Commission hired Lewin to run an anti-prejudice training program for community action leaders, which served as a crucial origin point for developing the T-group’s methodology.

Indeed, it was during evening debriefing sessions at this 1946 anti-prejudice training where

Lewin discovered the principle of “feedback” that would become central to the methodology of the T-group.58

54 In the 1930s, Lewin conducted experiments with his graduate student Ronald Lippitt at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station to study leadership styles. Through experiments on 10-year old children , Lewin and Lippitt continuously altered features of the situation to try to generate the social climate suitable for democratic leadership in the small group. By continuously manipulating the “experimentally generated ‘total situation,’” Lewin and Lippitt sought to experimentally produce the “right political affects” that produced democratic relations in the small group. Javier Lezaun and Nerea Calvillo, “In the Political Atmosphere: Kurt Lewin’s Atmospheres,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 4 (2014): 452. 55 During World War II, Lewin worked with psychologist Henry Murray in developing an assessment center methodology for the Office of Strategic Service, discussed in chapter 2. Scott Highhouse, “A History of the T-Group and its Early Applications in Management Development,” Group Dynamics 6, no. 4 (2002): 277-290. 56 Bill Cooke and Bernard Burnes, “Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory: A Review and Reevaluation,” International Journal of Management Reviews 15 (2013): 408-425; Lezaun and Calvillo, “In the Political Atmosphere.” 57 As critical management scholar Bill Cooke notes, the standard historiography of T-groups’ influence on management training rarely notes how this research into race relations, undertaken in a moment of profound racial segregation in America, shaped management understanding of group dynamics and differences. Bill Cooke, “Writing the Left out of Management Theory,” Organization 6, no. 1 (1999): 81-105. 58 Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts; Jenna Alden, “Bottom-Up Management.”

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Cobbs described his work as a direct successor to Kurt Lewin’s original vision of the small group as an agent for change.59 After the first encounter group at Esalen, Cobbs continued running interracial encounter groups in San Francisco in the early 1970s, under a format he called “ethnotherapy,” which offered a site for Black Americans to confront their emotions about living in a racist society. In small groups of 12-14 people, equally divided between Black and white participants, and between men and women, ethnotherapy operated by unleashing repressed emotions through the sharing of experiences and identities. Although both Black and white participants were encouraged to talk about their experience of racial identity, Cobb’s version of ethnotherapy did not treat their experiences equally. Designated periods for “Black exploration” allowed room for only Black participants to talk and share their experiences of racism, in addition to confrontational encounters with white participants. In his autobiography, Cobb reported one example of a white woman, who had absorbed the colorblind ideal, declaring that she “didn’t see color.” Cobb responded: “that’s a lie! How would you like if I said to you, ‘I don’t see gender?’”60 These interracial encounter groups, and the experiences of the particularities of the Black experience under a racist society, led Cobbs to co-author Black Rage in 1968, which became a landmark text in the development of Black psychology.61

Inspired by Cobbs’ work, in 1972 two Black facilitators in encounter group facilitators drew on psychological research of Kenneth and Mamie Clark to argue that encounter groups were vital for African-Americans, because they offered them a space to release their anger and

59 Price M. Cobbs, “Ethnotherapy in Groups,” in New Perspectives on Encounter Groups, eds. Lawrence Schmon and Betty Berezon (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc, 1972), 383-403. 60 Better Berzon, F.T. Pollard, and D. Mermin, “Encountertapes for Black/White Groups: A New Approach to Race Relations,” Interpersonal-development 2 (1971-72): PG NUMBER. 61 Price Cobbs and William Grier, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

201 confront the internalized self-hatred inculcated by living in a racist society.62 The research into racial awareness and the psychic damages of segregation conducted by African-American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark was an important origin point for the psychology of prejudice. In the late 1940s, the Clarks, a husband and wife team of African-American psychologists trained at Howard University and Columbia, conducted experiments to understand the psychological effects of segregated schools on children.63 In order to understand the formation of racial identity in segregated schools, Clark and Clark gave white and Black dolls to young African-American children, aged 3-7, from both segregated Northern schools and desegregated Southern schools. They asked children which dolls they preferred, which dolls were nice, and which dolls most represented them, and found that the majority of children preferred the white doll and rejected the Black doll—the same doll with which they had identified, leading to feelings of psychological distress. These experiments achieved notoriety as evidence for the psychological harm of segregation when Kenneth Clark contributed to a social science brief for the Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, that ruled segregated schools unconstitutional.64 Based on experiments into the formation of racial identity in children, the Clarks forcefully argued that segregation caused psychological damage to Black children, by

62 Robert Steele and Kermit Nash, “Sensitivity Training and the Black Community,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 42, no. 3 (April 1972): 424-430. 63 Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” in Readings in Social Psychology, eds. Theodore Newcomb and Eugene Hartley (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1947), 169-178. 64 Kenneth Clark, writing alongside two social scientists in a brief to the Supreme Court, further challenged the racist claims that African-American children were innately less intelligent than white children, which bolstered opposition to integration as potentially harmful to white children. Instead, they argued that any observable differences in intelligence test scores were the result of the environment, such as the poor conditions of segregated schools, rather than innate biological differences. Moreover, they noted more variance in intelligence scores within racial groups than between racial groups. Kenneth Clark, Isidor Chein and Stuart Cooke “The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A (September 1952) Social Science Statement in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court Case,” American Psychologist 59, no. 6 (Sept 2004): 495-501; John P. Jackson, Science for Segregation: Race, Law and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

202 harming their personal dignity and self-esteem, and to white children, by reinforcing stereotypes and communication blocks between white and Black Americans. 65

One of the major goals of the training group, as developed at Esalen and also at NTL, was to unpack communication blocks and prejudices that fostered the kind of internalized racism identified by the Clarks. Esalen’s newsletter, for instance, trumpeted the interracial encounter group as a space that allowed participants to transcend the “divided selves” at the root of racial prejudice for both Black Americans, who often had internalized racist norms of society, and for white Americans, who, as the Clark’s research had shown, also been damaged and divided by the racism of American society.66

One professed goal of the National Training Laboratories’ approach to training was to break down stereotypes, described as instinctive, conceptual systems that included, but were not limited to, racial stereotypes. 67 NTL materials drew on Lewin’s field theory to describe stereotypes as conjuring up a forcefield of preexisting biases and assumptions: “When we discover that a person is a Negro, or a PTA president, or a social scientist, or a wife, the information on these concepts immediately calls up a whole network of expectations about other

65 By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the argument about the psychic damage of racism was challenged by some Black psychologists, who, inspired by the rise of the Black Power movement, sought to emphasize the psychological strengths and resiliency of Black Americans, rather than the psychological damages. Indeed, Mamie Clark’s later career sought to emphasize children’s strengths, rather than damages caused by racism. Damage imagery had become appropriated by more conservative views on race to present racist and patriarchal ideas of African-American families catapulted to political attention by the Moynihan Report (discussed in chapter 2). Violent white resistance to desegregation made Kenneth Clark increasingly pessimistic about race relations. On the use of “damage imagery” in midcentury social sciences and policy, see Daryl Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 66 Esalen Institute Newsletter, Vol 1, no. 1 (1970), Abraham Maslow papers, Box 4450, Folder 7, AHAP. This also evokes W.E.B. Du Bois’s well-known articulation of “double consciousness,” as a psychological state of duality faced by African-Americans within a racist society. 67 Laura Kim Lee, “Changing Selves, Changing Society.”

203 characteristics.”68 Approaches to breaking down stereotypes treated racial stereotypes as essentially the same as stereotypical assumptions about professional fields or social roles. In

1968, NTL formed a Black Caucus that tried to recruit more Black trainers and participants into encounter groups.69 As the head of the caucus advocated, for NTL to fulfill its stated aim of unpacking stereotypes, it needed to include greater African-American participation—the group, in America, who had been so heavily stereotyped by white Americans.70

Even as the largely white group of NTL trainers professed their aim of breaking down stereotypes, white trainers’ depictions of the few Black participants exposed their own set of stereotypes and show how iterations of management T-groups remained largely white spaces, enacting the larger whiteness of corporate management. As recounted by one NTL trainer in

1970, one T-group featured all-white participants, except for one Black man in the group, a corporate middle manager. “At first,” recounts the trainer, “he seemed elderly, passive, conceptually impoverished, limited in vocabulary,” and distrustful of the white group. As the T- group progressed, he came to trust the group, and “a remarkable change took place. He seemed younger, stronger, more active and vigorous; his voice deepened, his sentences were more complex and penetrating, his southern accent fell away. He told us we were the only whites he had ever trust enough to let his mask slip.”71 While taken by the session’s trainer Sherman

Kingsbury to signal the transformative power of the encounter group, this anecdote instead demonstrates how management training at NTL, as in management more generally, were organized and perceived as white spaces. Such spaces were replete with scripts of racial

68 “Management Work Conference workbook” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1970): 11. Box 272, NTL Papers, AHAP. 69 1968 was the same year as the inauguration of the Association for Black Psychologists, a caucus within the American Psychological Association. 70 “Relevance and Participation of Black Community” (1968-1969), Leland Bradford Papers, Box 1048, AHAP. 71 Sherman Kingsbury, “Dilemmas for the Trainer” (1970), 6, Box 275, NTL Papers, AHAP.

204 stereotypes and the white fantasy of saving and transforming non-white members of the encounter group.

In addition to its connections to diversity training, encounter groups were crucial spaces for the development of management interventions that emphasized the emotional dynamics of managing across differences. It was among the executives and managers of corporate America where the National Training Laboratory’s version of the “training group,” shortened to “T- group,” found its major audience, as a technique for teaching managers the psychosocial capacity to manage others. From its origins in 1947 to the 1960s, the peak decades of T-group popularity, managers and executives of corporate America came to National Training Laboratories and their regional branches to participate in Management Work Conferences, Key Executive Conferences, and Management Team Laboratories.72 By 1967, at least 20 000 business people—the vast majority of them white men—had attended some form of T-group training, from major companies like Dow Chemical, Standard Oil, and J. Walter Thompson Company, AT&T, and

IBM.73 In T-groups run for managers, participants were sent away from their companies to retreats—often at NTL headquarters in Bethel, Maine—that acted as “cultural islands.” Placed in groupings across company divisions and hierarchical lines, managers were stripped of their usual authority in the ostensible non-hierarchical atmosphere of the T-group. It was this non- hierarchical atmosphere, trainers argued, that was required for them to unlearn harmful prejudice

72 Management Work Conference and Key Executive conferences both began in the mid-1950s, and Management Team Laboratories began in 1963. By 1967, NTL annually conducted 5 Key Executive labs, for top executives, and 4 Management Work Conferences, for middle-level managers. Management Work Conferences were held into the 1970s and 1980s; in 1974, for instance, NTL advertised programs in Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and California, for the cost of $350 for tuition, plus $175 for room and board for a week-long session. “Management Work Conference workbook” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1970) Box 272, NTL Papers, AHAP. 73 Highhouse, “A History of the T-Group.”

205 and to learn the more constructive emotional and intellectual capacities they associated with effective managing.

NTL trainers described the management T-group as a laboratory to learn to manage the emotional intensities generated by differences in group dynamics. 74 Trainers urged managers to

“view differences of opinions as helpful rather than as a hindrance” in the corporations.75

“Conditions must be created,” one workbook proclaimed, to allow “emotional energies to be channeled in the direction of group effort.” 76 Training manuals cautioned facilitators that groups generated a “considerable amount and intensity of affect”—including negative emotions of frustration, anger, and discomfort. 77 At the heart of the training group, as developed at NTL and continued at Esalen, was a technique of unstructured group discussion—an amorphous, protean, free-form, leaderless, agenda-less group discussion.78 Frustration or anger was a common

74 “If we are trying to learn better…how to manage other people,” Benne declared, “we need a laboratory of other people in which to generate and test our learnings. Kenneth Benne, “Teambuilding/Group Dynamics Workshops,” Box 573, Folder 4. Boston University Human Relations department papers, AHAP. 75 “Program for Specialists in Organization Development” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1970), NTL Papers, Box 272, AHAP. A litany of more structured group techniques complemented the unstructured group discussion, designed to elicit emotional, even confrontational responses from participants. One of the more bizarre exercises involved a box of balloons: each participant was asked to blow up a balloon, tie it in a knot, rub it against their cheeks, and think of image with eyes closed; then, they broke their balloons, and think of another image. The balloons were supposed to prompt a “wide variety of feelings and associations,” including sexual fantasies, in order to study the facets of expressive behaviour. “T-Group Sensitivity Exercises,” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1968), Box 4467, Folder 6, Abraham Maslow Papers, AHAP, p. 5). 76 Indeed, the deliberate cultivation of negative emotions—discomfort, frustration, and even anger—was part of the approach of the T-group, as it would be in diversity exercises. In one 1968 exercise from the roster of T-group exercises, called the “unfair debate,” the trainer asked for a volunteer to leave the room and instructed the rest of the group to engage the volunteer in an argument when they returned: the group should argue “as unfairly as possible, interrupting, introducing irrelevancies, contradicting themselves, become overexcited, inventing facts, and pointing out non-existent fallacies…The ‘unfair debate’ is carried as long as feasible.” The rest of the group observed the reactions of the unsuspecting volunteer. “T-Group Sensitivity Exercises” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1968): 5. Box 4467, Folder 6. Abraham Maslow Papers, AHAP. 77 “Program for Small Group Leadership for Organizations,” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, July 26-Aug 21, 1970), p. 26. NTL Papers, Box 272, AHAP. 78 The unstructured format made, understandably, for some awkward beginnings. As described in a trade journal, the T-group began with the group sitting around a table, “a little bewildered, a little lost. At first, no one says anything. The seconds stretch out like minutes, the minutes, in instances where the silence lasts that long, seem almost like hours—And, finally, the nervous tension high, someone says something. He may introduce himself, he may ask a

206 response to the free-wheeling format—emotions that in turn became the very focus of the group’s discussion.79 If members of the T-group talked about their dislike for bad group meetings at work, for example, trainers could observe that the group members were frustrated with the operations of the current T-group.80 If not properly managed, emotions could destroy the group; but properly directed, emotions could be harnessed towards organizational aims.81

Other corporations, such as American Airlines, adopted principles from T-groups for their in-house management training. In the late 1960s, American Airlines borrowed the principles of the encounter group to develop their own “managerial learning laboratories.”

