Western Electric Company near Chicago. This study one of the most famous management experiments ever reported was conducted by Elton Mayo and his associates from the Harvard Business School. The decade-long series of experiments started out as traditional scientific management examinations of the relationship between work environment and productivity. But the experimenters because they were initially unable to explain the results of their findings, literally stumbled on a finding that today seems so obvious-that factories and other work situations are first of all social situations. The workers, as Mary Parker Follett had suggested a decade earlier, were more responsive to peer pres sure than to management controls. The Hawthorne studies are generally considered to be the genesis of the human relations school of management thought, providing the first major empirical challenge to the scientific management notion that the worker was primarily an economic animal who would work solely for money.