| This dissertation examines the professional identity, managerial ideology, and management strategies of federal personnel administrators during a period of rapid expansion in the American administrative state. In their pursuit of professional status and administrative authority, public personnel managers struggled to define an objective science of administration which would increase worker productivity and establish a modern merit-based civil service. By the end of the 1930s, they had adopted the human relations school of management, already popular in business firms, as their professional "body of knowledge." As human relations advocates, personnel administrators encouraged employee participation in management and the development of a personal relationship between supervisors and their workers. By using social science knowledge to analyze worker behavior, managers hoped to objectify management theory and thus legitimate their professional status.;Issues involving class, race, and gender, however, threatened the professional status of personnel managers. These managers conflicted with unions over bargaining and striking rights, arguing that these rights were unavailable to civil servants whose salaries were paid by public taxpayers. To placate unions, personnel administrators set up employee councils and encouraged employee "participation" in management. The employment of increasing numbers of women and minorities during World War Two forced personnel managers to confront another conflict: the contradiction between the theory of a gender-and color-blind merit system and the reality of sex and race discrimination. Despite rules prohibiting both types of discrimination, the human relations management strategies employed by personnel managers reinforced, rather than eliminated, a gender and racial division of labor. Efforts by personnel managers to create a modern merit system and to adopt new scientific management practices masked the degree to which class, gender, and racial divisions persisted into the postwar era. Although personnel managers expanded career opportunities for middle-level managers in the federal bureaucracy, they failed to create an objective science of administration. Hence their desire for full professional authority remained unfulfilled, as did their desire to establish a meritocracy in the administrative state. |