Through unstructured, free-form discussion and structured group exercises, managers were taught emotional and social skills required for managing others. The workshop began with a non- verbal icebreaker exercise, where participants had to get to know each other without speaking; self-reflection exercises followed, which asked participants to assess the “force fields” that made up their own lives; in a Fishbowl exercise, the group broke down into smaller groups to observe and report on the interactions of another group. Whether or not the program changed managers remained an open question—while bosses did not find much difference, top executives at

American Airlines found that the program raised “hard-to quantify levels of trust, candor, and participation.”82 At a moment when the airline industry faced legal and political pressure from

querulous question. Whatever it is, he breaks the silence—and the T (for training) group is in session.” Winston Oberg, “Sensitivity Training and Management.” MSU Business Topics (Autumn 1969): 30-40. 79 Winston Oberg, “Sensitivity Training and Management.” MSU Business Topics (Autumn 1969): 30-40. 80 “Management Work Conference workbook” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1970): 3. Box 272, NTL Papers, AHAP. 81 “The test of a good decision, one which will be carried out wholeheartedly, is not whether it has been unemotionally made, but rather whether all of the emotions involved have been expressed, recognized, and taken into account.” “Management Work Conference workbook” (Bethel: National Training Laboratories, 1970): 7. Box 272, NTL Papers, AHAP. 82 Alden, “Bottom-Up Management,” 332; Harold Rush, Behavioral Science: Concepts and Management Application, Studies in Personnel Policy no. 216, (New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1969), McGraw-Hill Research Information Centre, Box 14, John Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University.

207 employment discrimination lawsuits brought by female flight attendants in the newly-formed

EEOC, American Airlines’ managerial laboratory indicates the legacies of the training group for management training.

The initial ideological promise of the encounter group—that the methodology of the small group training seminar could serve as a site of democratic social change through non-hierarchical encounters–was often overshadowed when the ostensibly non-hierarchical setting collided with the realities of corporate hierarchies and power. Given the discomfort and frustration so often provoked in the training group, the virtues of emotional expressiveness and the non-hierarchical structure of T-groups rarely translated back into the emotionally closed, hierarchical world of the corporation dominated by relations of power and hierarchy.83 For example, in the 1960s, Digital brought in a management consultant, “thoroughly imbued with the National Training Lab philosophy,” to resolve “communication blocks” among senior executives, but found Digital executives thoroughly unimpressed: they failed to see how attention to the emotional dynamics of groups could translate into corporate innovation.84 Especially as wedded to the human potential movement, by the 1970s, the encounter group faced mounting criticisms over its ethics, epistemology, and validity: the intense emotions generated through the encounter group raised criticisms that the T-group could cause psychological harm.85

At National Training Laboratories and at Esalen, the psychological training seminar became a site for the dense circulation of affective relations, including negative emotions

83 Such tensions became even more apparent when corporations were paying for their employees to go on a retreat of self-discovery: one trainer noted the irony that their role involved “helping individuals discover and confront their own alienation from the values of the organization that is paying for their expense at the laboratory and their salaries while at it. Kingsbury, “Dilemmas for the Trainer,” 5. 84 Jamie Parker Pearson, ed., Digital at Work: Snapshots from the First 35 Years (Burlington, MA: Digital Press, 1992), 169. 85 See the previous chapter for a discussion of the influence of human potential movement on management training.

208 provoked by the format of the group itself. The encounter group’s twinned legacies in management training and in diversity training make it a crucial origin of the management training interventions discussed in subsequent sections. As encounter groups facilitators moved into careers in management training and corporate consulting, they brought techniques and assumptions derived from their experiences with the encounter group. The midcentury claim that prejudice was an individual, psychological phenomenon produced by social conditions, to be addressed through small group psychological training continued to shape approaches to diversity training into the 1980s. Moreover, as trainers moved into team-building, they emphasized the small group as a site that could convert conflict engendered by personality differences into productivity and corporate profits.

The career trajectory of Price Cobbs demonstrates how the psychologically-oriented techniques and the anti-racist, social democratic goals of the encounter group—brought to Esalen from National Training Laboratories— continued to shape the corporate diversity initiatives in later decades. From his early career as a psychiatrist and encounter group leader, Cobbs went on to become a diversity consultant hired by Procter & Gamble and Digital Equipment Corporation to consult on race relations. In 1972, while giving a speech based on Black Rage in Deotroit,

Price Cobbs was approached with a job offer by white managers from Procter & Gamble—an encounter that led him to pivot into the burgeoning world of diversity consulting. As part of their corporate Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies in the early 1970s,

Procter & Gamble had hired a new influx of entry-level Black managers. These managers, though, faced white resistance to their positions that curtailed their ability to assert their managerial authority. Procter & Gamble, Cobbs recounted, represented “the essence of the kind of corporation—enormous, with a monolithic and certainly white-faced management force—that

209 until now had been strictly off-limits to Blacks.”86 Cobbs’ early consulting work for Procter &

Gamble taught him the importance of emphasizing economic profits to speak to corporations’ bottom line: integration could only occur, Cobbs declared, if diversity were recognized “through the use of the most real and direct of corporate priorities—profit.”87

In addition to teaching him the importance of corporate profits, Cobbs’ early consulting work had taught him the importance of empowerment to improving Black managers’ position in the workforce. “To access personal power,” which Cobbs defined as the “ability to mobilize one’s personal traits and attributes to accomplish goals,” Cobbs urged Black managers to

“develop a mindset that we are entitled to exercise power.”88 However, individual empowerment had limited impact without institutional structures in place: as Cobbs recognized, Black managers might leave a seminar or read a book that made them feel empowered, but still might face a lack of support, or outright hostility, from managers. He thus recognized, as did many diversity trainers, the importance of countering prejudice among white managers.

Cobbs’ next consulting job came from a familiar company—Digital Equipment

Corporation—who hired him as a race relations consultant to help the company respond to racial tensions in factories between white managers and Black and Hispanic workers. Digital’s investment into diversity training was motivated by their expansion of their plants into small, blue-collar towns with different racial compositions, such as a majority Black town in

Massachusetts in the early 1970s.89 At Digital, Cobbs used the sensitivity training model

86 Cobbs, My American Life, 225. 87 Cobbs, My American Life, 228. 88 Cobbs also conducted professional development seminars for Black Enterprise, a journal dedicated to promoting Black business and fostering Black mentoring networks. Dewayne Wickham, “Career Savvy: Power,” Black Enterprise 17, no. 9 (April 1987): 52. 89 Pearson, Digital at Work.

210 developed through his interracial encounter groups to teach white male managers to counter their prejudices: according to his autobiography, he introduced the concept of “institutional racism” to

Digital Vice-President William Hanson.90 By the late 1980s, Cobbs had begun collaborating with white consultant Lewis Griggs to create a series of diversity training videotapes, Valuing

Diversity, that became widely used in corporate training seminars.91

Cobbs’ goal in running encounter groups gestures to one of the promises of the encounter group as a site for social democratic change, including the reduction of prejudice and racism. As the technique of small group training moved into corporate spaces in the 1980s, wedded to corporate invocations of the economic value of diversity, this initial promise became significantly watered down, even as the techniques and assumptions of the encounter group continued to inform diversity training.

4.3 Corporate Diversity Training

In 1993, white organizational sociologist-turned-diversity consultant Rosabeth Moss

Kanter narrated an animated video designed for corporate diversity training seminars that aimed to teach managers how to interact across differences. The animated A Tale of O: Insights into the

Impact of Difference starred the letters Xs and Os as stand-ins for the relationship between majority groups and minorities at work.92 In the video, the letter “O” was an all-encompassing figure who stood in for any and all kinds of difference—be it race, gender, age, or lifestyle. As stylized Xs and Os danced across a background of abstract art, Kanter narrated common tropes

90 Lynch, The Diversity Machine; Cobbs, My American Life. 91 Lewis Griggs and Price Cobbs, Valuing Diversity: Part 1, Managing Differences (San Rafael: Copeland Griggs Productions, 1987). 92 Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Barry Stein, A Tale of O: Insights Into the Impact of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Goodmeasure,1993); Rosabeth Moss Kanter, A Tale of O: On Being Different in an Organization (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

211 heard by Os in the workplace: Os were scapegoated, asked to represent their entire group and impelled to laugh at jokes made about them. Puns using the letter x—“x-traordinary” or “x- cellent”—repeat throughout the video. The video conveyed the overarching message that people needed to stop thinking about other groups of people in binary, contrast categories (like X and O) and instead recognize and accept the mosaic of differences in the organization.93 In The Tale of

O, difference was quite literally disembodied and detached from particular people, embodied only in animated letters. In treating the category of “difference” as existing in a floating sea, detached from particular bodies and meanings while avoiding directly naming racism and its historical legacy and contemporary realities, A Tale of O illustrates some of the key features of corporate diversity training of the early 1990s.

This section analyzes the protocols, exercises, and rhetoric of corporate diversity training in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 94 Diversity training seminars sought to cultivate the capacity to interact across racial differences as a form of psychological capital. In order to foster awareness and appreciation of differences, trainers encouraged participants to unlearn prejudice, cultivate empathy, and manage their own emotional reactions to race and prejudice.95 Many of these key thematics of diversity training seminars were embodied in a technological medium that grew to be popular in the small group format of diversity training: the videotape.96 A technology made available to American consumers in 1977 and only a decade old by the late 1980s,

93 As Lasch-Quinn describes, the Tale of O lumped in a whole “conglomeration of behavior” and a whole host of differences into binary categories of X and O. Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, 184. 94 Although diversity training went by several names— training in sensitivity, anti-discrimination, anti-prejudice, racial awareness, and cultural competency, I use the term “diversity training” to encompass training that targeted individual psychology and behavior, under the assumption that psychological change will lead to broader cultural change in organization. Andrea Voyer, “Disciplined to Diversity: Learning the Language of Multiculturalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 11 (Nov 2011): 1874-1893. 95 Mohan Limaye, “Responding to Work-Force Diversity,” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 8, no. 3 (1994): 353-372; Gordon, From Power to Prejudice. 96 David Wigglesworth, “Video-ing diversity: A Review of Training Videos on Workforce Diversity,” Training & Development 46, no. 12 (1992): 53-63.

212 videotapes helped to circulate a common set of protocols, claims, and exercises for diversity training. Crowded around a VHS player, participants in training seminars shared the experience of watching videos together, in a small group gathered around a screen. Diversity training videos tended to feature multiracial casts acting out vignettes of common office situations, encouraging viewers to identify with the people and scenarios displayed on screen.

Three key claims oriented the diversity training approaches discussed in this section. First, diversity trainers often incorporated experiential learning techniques to cultivate the capacity of empathy by creating artificial situations that sought to mimic the experience of discrimination for white participants.97 These techniques often used other forms of difference as a comparison class—eye color or musical preferences—in ways that ended up depicting many sort of differences as equivalent. Second, participants were encouraged to attribute attitudes and behaviors of their colleagues to racial differences, understood as group characteristics. Third, concerns about the emotions and “comfort” of white participants shaped the contours of diversity training in ways that curtailed any potential impact of training. I draw on the analytic of “white fragility” theorized by critical race scholar Robin DiAngelo to understand how concerns about white discomfort shaped diversity training.98

Diversity trainers identified the attitudes and prejudices of the largely white cadre of middle managers as particularly potential hindrances to increasing the representation of people of

97 The “Banga Tournament card game” was one technique that sought to teach the tacit assumptions that shaped people’s experience with racial differences through a card game. Before the game started, each participant, unbeknownst to the others, received a different set of rules (in one version, aces were high; in another, aces were low).97 Participants were then instructed to play the game without verbal communication, and to communicate only via gestures, or sketches; as the game went on, players began realizing something was amiss—laughter, frustration, or finger-pointing ensued. Marie McKendall, “A Course in ‘Work-Force Diversity’: Strategies and Issues.” Journal of Management Education 18, no. 4 (1994): 407-423; Albert King, “Capacity for Empathy: Confronting Discrimination in Managing Multicultural Work Force Diversity,” Business Communication Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Jan 1995): 46-50. 98 DiAngelo, “White Fragility.”

213 color in the corporation, and thus particularly important targets of diversity training efforts.99

Middle managers were the individuals who had day-to-day authority over hiring and promotion decisions—the decisions that might actually result in greater representation—making them one major audience for corporate diversity training. Concerns about the emotions and experiences of white managers thus often dominated diversity training programs. To understand these attitudes,

I situate the protocols and assumptions of diversity training in the broader context of the white backlash against Affirmative Action in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as the business case for diversity of the late 1980s.

One of the “most memorable and transformative” experiential learning exercises used in diversity training was the “blue eyed experiment,” developed by Jane Elliott, a white

Midwestern teacher who became a corporate diversity trainer by the 1980s. 100 In 1968, spurred by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Elliott conducted an experiment on her classroom of all-white Iowan third-graders which involved dividing children by eye color and labelled brown- eyed children superior and blue-eyed children inferior. The experiment was turned into a film in

1970, made the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary news report, A Class Divided, in 1985, and became part of diversity training as a video with accompanying workbooks.101 As part of the exercise, Elliott made blue-eyed people wait outside the room for an indefinite period of time, during which time she told the rest of the group that their role was to make the blue-eyed group

“feel uncomfortable”; when Elliott let the blue-eyed members in, she yelled at them for being

99 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity; Gordon, “The Work of Corporate Culture”; Deborah Litvin, “The Discourse of Diversity—from Biology to Management,” Organization 4, no. 2 (1997): 187-209. 100 Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters, “A Retrospective View of Corporate Diversity Training,” 361. 101 William Peters, A Class Divided (New Haven: Yale University Films and PBS Videos, 1986); Nora Lester, Blue Eyed: A Guide to Use in Organizations (California Newsreel, 1996).

214 late, providing constantly shifting goalposts and double standards.102 In the debriefing session after the exercise, the white men in the audience expressed their discomfort at the feelings of powerlessness, anger, and frustration spurred by the exercise, which asked them to experience discrimination for only a few hours.103 Elliott warned that although the exercise could be pedagogically useful, it risked being dangerous without proper facilitation. The facilitators’ guide that accompanied the training video cautioned that “emotionally charged group dynamics” would “necessarily surface with the topic of biases, stereotypes, and assumptions.”104

The concern with the emotional dynamics of the group, one legacy of the encounter group, was evident in how Cobbs and Walker both described the role of the facilitator. As promotional materials for Cobbs’ video series Valuing Diversity cautioned, the videos “may bring out uncomfortable feelings at first;” but, if the facilitator provided “reassurance and support,” participants’ discomfort would be replaced by a “new awareness” of the “value of diversity.”105 Walker described the role of Digital’s core group facilitators as the creation of an atmosphere of “safety,” that allowed participants to learn from each other, without making participants feel too threatened or challenged.106 Walker further rooted Digital’s core groups in the legacies of the training group developed at National Training Laboratories, where some of

102 Peters, A Class Divided. 103 Elliott reported getting death threats, hate phone calls, both from the parents of the children that were her initial test subjects, and from the white male subjects of her training seminar, who had pulled a knife on her, and physically assaulted her. 104 Lester, Blue Eyed. 105 Lewis Griggs and Price Cobbs, Valuing Diversity: Part 1, Managing Differences (San Rafael: Copeland Griggs Productions, 1987). 106 Walker, “Valuing Differences.”

215 the core group facilitators had been educated. Core groups, Walker described, were “laboratories in which people help each other explore the issues created by differences with others.”107

In order to mitigate potential white backlashes, diversity trainers were held responsible for managing and channeling the emotional dynamics of the group, as well as their own emotions about race. One 1993 video, Let’s Talk Diversity, began with a warning to the facilitator about the emotional “risks” of training: “this videotape was specifically designed to spark lively and emotionally-charged discussion. You will find that many of your participants will have strong feelings.”108 Only through appropriate facilitation skills could such emotional risks be mitigated, the video warning cautioned. As described in one 1992 trade article addressing the “backlash” to diversity, diversity trainers needed to “have a handle on their own attitudes toward diversity so their feelings don't influence their training. A trainer who felt frustrated by a white-dominated system, for example, might react in a hostile, flippant, or patronizing way to a white trainee's complaints about reverse discrimination.”109 Trainers had to be careful not to betray their

“particular political agenda,” or act as the “PC police”—an overly political approach to diversity training merely “increases cynicism and backlash toward diversity work, and creates distrust between groups.”110

One business professor who incorporated explicit conversations of white privilege into her anti-prejudice training in a Midwestern business school cautioned that discussions of white privilege provoked emotional responses from the white male participants: “I usually see the first

107 Walker, “Valuing Differences,” 218; Rosalyn Taylor O’Neale, “Valuing Differences: A Perspective on Intercultural Education at Digital,” Adult Learning 2, no. 5 (1991): 11-12; Beverly Geber, “Managing Diversity,” Training 27, no. 7 (July 1990): 23-30. 108 Quoted in Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, 187. 109 Mobley and Payne, “Backlash!” 110 Mobley and Payne, “Backlash!”

216 sign of defensive reaction from the White males in the class; they seem quite uncomfortable with the notion that the prejudices of those in power might matter more than those of other people.”111

Course material “inevitably generates affect” that included responses of discomfort, anger, or hostility from the white males in the course.112

The white responses to diversity training exemplify the broader white backlash to

Affirmative Action expressed in legal cases and the business press, embodying what scholar

George Lipsitz calls a “possessive investment in whiteness.”113 In the 1970s, a network of newly- minted conservative think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise

Institute) began mobilizing opposition to Affirmative Action based on the argument that

Affirmative Action programs intended to redress slavery and the continued segregation of Black

Americans actually enacted a form of “reverse discrimination” against white males.114 The conservative mobilization of “reverse discrimination” arguments reached its apogee in a landmark 1978 Supreme Court case, which took as its premise the claim that race-based discrimination could apply to white Americans. This court case, Regents of the University of

California v. Bakke, marked a decided shift in the public and legal conversation around

Affirmative Action that had significant repercussions for the rise of the “business case for diversity.” The claimant, Allan Bakke launched a legal case against the University of California,

Davis, in protest over being denied admission to their medical school. The medical school had

111 In 1991, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) mandated that business programs cover diversity in graduate and undergraduate curricula in order to be accredited, in part justified by the findings of the Hudson report. McKendall, “A Course in ‘Work-Force Diversity,’” 415. 112 McKendall, “A Course in ‘Work-Force Diversity,’” 413. 113 Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness. 114 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States. On the backlash to Affirmative Action as part of America’s ‘cultural memory’ in the 1980s and 1990s, see Pierce, Racing for Innocence; Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough. On the rise of the New Right, see Bruce Shulman and Julian Zelizer, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

217 launched a small special admissions program for disadvantaged students, as a way to correct for the all-white classes the school admitted in its first year, 1968. Bakke claimed that his standardized test scores and undergraduate grades were higher than minority students admitted through this special admissions program, making his rejection a form of race-based discrimination. In a divided decision, the court ruled that the university’s protocol discriminated against whites, because it denied them the chance to compete for the full number of seats in the class; the court ruled to admit Bakke. Although the court ruled against quota-based Affirmative

Action policies, they did not declare Affirmative Action as a whole to be unconstitutional, but argued that the appropriate legal justification for affirmation action lay in the value of creating a diverse student body.

The white male backlash exhibited in the Bakke case became, by the late 1980s and 1990s, a prominent theme in the business trade literature with titles like “White, Male, and Worried” and “Are White Males Being Left Out.” 115 The legal reasoning and public discussion of the

Bakke case had two significant implications for corporate diversity programs. First, this case established the value of organizational diversity as a legal and rhetorical rationale for

Affirmative Action policies.116 As the rationale shifted from redressing historical inequities to promoting diversity, the second impact of this case was in validating “reverse discrimination” as a legal argument and public framing of Affirmative Action. As legal studies scholar Cheryl

Harris has argued, this case demonstrated how the protection of property interest in whiteness is at the core of legal reasoning and popular backlash to Affirmative Action. Bakke’s expectation of being admitted and the legal reasoning that special admissions programs infringed on the

115 Tucker and Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity”; Mobley and Payne, “Backlash!”; Michael Galen, “White, Male, and Worried,” Business Week, Jan. 31, 1994. 116 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity; Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America.

218 rights of future white applicants, embodied continuing, embedded white privilege.117 Bakke did not, after all, challenge the seats that were reserved for the children of alumni, or challenge the explicit age discrimination practiced by medical schools: he targeted the seats reserved for racial minorities. The Bakke case centered around the figure of the “innocent white man”—the figure who was unfairly “punished” by attempts to redress racial inequality.118 In applying anti- discrimination laws in favor of whites, the court decided that the effort to redress damage done by racism in the past was not pertinent to the relevant law, which undermined the legal basis for

Affirmative Action in other sectors of society as well.119

Corporate executives in the late 1980s commonly claimed that Affirmative Action was outdated, a relic from the past that was no longer relevant for diversity management. Moreover, they described the new wave of diversity programs as applicable to everyone, not just minorities.120 Computer company Honeywell’s director of diversity, for instance, suggested that their “inclusive” diversity programs were not just about helping minorities and women but could help white males who had been “excluded” from Affirmative Action policies.121 Digital distinguished its corporate diversity initiatives from previous Affirmative Action and Equal

Employment Opportunity programs, which sought to redress the historical exclusion of women and African-Americans from the workplace. Affirmative Action programs, Walker claimed, had

117 Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” 118 Pierce, Racing for Innocence. The figure of the “innocent white man” illustrates the individualism underpinning white fragility. DiAngelo, “White Fragility.” 119 Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 200-204. 120 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity, 252; Alster, In Diversity is Strength. 121 Tucker and Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity,” 54.

219 made “everybody feel victimized and disempowered” by “discounting and devaluing those in the non-Equal Employment Opportunity and protected classes.”122

However, even as corporations sought to distance their diversity programs from

Affirmative Action in the 1980s, instituting diversity training programs was one response to respond to or attempt to prevent EEOC discrimination lawsuits. Corporate training programs were often directly the result of EEOC mandates, in response to lawsuits or as preventive measures to avoid lawsuits.123 After AT&T was the target of a lawsuit, for example, they hired a

T-group trainer to conduct race relations training.124 In response to a class action discrimination lawsuit by African-American employees in the 1970s, Xerox instituted psychologically-oriented

“racial awareness training” that sought to root out unconscious bias among white managers.125

Both Xerox and AT&T trainers originated in the “encounter group” approach to interracial differences, exemplifying how legal compliance and the threat of lawsuits combined with the legacy of encounter groups to shape corporate diversity training.

Corporations justified diversity programs according to several overlapping rationales: to mitigate legal risks, to act as good public relations, and to cultivate flexible psychological capacities for its workforce. As explained in one 1992 trade article, “some [corporations] see the work as an intervention—a way of managing the legal risks associated with a diverse workforce.

122 Michael Mobley and Tamara Payne, “Backlash! The Challenge to Diversity Training,” Training & Development 46, no. 12 (Dec. 1992): 45-52. 123 Avery Gordon, “The Work of Corporate Culture: Diversity Management,” Social Text 44 (Autumn-Winter 1995): 3-30; Anand and Winters, “A Retrospective View of Corporate Diversity.” Sexual harassment training often came about for similar reasons. The first successful legal complainants about sexual harassment in 1976 was a female employee of the Department of Justice. Julie Brebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 124 Highhouse, “A History of the T-Group.” 125 Bernard Bass, Wayne Cascio, J. Westbrook McPherson and Harold Tragash, “PROSPER: Training for Increasing Management Awareness of Affirmative Action in Race Relations,” Academy of Management Journal 19, no. 3 (Sept. 1976): 354.

220

Others look at diversity programs as the source of a skill set that people can recall and apply as needed. Still other organizations regard diversity work as an attempt to be socially responsible.”126 The value generated from diversity policies included not only the positive value that could accrue from differences, but also included strategies of mitigating risks posed by the failure to properly manage diversity—in the form of lawsuits, negative publicity, or workplace conflict. Training seminars sought to teach managers how to productively integrate differences so that they would contribute to the productivity and profits of the corporation.

As a strategic response to the white conservative backlash and Workforce 2000, the network of diversity workers, consulting psychologists, and corporate departments that had been created to address Affirmative Action often repackaged diversity training practices to emphasize the economic value of diversity.127 The number of consulting psychologists and firms dedicated specifically to diversity management exploded in the 1980s and 1990s. The first consulting firm specifically dedicated to diversity management, the American Institute for Managing Diversity, was founded by African-American management expert R. Roosevelt Thomas.128 These consulting firms developed training modules that sought to cultivate awareness and appreciation of differences.

Another prong of corporate diversity strategies that exhibited continuity from earlier

Affirmative Action programs included mentoring and professional development programs for women and people of color. These initiatives sought to cultivate what Pamela Laird calls

126 Mobley and Payne, “Backlash!” 127 Some diversity officers were hired as ad-hoc consultants, to run a one-time or ongoing training seminar; some, like Barbara Walker, worked as in-house managers, affiliated with human resources departments. Kelly and Dobbin, “How Affirmative Action Became Diversity Management”; Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity. 128 Thomas received a PhD in organizational behavior from Harvard Business School. R. Roosevelt Thomas, Beyond Race and Gender: Unleashing the Power of Your Total Work Force by Managing Diversity (New York: AMACOM Books, 1991).

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“synthetic social capital”: the professional, familial, and educational networks that had helped elite white men gain power in corporations for so long.129

This managerial model of individual empowerment, though, faced limitations from the broader corporate structures. A review of one of the most popular video series using in diversity training, Bridges: Skills for Managing a Diverse Workforce, illustrates how diversity training often placed the burden of assimilation and adaptation on minority workers while centering emotions of white comfort.130 Narrated by a white male narrator, Bridges’ modules included vignettes of situations marked by racial differences and cultural clashes, including a Black woman whose traditional African dress put her in conflict with her white manager, and a Black department head concerned that his boss would not promote him due to his race.131 A review of the Bridges video in a business trade journal highlighted the differences in responses among

Black and white training participants.132 The “white male perspective” appreciated the video for precisely the fact that it offered a “safe environment to address a sensitive subject.” Narrated by a white male, the video addressed diversity without “white male bashing,” which helped “make the experience more credible.”133 This language of safety, comfort, and concerns about “white

129 One of the earliest and most well-known example of corporate mentoring programs was Xerox’s “affinity groups,” which launched in 1969 and produced some high-profile Black executives These internal caucuses had been instituted in 1969, in part in response to racial protests in Rochester in the 1960s, as an early form of corporate social responsibility. The New York Times called A. Barry Rand, who worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a Vice-President at Xerox by 1992, the “Jackie Robinson” of corporate America. Jonathan Hicks, “A Black’s Climb to Executive Suite,” The New York Times, May 22, 1987, 001; Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig, eds, The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012); Elizabeth Lesly, “Sticking It Out at Xerox by Sticking Together,” Business Week, November 29, 1993, 77; Laird, Pull. 130 Jeffrey Goldstein and Marjorie Leopold, Bridges: Skills for Managing a Diverse Workforce (Rockville: BNA Communications, Inc). 131 Tucker and Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity”; Limaye, “Responding to Work-Force Diversity.” 132 William Oyler, Taya Levine, Bradley Kukuk, and Annette Irving Bookter, “Four Reviews of the Bridges Training Program from Diverse Perspectives,” Human Resource Development Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 97- 108. 133 Oyler, Levin, Kukuk and Bookter, “Four Reviews,” 100.

222 male bashing” demonstrate how corporate diversity programs re-centered the emotions and experiences of white comfort. In contrast, Annette Bookter, who represented the “Black female perspective” criticized the video for placing the onus of accommodation on the minority manager: while demanding that minority managers “learn how to play golf,” “nothing was expected of the corporate systems.”134 Although advances towards more equitable corporate life had been made, these changes, she noted, were often more “perceptual and psychological than tangible.”135

Diversity training exercises could end up not only reifying race as a category, but also reinforcing racial stereotypes.136 Indeed, one common technique to begin diversity training asked participants to list off common racial stereotypes, including naming racist epithets.137 In the business school situation, students were asked to publicly record stereotypes about different cultural groups. The teacher reported that after initial laughter, “tense silence” followed, as students realized how they had internalized such stereotypes.138 However, these “adjective exercises” did not always have the desired effect of breaking down stereotypes, but in fact could leave participants feeling that stereotypes had only been confirmed. For example, in 1988, one

134 Oyler, Levin, Kukuk and Bookter, “Four Reviews,” 107. 135 Oyler, Levin, Kukuk and Bookter, “Four Reviews,” 107. 136 Tucker and Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity.” 137 This kind of stereotype exercise is parodied in a 2005 episode of The Office, a sitcom set in a white-collar office in middle America. Throughout the show, Michael Scott’s attempts to run diversity training seminars—for race, homosexuality, disability—are played for cringe-worthy comedic effect. In one episode, called “Diversity Day,” everyone in the office is assigned a race, listed on a card on their forehead, which they have to discover by asking co-workers for clues. Unsurprisingly, decidedly un-‘politically correct’ stereotypes emerged. Moreover, the whole rationale for the diversity training was Michael Scott’s own racist parodies. Although it plays for laughs, it also shows how exercises, when not properly facilitated, end up reinforcing stereotypes rather than breaking them down. The facilitator, a Black diversity trainer, urges the audience to celebrate their diversity, not to pretend they’re the same; and then, at the end, has to get Michael Scott to sign a statement; the specter of an employment lawsuit hovers in the background. The Office, “Diversity Day.” As Jennifer Pierce argues, popular culture has served as an important site for Americans to understand the meanings of race, Affirmative Action, and diversity. Pierce, Racing for Innocence. 138 McKendall, “A Course in ‘Work-Force Diversity.’”

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California grocery store company who used this adjective exercise as part of their diversity training were even the target of a lawsuit, based on the stereotypes presented. Managers, who already suspected that gender and racial stereotypes blocked promotion opportunities, deployed training notes that presented stereotypes—like “Black females are aggressive”—as evidence that upper management held racist stereotypes that prevented the advancement of Black managers.139

Diversity training seminars encouraged participants to attribute the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of their colleagues to their membership in racial or ethnic categories. One video series, Diverse Teams at Work, encouraged viewers to view their colleagues through a “diversity filter”—comprising the varied factors that made up a person’s identity, including their race, age, personality traits, and life experience. In a dramatized rendering of a business meeting, the video’s narrator intervened to model the “diversity filter” through which to view meeting participants: for example, a “Black woman, 42, active in Black pride movement”; or a “white man, 63, Midwestern, hardworking.”140 The floating field of demographic signifiers represented by this “diversity filter” encouraged people to understand their colleagues according to a variety of racial, cultural, and personality characteristics.

Techniques in diversity training videos sought to enroll viewers in the ethnographic work of observing others: white people were encouraged to act as “cultural detectives” by reading

Black literature, attending a Black art exhibit, or observing the behaviour of their Black coworkers.141 This ethnographic work was intended to cultivate an awareness and appreciation of

139 Anand and Winters, “A Retrospective View of Corporate Diversity Training,” 361; Shari Caudron, “Employees Use Diversity-Training Exercise against Lucky Stores in Intentional-Discrimination Suit,” Personnel Journal 72, no. 4 (1993): 52. 140 Quoted in Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts, 178-179; Lee Gardesnwartz and Anita Rowe, Diverse Teams at Work (Chicago: Irwin Professional Publishers, 1994). 141 Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth, “How to Behave Sensitively: Prescriptions for Interracial Conduct from the 1960s to the 1990s,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 2 (Dec 1999): 409-427; Lewis Brown Griggs and Lente-Louis Louw, eds, Valuing Diversity: New Tools for a New Reality (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995).

224 differences that could prevent misunderstandings due to cultural differences. Diversity training materials and management textbooks, as critical management scholar Deborah Litvin has argued, portrayed racial categories as obvious, naturalized categories— even as the descriptions associated with racial differences described racial differences according to characteristics of culture, lifestyle, and personality, rather than biological characteristics.142

In the early 1990s, diversity trainer Barbara Walker developed an exercise to teach racial differences. This exercise began by sorting participants into groups based on their hypothetical choice of radio station in a rental car (country, rock, classical, jazz). Then groups were asked to ruminate on the assumptions and adjectives that they would use to describe people who liked country music, or jazz, as a stand-in for understanding stereotypes. The debriefing notes prodded participants to relate the categorizations and assumptions made in this exercise to “other kinds of intergroup differences, such as race, gender, culture,” and to contemplate ways that “an organization might facilitate the valuing and utilizing of differences between people.”143

Gesturing to the presence of institutional segregation and racism without directly naming it,

Walker described group racial identity as fostered by a “shared perspective that has developed as a result of the way it has been treated by another group.144

Training manuals and videos on diversity often suggested that all differences were equivalent to the extent that they could interfere with working together, without considering relations of power that shaped whiteness in America. It was not only white people who were enjoined to play cultural detective: video series and training seminars explicitly addressed

142 Litvin further connects the definition of difference repeated in the organizational behavior literature in the 1990s to scientific projects that naturalized racial categories in celebrating, such as the Human Genome Diversity Project and environmentalism’s celebration of “biodiversity. Litvin, “The Discourse of Diversity.” 143 John Schermerhorn et al, Organizational Behavior, 12th Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). 144 Walker, “Valuing Differences,” 215.

225 themselves to everyone, including people of color. As one business trade article cautioned,

“being a minority or a woman doesn't ensure that a person will be effective in working with all types of differences.”145 Diversity training programs, like the “blue-eyed experiment” and

Bridges, had everyone sit through the same training, including people of color, even though their reactions were quite different. One Black participant in the blue-eyed exercise, as filmed in A

Class Divided, described the difficulties of fostering his children’s self-esteem when confronted by racism in schools—at a moment in the 1980s of white backlash to busing, a policy that aimed to end the de facto segregation that still shaped American schools.146

In showing how diversity training seminars sought to cultivate the capacity to interact across racial differences in corporate America, my claim has not been that diversity trainers themselves saw power, privilege, and structural racism as irrelevant or unimportant. For some within this network of diversity and anti-racist trainers, including Jane Elliott and Price Cobbs, invoking “differences” served as an important rebuttal to counter claims of colorblindness—an “I don’t see race” school of thinking that sought to erase differences in the name of the melting pot.

In 1992, Elliott and her “blue-eyed experiment” appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show as part of a series of conversations hosted by Oprah to talk about American race relations in the wake of the protests spurred by the court’s not-guilty verdict for the officers who had beaten Rodney

King.147 On Oprah, Elliott declared racism to be an institutional phenomena, rooted in white supremacy, that engendered persistent attitudes of racism. Moreover, Elliott advocated for a recognition of differences as a counter to the claims that America had become a “colorblind society.”

145 Mobley and Payne, “Backlash!” 146 Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 147 Kathryn Lofton, O: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

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Similarly, a coterie of business books written by and for Black managers gave advice on how to thrive in white workplaces. Without minimizing structural conditions of racism in corporate America, this genre of advice offered psychological strategies for Black managers to cope with racism in corporations. These books highlighted the importance of individual empowerment as a strategy to cope in the face of racist corporations.148 One 1982 book, The

Black Manager, gave advice to the new Black manager for succeeding in predominantly white workforces.149 Written by Jacqueline and Floyd Dickens (a former engineer for Proctor &

Gamble turned management diversity consultant), The Black Manager offered strategies to

“constructively deal with racism.”150 Dickens and Dickens urged Black managers “to channel their anger and emotions at racist situations into strategies that will enhance their job performance and place them in line for promotion.”151

However, the broader institutional contexts in which diversity trainers operated circumscribed its possibilities. Cobbs may have taught Digital executives the meaning of

“institutional racism” and Elliott may have called out white supremacy, but corporate materials trumpeting their diversity program instead emphasized the harmonious workings of differences.

One 1992 article on “managing diversity,” written in the wake of protests in Los Angeles against police brutality and racism spurred by the beating of Rodney King, lays bare the detachment of many white corporate executives could be from the realities of continued American racism, that included not only police violence, but also continued mass incarceration and economic

148 Ellen Berrey, “Breaking Glass Ceilings, Ignoring Dirty Floors: The Culture and Class Bias of Diversity Management,” American Behavioral Scientist 58, no. 2 (2014): 359. 149 Floyd Dickens and Jacqueline Dickens, The Black Manager: Making It in the Corporate World (New York: Amacom Books, 1982). 150 Charles Whitaker, “How to Survive the New Racism,” Ebony 46, no. 12 (1991): 108. 151 Whitaker, “How to Survive the New Racism,” 108.

227 disenfranchisement.152 The article cited numerous white corporate executives with companies in

Los Angeles, whose concern lay in the damage to property resulting from protests, rather than the structural racism in policing, housing, and economic opportunities that had spurred the protests.

By the early 1990s, corporate diversity training took place within a corporate context of celebrating the productive integration of differences, rather than the redressing of historic inequality. As sociologist Ellen Berrey argues, this corporate case for diversity created a particular interpretation of racial progress that celebrates diversity as a competitive advantage, which leaves “whiteness unnamed while constructing a role for white people as participants in cordial, productive workplace relationships.”153 It is due in part due to the desire to avoid the reactions of white fragility that corporate training seminars—one of the rare spaces where many white people might have been forced to confront their own racial identities and prejudices—so often avoided directly calling out the dynamics of structural racism and white privilege. The

“pressure from management to keep the content comfortable and palatable for whites,” combined with diversity workers’ lack of bureaucratic power over middle managers, also circumscribed the impact of diversity training. 154

4.4 The Team-Building Seminar

In the early 1990s, Digital Equipment Corporation adopted the Myers-Briggs Type

Indicator in team-building seminars as a framework to integrate individual psychological

152 Mary Pat McEnrue, “Managing Diversity: Los Angeles Before and After the Riots,” Organizational Dynamics 21, no. 3 (Dec. 1993): 18-29; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 153 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity, 242. 154 Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 55.

228 differences into the unit of the team. One Digital manager, Barbara Cofsky, praised the Myers-

Briggs for solving communication problems among her accounting team: the discovery that the team lead had the polar opposite Myers-Briggs type from the rest of the team allowed the team to work across differences, through the “common language” of psychological type.155 By providing a framework to understand individual differences, Cofsky asserted, the Myers-Briggs helped

Digital teams to “leverage those differences more effectively” and “to resolve conflicts in a more productive and rewarding manner.”156 Digital adopted the Myers-Briggs in the midst of restructuring their teams into self-managing teams: a change which, by shifting many of the functions traditionally performed by managers to the team, demanded increased attention to the psychosocial skills involved in teamwork.157 As a growing multinational company that historically prided itself on its nonhierarchical and “chaotic” corporate culture that integrated social and technical structures, Digital managers justified this new arrangement of teams as a cost-effective strategy to harvest corporate value through “appreciating…our human resource assets.”158

The case of Digital—a company whose much-publicized diversity initiatives accompanied

Myers-Briggs team-building seminars—highlights the competing understandings of

155 Barbara Cofsky, “Digital’s Self-Managed Accounting Teams,” Management Accounting (April 1993): 39-42; Barbara Cofsky, “A Journey Towards Excellence,” Management Accounting 77 (1996): 13-16; Sharon Clinebell and Mary Stecher, “Teaching Teams to be Teams: An Exercise Using the MBTI,” Journal of Management Education 27, no. 3 (June 2003): 363-383. 156 Cofsky, “A Journey Towards Excellence,” 14. 157 As one Digital plant manager described, “developing the social skills of participative, self-management that took the most time. Our process was integrated into our organizational design—it can’t be seen from a purely technical point of view.” Pearson, Digital at Work, 136; Rollin Glaser, Learning to be a Self-Managing Team (Organization Design and Development, 1991), Wunderman papers, Box PM-2, Hartman Center for the History of Sales, Advertising and Marketing, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. 158 Cofsky, “Digital’s Self-Managed Accounting Teams,” 39. By the 1980s, Digital was a rapidly expanding multinational firm second only to IBM in the computer market; a firm that was invested in management innovations to complement its technological advances. Like IBM, they were in the midst of rebranding themselves as a company selling not just machines, but information systems—an exemplar company of the knowledge economy. Pearson, Digital at Work; John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

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“differences” at stake in corporate claims about the capacity to manage across differences. The rationales of Digital managers for adopting the Myers-Briggs, after all, resonate with the core claims of Digital’s diversity initiatives: that valuing individual differences was a key managerial capacity and form of psychological capital that allowed corporations to harvest value from these differences. In discussing his company’s diversity programs, Digital executive Alan Zimmerle enacted this expansive understanding of difference, detached from the power dynamics of

American racism: “the “concept of ‘differences’ is broadly defined at Digital, extending beyond race, age, gender, national origin, and language to include the more subtle characteristics of personality, work ethics, lifestyle and educational background.”159 Zimmerle described the outcome of diversity programs as benefitting individual employees and the company alike: employees became “empowered to view differences as assets and to put these assets to work creatively,” while the company converted these individual differences into “productivity, profitability and competitive advantage.”160 As Digital executives trumpeted, “each person’s differences brought unique and special gifts to the organization.”161 In describing differences of personality and lifestyles as rhetorically equivalent categories to legally protected and historically oppressed categories of race and gender and in trumpeting the economic value of differences, Digital’s diversity initiatives exemplify a broader shift in corporate rhtetoric and practices that had crystallized by 1990.

As this final section shows, the protocols and assumptions developed in Myers-Briggs team-building workshops were an important site for promoting the capacity to interact across

159 Sheryl Tucker and Kevin Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity + Advancement for Blacks?” Black Enterprise (Nov 1990): 54. 160 Tucker and Thompson, “Will Diversity = Opportunity.” 161 Quoted in Lynch, The Diversity Machine, 53.

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“differences” as a key component of psychological capital.162 The protocols developed for team- building with the Myers-Briggs mirrored the approach to management training in diversity training, particularly in emphasizing experiential learning, the appreciation of differences, and channeling the emotional energies of the group. Moreover, the claims of MBTI team-building seminars resonate with the ways that corporate executives and diversity trainers often described differences between racial, ethnic, and national groups in terms of culture, lifestyle, and personality. A network of organizational development trainers and team building exercises depicted the ability to productively manage personality differences as crucial to the corporation and to individual development and success. I situate these organizational interventions not only in the business case for diversity discussed in the previous section, but also the changing work structures and globalization of corporations that made attention to differences and group dynamics seem particularly acute for corporate management.

In contrast to the diversity trainers presented earlier, Myers-Briggs practitioners held a distinct understanding of “differences” that treated personality type as the primary axis of difference between humans in organizations, and saw psychological type as a master explanatory framework to understand human variability, rather than differences borne of structural inequality. Race was rarely explicitly or overtly mentioned in Myers-Briggs training manuals: the cultural codes of diversity invoked by MBTI practitioners drew on the rhetorical appeal of diversity, while eliding differences of race and structural power dynamics in the corporation.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the Myers-Briggs is a typological theory of personality, that assesses people along four dichotomous scales that combined to produce a

162 In the previous chapter, I showed how the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator spread through networks of psychologists and management development specialists to become widely used as a measure of intuition. Here, I focus on the manuals and protocols oriented developed to use the MBTI in team building seminars, focusing on the claims about difference and diversity revealed through MBTI training materials.

231 distinct type of person. The MBTI treated these binary preferences—introversion or extraversion—as innate dimensions of an individual’s personality, akin to a preference for handedness. Myers, and the consulting psychologists who adopted the MBTI, repeatedly trumpeted the value of each psychological type: there were no better or worse types; each of the sixteen psychological types was equally valid, and equally valuable.163 One early set of guidelines for corporate MBTI seminars described the ultimate end goal of seminars as cultivating the capacity for diversity: participants, by learning from “persons of different types,

[and] opening their view to the range of human experience which they have missed,” could

“increase their tolerance of diversity.”164 The title of MBTI creator Isabel Myers’ book, Gifts

Differing, epitomizes this repeated claim about the “gifts differing” that each psychological type brought to an organization.165 Diversity, in the MBTI team-building seminar, was a diversity of psychological type.

Myers-Briggs manuals for team-building seminars depicted psychological type as a framework to manage and mitigate conflict that could arise from personality differences in a team.166 From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, consulting psychologists such as Sandra Hirsh,

Jane Brown, Nancy Geyer, Susan Brock, and Jean Kummerow, many of whom were white women, wrote manuals that contained standardized, yet eminently adaptable, protocols and

163 Sandra Hirsh, Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in Organizations (Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1985), Isabel Briggs Myers Library, Center for the Application of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida (hereafter CAPT) 164 “Guidelines for Use of the MBTI,” (Gainesville: Center for the Application of Psychological Type, 1979), CAPT. 165 Isabel Briggs Myers, Gifts Differing (Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980). 166 Hirsh, Using the MBTI in Organizations; Chris Clarke-Epstein, Roxanne Emmerich, Kathryn Jeffers and Sylvia Patzlaff, Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems: A Team’s Guide to Using the MBTI (Was, WI: Link Publications, 1994); Legal Services Corporation, “An Approach to Managing Individual Differences” (Unpublished training materials, 1983), 271, CAPT; Nancy Geyer and Jane Brown, “Using the MBTI to Facilitate Small Group Processes,” Fourth Biennial Conference on the Use of the MBTI, Palo Alto, CA (June 28-July 2, 1981), CAPT. On the way that psychological manuals arrange and produce subjectivities, see Martin Derksen, “Discipline, Subjectivity and Personality: An Analysis of the Manuals of Four Psychological Tests,” History of the Human Sciences 14, no. 1 (2001): 25-47.

232 scripts for using the Myers-Briggs in management training. A typical team-building workshop—

Building Team with Type—between about the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as evoked by training manuals followed a standard set of protocols. In a group ranging from 15 to 40 members, managers would sit in a circle in a corporate conference room, with four-letter types affixed to their name tags—INFJ; ESTP, based on their answer to the MBTI. Managers would be broken up into small groups, given simulated business scenarios, and asked to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of their own personality type and the differences with others. Perhaps the group would be asked to cut out pictures and phrases from magazines to make a collage that captured the group’s type, to be proudly hung on the wall for the other groups to see. Participants would be asked to list the potential pitfalls of the group, composed as it is of individuals with different psychological types, but also the advantages of individual psychological differences. MBTI team-building seminars were not a fringe practice: major corporations, such as AT&T and IBM, bought the team-building seminars as part of their investment in new arrangements of teams. 167

As an organizational intervention, team-building’s historical roots lie in the encounter group methodology and institutional networks developed at National Training Laboratories.168

NTL trainers built the entire field of organizational development, whose central intervention was the team-building seminar.169 The thematic of the confrontational encounter, carried over from

167 The Center for the Application of Psychological Type priced the Building Team with Type seminar at a minimum cost of $3000/day for ten people, or $475/person for additional participants, on top of licensing rights for the Myers- Briggs and the fees for the trainer to administer the seminar. 168 In 1967, NTL hosted a training program to train specialists in organizational development using the same technique of the T-group, with a goal to design their own organizational development seminar. Richard Beckhard, W. Warner Burke, and Fred Steele, “Program for Specialists in Organization Training and Development” (1967), 13, Leland Bradford Papers, Box 1046, AHAP. 169 Given its roots in NTL, the premise of organizational development as a field was that the small group as the unit for understanding and altering psychological relations in organizations. Team building, as one introductory 1982 article defined it, was a “long-term, data-based intervention in which intact work groups experientially learn, by examining their structures, purposes, norms, values, and interpersonal dynamics, to increase their skills for effective teamwork.” S. Jay Liebowitz, and Kenneth DeMeuse, “The Application of Team Building,” Human Relations 35, no. 1 (1982): 2; Cooke, “Writing the Left out of Management Theory”; Highhouse, “A History of the T-Group;

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National Training Laboratories, shaped the approach of team-building and the understanding of the trainer’s role. As described by organizational development specialist Bernard Bass, the role of the team-building trainer was to help the group learn to manage differences: the trainer was a

“catalyst” to foster the “work team’s confrontation with their own process of working together.”170 Trainers trained at National Training Laboratories developed theories of participatory management that justified new arrangements of work teams—a crucial context for corporate investment in diversity and for MBTI team-building seminars.171 As MBTI practitioners declared at the 1981 conference, recognizing psychological differences was particularly important given the growing importance of small groups— “groupings where from three to four to 12 to 15 persons struggle with a shared task”—in the organization of corporate work.172

Like diversity training, team-building seminars asked participants to act as ethnographers and to evaluate the similarities and differences in their colleagues’ personalities.173 For instance,

MBTI consultant Otto Kroeger developed an exercise and videotape series called

“Typewatching,” which enrolled participants in the ethnographic work of observing their colleagues, bosses and spouses, in order to identity them as a particular Myers-Briggs type.174

Graham Sewell, “What Goes Around, Comes Around: Inventing a Mythology of Teamwork and Empowerment,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 37, no. 1 (March 2001): 70-89; ”; William Crockett, “Teambuilding/Organizational Development Notes and Memos,” 1969/197), Abraham Maslow Papers, Box 4436, Folder 3, AHAP. 170 Bernard Bass, “An Evaluation of the OD System at Bell/AT&T” (1967), Bernard Bass Papers, Box 1237, Folder 78, AHAP. 171 Jane Mouton and Robert Blake’s “managerial grid” stemmed directly from the T-group. As Scott Highhouse notes, NTL people referred to the managerial grid, in a not-so-favourable light, as a “T-group in a box.” By copyrighting the adaptable modules and exercises of the T-group, they violated the “unwritten sharing code" of NTL. Highhouse, “A History of the T-Group.” 172 Geyer and Brown, “Using the MBTI to Facilitate Small Group Processes.” 173 Hirsh, Using the MBTI in Organizations. 174 Review of “Typewatching,” from the Bulletin of Psychological Type 9, no. 1, CAPT.

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The most common way that MBTI practitioners represented differences of psychological type was through the “type table,” a ubiquitous technique in the Myers-Briggs world. In a grid of 16

(all the possible combinations of the four types), often with percentage distributions of different types among various sub-groups of people. The Center for the Application of Psychological

Type, the institutional home of MBTI research, collected extensive databases of type tables, broken down into occupational and demographic categories. Team-building seminars often incorporated type tables as part of their exercises to learn about differences in psychological types: the trainer would often provide each small group with a type table that plotted out the distributions of different types in the group, alongside verbal descriptions of the meaning of each type.175 Then, it was a guessing game: group members were to discuss which members of their group they thought matched up to each type, and pencil in their guesses on the type table. Once the results were revealed, they wrote the correct answers in red ink. More discussion ensued— why were some people easier than others to type? And lastly, the group was enjoined to think about their “group” profile and ask how the group’s particular typological configuration influenced its overall productivity.176

Such workshops sought to cultivate awareness and appreciation of psychological type in order to harness the benefits and mitigate the risks engendered by personality differences. One exercise from a 1994 MBTI manual asked teams to build a “Team Profile” that described the potentials and pitfalls of teams with a diversity of psychological type. The manual cautioned participants that groups with a “wider…diversity of type” had a “greater… potential for

175 Clarke-Epstein et al, Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems. 176 Carol Truesdell, “The MBTI: A Win/Win Strategy for Work Teams,” MBTI News 5, no 2 (Spring 1983), Isabel Briggs Myers Library, Center for the Application of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida.

235 conflict.”177 If the group were less psychologically diverse, though, they risked becoming

“blindsided by an idea that never occurred to you.” After completing the team type table, groups were asked to notice which psychological types were underrepresented, and to ask if they were a

“team member who represents a ‘minority’ preference?”178 Although these “minority types” could provide a valuable point of view that could help the team learn and grow, the manual cautioned that perpetually being asked to provide their perspective could be “burdensome.” The language of diversity and minority types invoked by Myers-Briggs practitioners almost entirely evaded the question of race.179

The rare mentions of race in the MBTI literature reflects the particular understanding of diversity and difference in the world of MBTI trainers. In 1986, a subset of members of the

Association for Psychological Type (the main organizational body of MBTI practitioners) created a Diversity Task Force, which sought to correct for the underrepresentation of people of color in MBTI organizations. The task force was justified as fostering “diversity and inclusiveness among our membership beyond differences in [psychological] type.”180 As the previous chapter showed, the vast majority of experiments and research on the MBTI was conducted on white people, by white researchers. Although the APT described themselves as an association premised on the “acceptance and appreciation of differences,” their celebration of differences referenced differences in psychological type and elided other axes of differences. The task force included a resolution to notice and challenge sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic

177 Clarke-Epstein et al, Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems, 29. 178 Clarke-Epstein et al, Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems, 29. 179 Julian Carter uses the term “race-evasive” codes for whiteness to describ “sources that are themselves apparently blank on the subject of race, and yet that turn out to be full of representations of whiteness.” Julian Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007): 19. 180 Dorothy May Emerson, “Broadening the Meaning of Diversity,” MBTI Bulletin 8, no. 2 (Spring 1986), CAPT.

236 stereotypes by working through the implicit biases of the largely white membership.

“Appreciation of differences,” the Association newsletter reported, required “examining and changing the ways in which we find ourselves to be less socially conscious than we think we would like to think we are.”181

In addition to these rhetorical connections, the very use of the Myers-Briggs was shaped by anti-discrimination legislation, which makes sense of the repeated MBTI guidelines that the test was never to be used in situations where hiring or firing decisions were at stake. A case brought before the EEOC in 1971, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, curtailed corporate use of psychological tests by highlighting the ways that psychological tests could act to reinforce racial discrimination in the workforce. The case ruled that psychological tests that disproportionately discriminated against particular racial groups could not be used as hiring criteria unless companies demonstrated a specific connection between the test and the job: a standard that many general psychological tests did not meet. The claimants in the case were African-American janitors, who had been rejected from Duke Power Company based on their scores on psychological tests of intelligence and aptitude. The case of Griggs v. Duke showed how standardized aptitude tests could act as stand-ins for discrimination: the same date that Title VII anti-discrimination laws went into effect, Duke Power Company instituted psychological testing requirements, just as earlier integration of their workplace in the 1950s accompanied requirements for a high school diploma.182 Griggs v. Duke gave legal precedence to the concept of “adverse impact,” which argued that in the case of psychological testing, employment

181 Emerson, “Broadening the Meaning of Diversity.” 182 Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”

237 discrimination was measurable in its effects, rather than in intent.183 Personnel departments and industrial psychologists scrambled to respond to these new EEOC requirements that tests not disproportionately discriminate between racial groups and that tests showed a demonstrated relationship with the job being performed.184

Guidelines for psychological testing set strict limits on its use in hiring and firing, but allowed psychological tests to be used for purposes of management training and team-building, justified as forms of self-awareness. 185 As one training manual reported, team building exercises needed to encourage members to “develop positive attitudes towards their own uniqueness and toward the characteristics of each member.”186 The very definition of team-building, according to one MBTI manual, was the coming to awareness of individual differences and similarities: team- building was a “process in which individual team members learn more about their own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of other team members.”187 The manager’s role, according to proponents of Myers-Briggs for team-building, was to “support, appreciate, and encourage differences” and “provide an atmosphere for mutual respect…[to] enhance the effectiveness of teams.”188

183 David Garrow, “Toward a Definitive History of Griggs. v. Duke Power Co,” Vanderbilt Law Review 67, no. 1 (2014): 197-237. 184 David Robertson, “Update on Testing and Equal Opportunity,” Personnel Journal (March 1977): 144-147. Some companies, on the urging of their staff industrial psychologists, suspended psychological testing programs altogether to avoid potential lawsuits, while some white industrial psychologists even wrote letters to Congress in the early 1970s cautioning that this new standard would weaken employment standards and foster white resentment. Dorothy Adkins Papers, AHAP. 185 Weston Agor, “Managing Brain Skills to Increase Productivity,” Public Administration Review 45, no. 6 (1985): 864-868. 186 Legal Services Corporation, “An Approach to Managing Individual Differences.” 187 Legal Services Corporation, “An Approach to Managing Individual Differences,” 23. 188 Rideout and Richardson, “A Teambuilding Model.”

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Team building was a technique for reconciling the tension between individual differences as productive and differences as potential sources of conflict. Specialists in organizational development promoted team-building exercises as strategies to resolve the conflicts that might arise from such differences. Through the intervention of team-building, one manual wrote, teams could shift from “a group of people who are having difficulties working together toward becoming a team that tolerates and respects individual differences.”189 Team-building seminars trumpeted the value but also the potential pitfalls of work teams composed of different psychological types.190 MBTI practitioners Nancy Geyer and Jane Brown noted that “groups with high similarity will reach quicker decisions, but are more likely to make errors because of inadequate representation of all viewpoints.”191 This dualistic nature of differences was a frequent theme in team building manuals. MBTI practitioners sold their workshops as strategies to resolve conflicts in teams: Sandra Hirsh, for instance, described the MBTI as an “objective tool” that could resolve conflict by understanding people’s difference in constructive terms.192

Conflict, in the world of the Myers-Briggs, derived not from economic or class relationships of power, nor from discrimination on the basis of race or sex, but arose from miscommunications across personality differences.193 Fostering awareness and appreciation of personality differences was thus presented as one remedy for workplace conflict.

189 Clarke-Epstein et al, Finding Solutions to Workplace Problems, 77. 190 In the previous chapter, I showed how intuition consultants advocated for teams with mixed psychological types to promote innovative corporate strategies. 191 Geyer and Brown, “Using the MBTI to Facilitate Small Group Processes,” 30. 192 Hirsh, Using the MBTI in Organizations, 6. 193 These claims about the harmonious resolution of conflict and the dynamics of the small group evokes human relations management, and the key management theorist Elton Mayo. Depicting the ideal workforce as a harmonious equilibrium, Mayo blamed conflict on the psychological imbalance of workers, which led them to seek unions. In eliding over power and class dynamics of workplace through the rhetoric of “harmony,” Myers-Briggs practitioners were thus part of a longer tradition of management approaches. Kira Lussier, “Temperamental Workers: Psychology, Business, and the Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale in Interwar America,” History of Psychology

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Team-building exercises often moved beyond the classroom or the workplace to incorporate physical activity and outlandish scenarios as ways to vividly highlight, and reconcile, personality differences in teams. One colorful team-building exercise from the early 1980s, described by a human resource manager for Hewlett-Packard, involved sending participants— dressed in office attire, on a windy day—to tramp into the woods to search for a ‘lost and injured’ team member, and return her on a stretcher.194 Teams were divided into two groups on the basis of their MBTI scores: “doers” (sensing, perceptive types) and “thinkers” (intuitive or judging types). As expected, the “doer” types forged ahead without a plan, while the second team planned their rescue first. Both teams, despite their differing approach, emerged from the woods successful (albeit, with shoes caked in mud).195

American management writers in the 1980s and 1990s depicted the team as the fundamental unit for psychological training seminars, the basis of the organization of work and the primary space for sociality in the workforce. 196 An influential 1996 Business Week article

21, no. 2 (May 2018): 79-99; Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 194 Jim Maxon, “Personality Type and Personal Development,” ICT (Jan-Feb 1985): 24. 195 American popular culture reflects both how pervasive corporate training oriented towards “managing across differences” has become, and a deep skepticism about its rationales. A 2009 episode of the sitcom Party Down exemplifies the absurdities of team-building. The show follows a catering company composed of wanna-be actors in Los Angeles, led by an enthusiastic “team lead,” Ron, who is always trying to make his employees care more about their job, get along better, and stop using their cellphones at work. While catering a corporate team-building retreat, Ron tries to surreptitiously “borrow” the materials to conduct team-building for his own team. Firstly, the group sits in a circle and discusses ideas for how to improve the company—which Ron immediately dismisses as too expensive, or impractical, except for the suggestion to “think positively.” Holding a binder full of materials, Ron runs his decidedly unenthused team through exercises: in partners, one person directs their partner, who is blindfolded, to move a ball poised on a spoon. One team fails, and drops the ball because the partner directed them according to her perspective, not that of her partner. Ron prompts them from the script: how could you have done better? She responds: “I could have said ‘go right’; I see that now.” The team-building abruptly ends when the real trainer arrives in the room, and angrily snatches back his binder filled with notes proclaiming that he will send an invoice for the cost of the seminar to Ron. These scenes incite laughter precisely because they capture how corporate profits and copyrights collide with psychology. They betray a cultural skepticism about team-building. 196 As critical management scholar Graham Sewell argues, management writers drew on the mythologized history of “the team” to justify present arrangements. This claim that teamwork was a source of empowerment often harkened back to a romantic, pre-industrial utopia—sometimes even to evolutionary times—to portray working in teams as a natural state of human affairs. Sewell, “What Goes Around, Comes Around.”

240 summarizing the business case for diversity explicitly connected diversity imperatives to working in teams. As Business Week described, “effective teamwork requires skill and understanding of how to manage diversity effectively. Indeed, diversity itself could be defined as

“being part of a global team”—a team that was multicultural, multifunctional, and multinational.197 In this imaginary, the whole world could be imagined as one team, whose members needed only to learn, through role play or through free associations, how to work across differences. As historian Nancy MacLean writes in her history of equal employment, the new model of diversity in corporations that supplemented Affirmative Action rationales in the

1980s resonated with corporate invocations of teamwork and innovation.198

One salient context for the importance of the group was the growing popularity of self- managing teams, as at Digital. The increasing importance of the Myers-Briggs as a measure of the psychological capacities needed for self-managing teams is suggested by the shifting priorities of McBer, the consulting firm whose motivation training I examined in chapter 2.

McBer, which had been acquired by the human resource consulting firm Hay Group in 1986, broadened their consulting work from its initial focus on individual motivation to examine the competencies involved in teamwork based on surveys of corporate clients that pinpointed the capacity to work in teams as their most critical human resource concern.199 In work for major companies like PepsiCo and Lego, McBer adopted the Myers-Briggs to develop a “team competency” model for self-managing teams that could evaluate people’s ability to manage

197 Wheeler, “Diversity.” 198 As Nancy MacLean writes, diversity training “fit with the appeal of teamwork: letting sparks fly could move stale work groups toward innovation in an ever more competitive environment.” MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 317. 199 McBer & Co, “Team Competencies Memos,” (1996), David McClelland Papers, Box 113, Harvard University Faculty Archives.

241 across differences.200 For McBer, as for the corporations like Digital who implemented new arrangements of teams, employees’ interpersonal skills and knowledge were treated as particularly crucial to self-managing teams.

Digital was not the only corporation who described their use of the Myers-Briggs as part of their larger commitment to diversity. As in Digital, telecommunications company US. West described their adoption of the Myers-Briggs as part of their larger investment in the corporate value of diversity. As U.S. West’s director of organization development declared in 1988, “the world is made up of people of all types, and we have to mirror our environment.” Companies could no longer take a “cookie-cutter approach” towards selecting managers, U.S. West declared; the “managers and leader of the future,” who would “come from a wide array of backgrounds,” instead needed to “represent our customers, our markets, our constituent base.”201

At the 1992 diversity symposium, a U.S. West executive described how the lessons from diversity training could apply to all kinds of work teams: “when a diverse work group gets through working out the interpersonal problems, I believe they can tackle anything.”202

The rhetoric and rationales of corporate executives demonstrate how corporate attention to diversity was justified according to the capacities associated with psychological capital, including capacities of motivation, intuition, and teamwork, while also eliding the historical legacies of racial and gender discrimination. At a 1992 symposium on diversity, an executive from computer firm Control Data Corporation described diversity initiatives as an adaptive,

200 McBer researchers drew on the Myers-Briggs introversion/extraversion scale to understand the psychosocial skills involved in “team orientation.” As part of this module, employees could be ranked on a spectrum from low team commitment—someone who saw the “team as a detriment to performance”—to high, someone who prioritized the happiness of the team as part of their personal pleasure. McBer & Co, “Self-Managing Team Competencies” (1992), David McClelland Papers, Box 113, Harvard University Faculty Archives. 201 Jim Fuller, “Businesses Finding Personality Tests are Useful Tools,” Star Tribune, April 18, 1988, 08E. 202 Alster, In Diversity is Strength.

242 competitive strategy that operated by demanding more out of people’s psychological capacities.

No longer were the “technical skills and professional competence which tended to be the limit of people’s capacities” enough, he declared: companies needed the “entire individual as well as the differences that make each of us unique.”203 The director of diversity management at Philip

Morris was quoted on this point in Business Week: “in organizations that value diversity, employees are more able to express creativity,” because “different perspectives contribute to creative problem-solving.” Productivity increases, she argued, when “employees perceive that

[they] have the full opportunity to achieve their goals.”204

In a 1992 symposium that brought together executives from major American companies, the white male executives of corporate America trumpeted diversity as a competitive advantage that could allow them to “capitalize on the new work force” identified by Workforce 2000.205

The Vice President of American Airlines waxed nostalgically about America’s historical industrial strength, built on “unlimited” natural and human resources—a “steady stream of able- bodied, dependable white men upon which our emerging industrial complex was dependent.”206

In rhetorically embodying the work ethic in white men, Workforce 2000 entirely neglected corporations’ own role in fostering exclusionary labor practices. Workforce 2000, took as its premise racial divisions in jobs, assuming that racial minorities held jobs in the low-waged service sector, rather than managerial positions. Drawing on racist assumptions about the lack of

203 Critical organizational sociologist Avery Gordon has argued that diversity management became a central zone for the very construction of “corporate culture,” which has now become a ubiquitous term. Framed as corporate culture, diversity projects enjoin employees to give all of themselves, including their racial identity, to the corporation. Avery Gordon describes these diversity projects as a form of governance in the Foucauldian sense, as strategies to arrange and organize the disposition of people. Gordon, “The Work of Corporate Culture.” 204 Wheeler, “Diversity.” 205 Judith Alster, ed., In Diversity is Strength: Capitalizing on the New Work Force; Report No. 994 (New York: Conference Board, 1992). 206 Alster, In Diversity is Strength.

243 motivation and work ethic of minority workers that I explored in chapter 2, Workforce 2000 cautioned that minority workers posed problems integrating into white workforce because of different “cultural values” towards work.207 This framing neglected how corporate claims to bring more minorities or women into managerial ranks sought to redress the very economic exclusions that corporations themselves helped to produce.208 In downplaying the profound inequality in the relationships between groups in American society, these corporate claims demonstrate the way that “differences” became detached from historically specific experiences of inequity and white supremacy, to instead became wedded to new business rationales for diversity.

Diversity was often defined according to the different psychological capacities that made up a workforce. In his 1990 article in Harvard Business Review, “From Affirmative Action to

Affirming Diversity” (which has been cited over 1000 times), Roosevelt defined diversity in multivalent terms, to encompass differences “not only in race, gender, creed, and ethnicity but also age, background, education, function, and personality differences.”209 Indeed, he included differences of personality and working style in this expansive understanding of diversity:

“[w]ithin any one organization, you might find…some who are inclined to push against authority, some who are very cautious with change, some with an entrepreneurial, ‘loner’ style, some who flourish in a team setting. And you would probably see women and men of several different races and ethnic groups…This mix is termed ‘diversity.’”210

207 Johnston, Workforce 2000, 115. 208 Shankar, Advertising Diversity; Green, Race on the Line. 209 R. Roosevelt Thomas, “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.” Harvard Business Review (March- April 1990): Reprint 90213, 12. 210 Thomas, Beyond Race and Gender, 11.

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Invocations of diversity also resonated with broader corporate strategies of

“diversification” in the 1980s, when mergers and acquisitions became an increasingly large part of the corporate landscape.211 Corporate executives applied similar rhetorical justification for these strategies of “diversification”—improving economic growth and competitiveness in the global marketplace—to justify diversity in its workforce.212 Although diversity engendered risks—chaos, tensions, conflicts—corporations described taking these risks as necessary for companies to remain adaptive and competitive in the global economy.213

Burgeoning corporate attention to diversity was connected both to the white backlash against Affirmative Action as well as shifts in marketing practices that sought to generate value from differences in lifestyles and increasingly fine-grained classification of consumers into marketing niches. At the same time as companies trumpeted the rhetorical value of diverse workforces, they also sought to find and cultivate marketing niches based on diverse sets of lifestyles and personality, including racial groups and sexual orientations. Value, for marketers, could derive precisely from the cultivation and celebration of “differences.” Corporate executives claimed that more diverse workforces allowed companies to tap into increasingly diverse and globalized consumer markets.214 As Business Week announced in 1996, the “most pressing, most immediate, and most clearly linked bottom-line argument” for the business case for diversity was the claim that more diverse workforces could tap into diverse, globalized

211 Management consultants encouraged business to pursue aggressive merger and acquisition strategies in the 1970s, arguing that diversification was necessary so companies could have different products at different stages in the “business lifestyle.” Louis Hyman, “Rethinking the Postwar Corporation,” in What’s Good for Business, eds. Kim Phillips-Fein and Julian Zelizer, 195-211 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 212 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity, 212. 213 Litvin, “The Discourse of Diversity,” 189. 214 Lynch, The Diversity Machine.

245 consumer markets and the growing spending power of the African-American community.215 This rationale was particularly salient for advertising and marketing firms, at a time of growing importance of “niche marketing,” which carved the mass consumer market up into more fine- grained niches based on demographic and psychological characteristics.216 Women and people of color advocated that they could best speak to these diverse markets, while corporate executives argued that access to “ethnic markets” could best be served by using the particular insights of

“diverse” individuals.217 As Business Week reported, companies could use African-Americans and Asian-Americans to market to African and Asian global consumer markets, respectively.218

The globalization of corporations and of consumer markets thus served as a crucial context for the corporations to make the business case for diversity, at the same time as it justified new arrangements of teams. American companies who implemented self-managing teams often invoked Japanese quality circles as a model—a group of workers who met regularly to identify and solve workplace problem, allocate tasks and implement solutions in realms ranging from occupational safety to product design, were credited by American management writers for Japan’s high production quality, economic growth, and trade competitiveness.219 In

215 Wheeler, “Diversity”; Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 216 Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic; Guadagnolo, “Segmenting America”; Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line. 217 In 1968, the federal government had held hearing to address discrimination in cultural industries, including marketing and advertising. In response to their recommendations to focus on training and promotion, industries like advertising developed training programs in the late 1960s to address racial disparities in the advertising industry. Many of these programs, however, were shuttered by the early 1970s, which companies attributed to the economic recession. Chambers, Madison Avenue and the Color Line. 218 Wheeler, “Diversity.” 219 Peter Drucker, “Behind Japan’s Success,” Harvard Business Review (Jan-Feb 1981): 83-90; Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, The Art of Japanese Management: Applications for American Executive (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).

246 addition, a growing body of literature on cross-cultural management used the Myers-Briggs to understand the differences in management styles between Japan and North America. In one management psychology study, researchers adopted the Myers-Briggs to understand the confusion faced by North American companies when Japan sent multiple teams to negotiate a deal. Researchers urged cross-cultural training for North American managers that incorporated training in psychological differences. They also encouraged companies to use the Myers-Briggs to build teams for negotiation that matched up with Japanese cognitive styles.220 The psychological capacity to “manage diversity” thus became a corporate concern against the backdrop of increasingly multinational companies, new arrangements of teams, and desire to tap into new consumer marketplaces.

By situating the Myers-Briggs team-building seminar in the context of this broader business case for diversity, we can better understand both the appeals, and the perils, of the alluring vision of the Myers-Briggs. The MBTI team-building workshops present a pleasing vision of a harmonious mosaic: after all, who doesn’t want to have better relations with coworkers and supervisors? Who doesn’t want their differences to be respected, to feel understood and recognized by coworkers? And what corporation wouldn’t want its workers to work together in ways that increased profits? Rather than focus on one common critique of the

Myers-Briggs—that it lacks scientific validity—this section instead invites us to probe the vision of addressing conflict and mitigating its harmful consequences to the corporation presented by the Myers-Briggs.221 The very fact that corporations described team-building and personality

220 Neil Abramson, Henry Lane, Hirohisa Nagai and Haruo Takagi, “A Comparison of Canadian and Japanese Cognitive Styles: Implications for Management Interaction,” Journal of International Business Studies 24, no. 3 (Third Quarter 1993): 575-587. For a discussion of cognitive styles, see chapter 3. 221 David Pittenger, “Cautionary Comments Regarding the MBTI,” Consulting Psychology Journal 57, no. 3 (2005): 210-221.

247 testing as part of their diversity initiatives indicates that the promises of Affirmative Action and equal opportunity became radically watered down, as MBTI practitioners rhetorically invoked

“diversity” of psychological types while largely evading race.222 Not only did this approach to understanding and managing different personality types elide race, but in presenting a harmonious vision of different psychological types working together, such seminars promised corporate profits and individual success while gliding over class and power relations that structured management.

4.5 Conclusion

This chapter has shown how corporate executives and consulting psychologists described the psychological capacity to “interact across differences” as a form of psychological capital developed from the encounter group developed at National Training Laboratory and at Esalen in the 1950s and 1960s, through to the diversity training seminar and the team building seminar of the 1980s and 1990s. Facilitators of team-building seminars and diversity trainers presented their expert guidance and their psychological training seminars as strategies to convert the conflict engendered by differences into productivity. The history of corporate rhetoric and practices around diversity in the late 1980s and early 1990s is crucial to understand the development of psychological capital. Indeed, diversity management served as a central site for the very construction of “corporate culture,” as social theorist Avery Gordon argues.223 The apparatus of personality tests, like the Myers-Briggs, combined with psychologically-oriented approaches to diversity training, have contributed to a particular vision of conflict, power, and difference in the corporation.

222 Carter, The Heart of Whiteness. 223 Gordon, “The Work of Corporate Culture.”

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“Differences” and “diversity” both held varied and contested meanings in the management training seminars and corporate rhetoric analyzed in this chapter. In diversity training, racial differences were treated as group characteristics, that influenced the way people behaved, thought, and felt in corporate spaces, even as the term “differences” rhetorically expanded to include differences of personality and lifestyle. For corporate executives, diversity became a positive buzzword that signaled corporate social responsibility, and the ability to compete in a globalized marketplace. Across the diversity training and team-building training described in this chapter, invocations of diversity often produced a flattened topographical map. Comparing lifestyle preferences to racial differences elided the imbalances of power that structure corporations and American life, as in the structural and economic power of whiteness. The failure of corporate training to address power, while worthy of critique, is not unexpected given how corporations are structured by multiple hierarchies of class, gender, and race. These dynamics of power were rarely discussed in management training seminars focused on the productive integration of differences into the machinery of corporate value.

To say that racism has psychological dimensions does not inherently necessitate downplaying the structural conditions of racism. Midcentury psychologists, such as Kurt Lewin,

Mamie Clark, and Kenneth Clark, sought to understand and change the psychological conditions that fostered racism, while recognizing the larger social structures that fostered racism. The

Martinician psychiatrist and social theorist Frantz Fanon offers another example of rich, socially grounded accounts of the psychic effects of racism.224

Nor is the problem in making efforts to increase the ranks of under-represented groups in corporate management, in instituting anti-racist training, or in attempting to make corporations

224 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2005 [1963]).

249 more inclusive. Indeed, the techniques and practices that I have been tracing in this chapter are also part of the genealogy of social justice movements and anti-racist organizing, at the same time as they are part of the genealogy of corporate diversity efforts.225 As Sara Ahmed argues, diversity workers in universities have strategically wielded the business case for diversity to accomplish social justice ends.226 Diversity works, Ahmed argues, precisely because it has these flexible valences and meanings. The rhetoric of diversity has operated precisely through its ability to change emotional registers, mobilized as at times a “business case,” and at times as social justice—and sometimes both at the same time.

The issue with trumpeting the rhetoric of diversity, as executives in the late 1980s and

1990s did, or instituting diversity statements, is that the rhetoric of diversity can allow organizations to absolve themselves from undertaking actual inclusion work. Diversity training, as its critics have argued, is a relatively easy-to-deploy organizational intervention that does not necessarily require instituting structural changes. More perniciously, sociologists have empirically demonstrated that one outcome of corporate diversity training can be lower representation of Black women in management positions.227 The kinds of differences valued in corporate diversity initiatives were those differences that could be easily absorbed into the corporate body, as Sara Ahmed has argued. Diversity initiatives admit differences, but only the differences that can be easily, and productively, assimilated into the larger organization without making those in power too uncomfortable.228

225 Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 226 Sara Ahmed, “The Language of Diversity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 235-256. 227 Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity. 228 Ahmed, On Being Included.

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As this chapter, and the dissertation as a whole has shown, corporate psychological techniques like the psychological training seminar have played a powerful role in shaping people’s experiences and encounters with corporations, work, and each other. Corporations became pedagogical and epistemic sites for understanding the meanings of race, psychology, and prejudice. Participants in management training seminars were enrolled as ethnographers of their co-workers: they were encouraged to jot down notes on how coworkers’ differed from and resembled themselves; they watched videos that taught them the meaning of racial, cultural, and national differences. From the interracial encounter groups to unconscious bias training today, training seminars have served as sites for people, like the middle managers of corporate America, to learn about the meanings of race and difference. Thirty years ago, the “business case for diversity” was made in the pages of business trade press, in the management training videos and in the work of consulting psychologists who sold techniques to teach managers to interact across differences. These lessons continue to shape the debates and politics of diversity in contemporary organizations—including universities.

The psychological orientation of diversity training examined in this chapter continues to influence anti-racist efforts in the contemporary moment. The dominant paradigm in corporate diversity training today is “unconscious bias training,” which almost invariably incorporates a psychological test of unconscious bias. The best known test of unconscious bias, the Implicit

Association Test (IAT), was developed by cognitive psychologists Anthony Greenwald,

Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek in 1995.229 Available online since the late 1990s, this computer-based psychological test detects the strength of individuals’ associations between two

229 Although the IAT’s framework draws on the earlier traditions of psychology of prejudice, IAT understands the “racist” as a liberal, rational citizen, ruled not by emotional hostility, but by cognitive biases that result in miscategorizations, making them unaware of their own biases. Jeffrey Yen, Kevin Durrheim and Romin Tafarodi, “’I’m Happy to Own my Implicit Biases’: Public Encounters with the Implicit Association Test,” British Journal of Social Psychology (2018): DOI:10.1111/bjso.12245.

251 concepts by measuring the speed of the reaction as the test-taker matches concepts—Black or white faces to positive or negative words. An entire corporate training industry has developed around unconscious bias training, based on the claims that racism is rooted in unconscious, individual biases, which can be measured through the IAT.230 The premise of the Implicit

Association Test of the pervasive nature of unconscious bias has made it a popular form of evidence in employment discrimination law as a liberal strategy to challenge conservative rulings around employment discrimination.231 Its use in employment law illustrates the continuing importance of the courts in shaping the meanings of race. Affirmative Action and Equal

Employment Opportunity legislation influenced the context of personality testing, as in the

Griggs v. Duke case, and the rationales for diversity, as in the Bakke case.

The widespread use of the Implicit Association Test in the courts and in diversity training is one logical outgrowth of the materials examined in this chapter that emphasized the psychological dimensions of racism. Through its online availability, the IAT has become, in the words of critical psychologist Jeffrey Yen, a “powerful diagnostic, truth-telling technology, provoking a great deal of self-reflection and sometimes confession.”232 It thus heralds an

230 An article on unconscious bias training in the wake of a racist incident at Starbucks suggests that the implicit bias approach is popular because it doesn’t “point fingers. Jena McGregor, “Starbucks is Turning to a Type of Training that Really ‘Took Off’ After Ferguson,” The Chicago Tribune, April 17, 2018, http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-starbucks-unconscious-bias-training-20180417-story.html. 231 Indeed, in the wake of the retrenchment of Affirmative Action I have been chronicling here, IAT had value in the courts in broadening Affirmative Action beyond the burden of proven, conscious discrimination that the court had implemented. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, courts had narrowed employment discrimination to proven, conscious discrimination, placing a much stricter burden of proof on claims of employment discrimination. Through claims that the IAT was an empirical psychological test that could measure pervasive implicit bias, liberals could challenge the high bar set by conservative approaches. Legal scholar Jonathan Kahn cautions that despite the value of the IAT, the framework of implicit bias risks “biologizing” and “essentializing” racism, rooting racism in our very biology, while also erasing the specific legacy of racism in America through a thin understanding of race. Kahn, Race on the Brain. 232 In the claims that the IAT makes on its users, calling on them to name their own unconscious bias, the IAT can function in a “non-performative way”: declaring that one has implicit bias is a declaration of being a racist that marks people as “not racists”, because one’s self-awareness, recognition, and confession itself absolves the state one professes to claim. Yen et al, “‘I’m Happy to Own my Implicit Biases,’” 10.

252 appropriate end to a dissertation devoted to understanding the myriad ways that personality tests have been deployed to provide insight into personalities, as well as to intervene in the arrangements of work in late 20th-century America.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

In March, 2018, revelations about Facebook’s involvement with marketing company

Cambridge Analytica propelled the politics of corporate personality testing to popular media attention. I can imagine no better bookend to this dissertation than the revelations about

Cambridge Analytica. At the heart of the public scandal over the political uses of personal data is the personality test whose history has been told in this dissertation. A personality test based on the Big Five personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—and administered to Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers, provided Cambridge

Analytica data to categorize 87 million people, mostly Americans, into psychographic niches— psychological categories that became the basis for targeted advertisements that allegedly influenced the 2016 American presidential election.1

Cambridge Analytica’s bold assertions of its abilities to probe Americans’ psyches are, to be sure, overblown.2 But the very fact that this claim would resonate with American political parties and marketing companies underlines one of the central arguments in this dissertation: that the epistemology, legitimacy, and politics of personality testing in America have been inextricably bound up in corporate logics. Moreover, as a research firm that draws on personality tests to consult for corporations and political organizations, Cambridge Analytica represents the apotheosis of the popularity of consulting psychologists traced throughout this dissertation.

1 Luke Stark, “Algorithmic Psychometrics and the Scalable Subject,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 2 (April 2018): 204-231; Kira Lussier, “How Corporations Convinced us Personality Tests are Super Fun,” Slate, April 9, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/how-corporations-convinced-us-that-personality-tests-are-fun.html. 2 Antonio Garcia Martinez, “The Noisy Fallacies of Psychographic Targeting,” Wired, March 20, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/the-noisy-fallacies-of-psychographic-targeting.

253 254

When I began researching this dissertation, I started with a set of questions located in the history of science about the politics of knowledge and expertise: Why and how had personality tests become a privileged tool for understanding the psyche? What claims about human nature and society shaped the psychological categories embedded in these personality tests? How did psychological expertise become a prominent idiom of public life in post-1960 America? As I located psychological expertise in the world of corporate management, I was led to an additional set of questions: How and why had management theorists drawn on psychology? How did management theorists and consultants respond to, and alter, the landscape of American corporations between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s? How did broader cultural and economic changes influence management, work and psychology?

In addition to these scholarly questions, the genesis of the dissertation also lay in my own discovery of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator through the online world of forums and blogs dedicated to this personality typing system. Why were so many anonymous Internet strangers bound together by the Myers-Briggs? How had these psychological categories come to shape people’s sense of themselves and their social world? Why was I drawn to its promises to tell truths about myself, even as I retained a deep skepticism about its claims?

Born out of this braiding of psychology, management and selfhood, “Personality,

Incorporated” has examined personality tests and training seminars as corporate techniques. I have not asked how well personality tests represented—or failed to represent—the truth of personality, nor have I tried to intervene in debates over the scientific legitimacy or accuracy of these personality tests and techniques. Instead, I aimed to uncover the way that personality tests operated and intervened in the world of corporate management, by situating personality tests in the broader cultural, political, and economic landscape that made such techniques legible for management practitioners. My focus on the braided techniques and capacities that compose

255 psychological capital bridges approaches in science studies that investigate scientific practices with scholarship on capitalism and value.3

This dissertation has provided an account of the twinned histories of corporate psychological techniques and the psychological capacities elicited by these techniques. I showed how consulting psychologists, such as David McClelland, Weston Agor, and Price Cobbs, convinced many American corporations to adopt personality tests and psychological training seminars based on the promise that they could measure and mobilize their employees’ psychological capacities for the sake of corporate value and employee empowerment. I traced the histories of several personality tests—including the Thematic Apperception Test and the Myers-Briggs Type

Indicator—and the psychological training seminars in which these tests appeared. I showed how psychological training seminars became pedagogical spaces: participants in motivation training seminars read clips from the writings of Abraham Maslow and David McClelland; diversity training seminars encouraged participants to learn about the meaning of racial differences, thus serving as sites for circulating ideas about the meaning of race. My interest in foregrounding techniques, capacities, and psychological capital meant that this dissertation has not focused primarily on the intentions of consulting psychologists, or the experiences of test users or participants in training seminars. Instead, I aimed to show how an assemblage of expertise, practices, and rhetoric around psychological capital developed from the early 1960s to the mid

1990s.

This dissertation made two main arguments. First, it argued that personality tests, as used in corporate management, are best understood not only as techniques of measuring personality

3 Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Michelle Murphy, The Economization of Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

256 traits, conceived as static, but of mobilizing and channeling these very capacities as forms of psychological capital. Participants in motivation training who took the Thematic Apperception

Test, for instance, were explicitly encouraged to imagine the business success that would result from tapping into their achievement motivation. Secondly, this dissertation argued that corporate management became a central site for the production and circulation of psychological knowledge. Corporations have shaped the contours of what counts as psychological knowledge.

The main contribution of this dissertation is to establish “psychological capital” as a distinct form of value that came to prominence from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. As an analytic term, psychological capital refers to a form of value that accrued from humans’ psychological capacities, elicited through psychological techniques of testing and training. As a historically- specific form of value, psychological capital became an explicit and prominent form of value in late 20th-century corporate America through the interventions of consulting psychologists, personality tests, and corporate management practices. I have located psychological capital in late 20th-century American corporations, against the backdrop of the particular circumstances of

American cultural and economic history that include the historical transition to a “knowledge economy,” the decentralization and globalization of large corporations, the impact of the civil rights movement, desegregation, and Affirmative Action legislation, and the impact of feminism in the workplace.

Each chapter of the dissertation took up a particular capacity that comprised psychological capital. Chapter 2 focused on the capacity for motivation, excavating a historically specific understanding of the work ethic that braided the motive towards achievement with the self- actualization motive. In chapter 3, I examined intuition as a visionary, creative capacity for perceiving the future, which reinforced notions of the visionary executive and fostered new gendered norms in management. My last chapter examined the capacity to “interact across

257 differences,” which sought to teach managers the capacity to interact across racial and personality differences in the context of business concern with the value of diversity. Together, these chapters combine to capture the psychological, affective, and social dimensions of psychological capital.

One major theme threading through these three chapters, and a theme that continues to haunt the contemporary moment, is the claim that the workplace could and should be a primary site for satisfying psychological needs. Psychologists and management practitioners alike argued that for employees, satisfying these psychological needs—for fulfillment, empowerment, or creativity—was not opposed to, but in fact was compatible with and necessary for the operations of corporate capitalism. Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization, introduced in chapter 2, was one important origin point for the claim that the corporate workplace could be a primary site to satisfy psychological needs, which influenced strategies of job redesign and corporate motivation training. The intuition consultants depicted in chapter 3 sold intuition as an antidote to stifling corporate bureaucracy that could bring creativity, and even spirituality, into corporate life. The corporate diversity programs featured in chapter 4 described the workplace as a site to transcend racial divides and foster individual empowerment, through celebrating individual differences. As a whole, this dissertation has traced a prominent strand of management that sought to intervene in work to make it more psychologically fulfilling, in ways that promised to benefit the company and the employees alike.

5.1 Contemporary Stakes and Future Directions

Although the historical arc of my dissertation ends in the mid-1990s, the importance of psychological capital continues to resonate in the contemporary moment. The increasing prominence and public attention of the “gig economy”—where workers are more likely to be

258 contractors or freelancers, without benefits and attachment to particular companies— makes psychological capital especially important. To succeed in the gig economy, individuals are encouraged to be flexible, self-motivated, and creative; to “hustle” to cultivate their psychological capital in an entrepreneurial mode.4 In 2015, the Center for Creative Leadership, an organization profiled in chapter 3, published a report on the role of leadership development programs in cultivating “psychological capital.”5 Inspired by the field of positive psychology, the report defined psychological capital as constituted by positive psychological capacities—hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism—that combine into the catchy acronym “HERO.”6 These contemporary management materials understand psychological capital as a form of value composed of positive psychological capacities that can be trained and cultivated, through techniques that included mindfulness and self-help books. These contemporary approaches to management development also gesture to the increasing prominence of other capacities that could be productively explored through the lens of psychological capital: hope, optimism, resilience, and the related concept of “grit,” which have become prominent subjects of psychological research, self-help books, and policy interventions.7

In addition to questions about the contemporary trajectories of psychological capital, my research also led me to questions about its geographical specificity. The psychological

4 Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018); Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Day of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Lester Spence, Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015). 5 Marian Ruderman and Cathleen Clerkin, Developing Leadership by Building Psychological Capital (Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership Research Report, 2015). 6 Fred Luthans, Carolyn Youssef, and Bruce Avolio, Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2007). 7 Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016); Orit Halpern and Gökçe Günel, “Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope,” The Fibreculture Journal 29 (2013): 1-23.

259 techniques and management strategies I have explored all had important transnational roots and itineraries: achievement motivation training, for instance, began in India, as a project connected to international development. In addition to its adoption in motivation training, the Thematic

Apperception Test was also adopted by Martinician psychiatrist Frantz Fanon to understand the psychic effects of colonization. In another transnational itinerary, the looping interactions between Japan and American management offers one future avenue for exploration. In the late

1960s, a Japanese human resource firm translated the Myers-Briggs into Japanese and began using it in management development and career counselling. In turn, American management writers admired Japanese management as a model for American management. Moreover, the globalized nature of consumer and labor markets became a salient context for corporate attention to diversity. In the same way that historians of capitalism have advocated for attention to the geographical and historical specificity of capitalisms, while also attending to its shared features, investigations into the transnational circulations of psychological capital would be similarly productive for historians of capitalism.8

As presented in this study, psychological capital offers a generative analytic that can be used to analyze other sites where psychology, value, and management collide. One such site is behavioral economics, a subfield of economics that draws on psychology to understand and intervene in individuals’ economic behavior. Policy interventions that attempt to “nudge” individuals to engage in desirable economic behaviors—like saving for retirement—highlight the precise combination of psychology, power, and value at stake in psychological capital.9 Another site to locate and study psychological capital is corporate wellness and mental health programs,

8 Mira Wilkins, “Multinational Enterprises and the Varieties of Capitalism,” Business History Review 84, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 638-645. 9 Natasha Dow Schull and Caitlin Zaloom, “The Shortsighted Brain: Neuroeconomics and the Governance of Choice in Time,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 4 (2011): 515-538.

260 initiatives that offer productive sites to extend my analysis of “psychological capital.” Policy documents and corporate reports on workplace mental health initiatives define mental health as the capacity to work productivity—a capacity that grounds an individual’s ability to work while also wedding it to and the economic health of the corporation. Such documents depict mental health as economically valuable, while presenting mental illness as an economic burden. In the corporate imaginary, “wellness” is a positive affective state that encompasses mental and physical health and enlists people—as consumers, workers, or clients—into taking responsibility for their wellbeing.10

The capacities I have chosen to highlight in this dissertation still remain some of the most visible manifestations of psychological capital. The notion that work should be a source of pleasure, embodied by the popular phrase “do what you love,” reflects the continuing prominence of the attitude toward work explored in chapter 2. Best-selling popular psychology books, like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, reflects how intuition has continued to be celebrated and often sutured to corporate valuing of innovation and the “creative destruction” of capitalism.11

Corporate mission statements continue to justify diversity and inclusion initiatives as investments in human capital, for the sake of global competitiveness. Organizations (including universities) respond to racist incidents by holding training seminars featuring psychological tests of unconscious bias.

In addition to the continued importance of these capacities, the management theories and theorists that populate this dissertation continue to animate contemporary management practices

10 Catherine Call, Robyn Gerdes and Kristen Robinson, Health and Wellness Research Study (Washington, DC: Social Dynamics LLC & US Department of Labor, 2009). 11 Megan Brown, “Survival at Work: Flexibility and Adaptability in American Corporate Culture,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 5 (2003): 713-733.

261 and pedagogy, making this project important to understand the history and political stakes of contemporary management. For instance, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, discussed in chapter 2, continues to dominate contemporary management theories of motivation.12 Kurt

Lewin has been an important intellectual influence on “change management.”13

For millions of North Americans, personality tests, management training seminars, and business books have served as key sites to encounter psychology: corporate personality tests have become part of the cultural lexicon. I have filed away hundreds of links to online articles celebrating, condemning, or parodying personality tests.14 Despite attempts by its publisher to assert rules and controls limiting the use of the Myers-Briggs, for example, through copyright law and accreditation standards, the Myers-Briggs constantly exceeds these boundaries.15

Anyone with Internet access can take an unsanctioned version of the test online, from the comfort of home, and then discuss results on Internet forums dedicated to typology, which raised a different set of questions.

When I tell friends, relatives, or acquaintances about my dissertation topic, I am accustomed to receiving nods of recognition—a recognition that veers from skepticism (“those tests are all meaningless, right?”) to enthusiasm, as Myers-Briggs acolytes ask me to share my own Myers-Briggs type. In addition to the writings of consulting psychologists and the manuals

12 Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard, “Triangulating Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: The Construction of Management Studies’ Famous Pyramid,” Academy of Management Proceedings 2017, no. 1 (Nov 2017): https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.2017.14177. 13 Bill Cooke and Bernard Burnes, “Kurt Lewin’s Field Theory: A Review and Reevaluation,” International Journal of Management Reviews 15 (2013): 408-425. 14 Daniel Mallory Ortberg, “Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m an Introvert,” The Toast, November 10, 2014, http://the-toast.net/2014/11/10/sorry-murdered-everyone-im-introvert/. 15 Peter Geyer, “Quantifying Jung: The Origin and Development of the MBTI,” (Masters thesis: University of Melbourne, 1995); Karin Garrety, “Beyond ISTJ: A Discourse-Analytic Study of the Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 45, no. 2 (2007): 218-234; Ian Davidson, “The Ambivert: A Failed Attempt at a Normal Personality,” Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences 53 (2017): 313-331.

262 of psychological tests, these earmarked scraps of conversations provide evidence, however anecdotal, for the continuing resonance of corporate personality tests. For example, while sitting through introductions in a beginners’ painting class—a class I took to escape thinking about my dissertation—at least three different people announced that they were taking the class to tap into their “right brain.” These intimate circulations and “ordinary affects” illuminate the continued significance of personality tests.16

It is not my intention to criticize wholesale these claims that work should be meaningful, or that valuing diversity has positive returns. Is it not preferable to enjoy your work, to get along with your coworkers, and express your creativity in work? Should we not want are corporations to hire with the concern for diversity and to offer anti-racist training? Rather, I have sought to call attention to the way that these positive values are bound up in entangled genealogies of corporate management practices. The conditions of academic labor and the contemporary university are directly implicated in the capacities and techniques explored in this dissertation, including the attitudes towards work, the celebration of creative, innovative thought, and the organizational value of diversity. 17 In her “reparative history of imposter syndrome,” historian of science Dana Simmons grapples with the non-innocent entanglements between the idea of

“imposter syndrome,” which has permeated academic culture, and the politics of motivational psychology.18 As an academic, I too am thoroughly bound up in the psychological capacities whose contours I outlined in this dissertation: I consider myself to be a motivated subject who has internalized the work ethic; an intuitive subject, who channels creativity. I read productivity

16 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 17 Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011). 18 Dana Simmons, “Imposter Syndrome: A Reparative History,” Engaging Science, Technology & Society 2 (2016): 106-127.

263 blogs with advice on cultivating intrinsic motivation. I treat work as an extra-economic vocation that should bring fulfillment, meaning, and pleasure. I write diversity statements as part of job applications that partakes in the rhetoric of valuing diversity.

Even as these psychological techniques and the capacities they cultivate have become dominant, I do not mean to suggest that they are totalizing. People reserve parts of themselves from work, carve out their own boundaries, and adopt tactics of resistance or refusal.19 Bubbling under the surface of the dissertation are figures who refute or challenge the tools and techniques of the psychologist—“killjoy figures,” in the words of Sara Ahmed—who disrupt or resist the economies and cultures of psychological capital.20 In chapter 2, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and psychologist Matina Horner found subjects whose motives failed to be recognized by the protocols of the Thematic Apperception Test. Chapter 3 found employees who launched lawsuits against employers who made them sit through “spiritual” management seminars. Chapter 4 found participants in diversity training who criticized its assumptions about white fragility.

Even before the revelations of Cambridge Analytica came to popular attention, America had been in the midst of a backlash against corporate uses of personality tests, particularly the

Myers-Briggs. Critics caution against the infiltration of personality tests into workplaces as an invasion of privacy. 21 The concern about digital privacy engendered by the large-scale privacy breaches of Cambridge Analytica is a logical outgrowth of half a century of concerns about the uses to which corporate psychological tests have been put.22 These revelations might provoke us

19 Kathi Weeks advocates for a refusal of the work ethic, and carving out a sphere “against work.” Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 20 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 21 David Pittenger, “Cautionary Comments Regarding the MBTI,” Consulting Psychology Journal 57, no. 3 (2005): 210-221. 22 Sarah Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

264 to reconsider our relationship to the humble, yet mighty, tools for understanding, measuring, cultivating, and valuing psychological capital in ways traced in this dissertation.

265

Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Ohio (AHAP). - Adkins, Dorothy - Bradford, Leland. - Maslow, Abraham. - McClelland, David. - National Training Laboratories. - Rapparlie, John. - Sells, Saul.

Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Cambridge, Massachusetts. - Lawrence, Paul.

Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware. - Dichter, Ernest.

Harvard University Faculty Archives. - McClelland, David.

Isabel Briggs Myers Library. Center for the Application of Psychological Type, Gainesville, Florida (CAPT).

John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, Duke University. Durham, North Carolina. - McGraw-Hill Marketing Information Center. - J. Walter Thompson Marketing Information Center. - Wunderman Archives.

Rockefeller Archive Centre. Sleepy Hollow, New York. - Ford Foundation. - Rockefeller Foundation.

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I would like to thank the Business History Review for allowing me to reproduce parts of an article originally published in the journal in 2016. Kira Lussier, “Managing Intuition,” Business History Review 90, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 708-718.