Emotions at Work – Working on Emotions. Germany, 1870 - 1970

How does a human being feel at work? Do feelings like boredom and fatigue impinge on work performance? How do human relations affect work output and how can they themselves be worked upon?

With the advent of industrialization, these and related questions were given increasing attention. On the one hand, the momentum of the labor movement brought about the question how the emotion of ‘class hatred’ could be replaced by a feeling of belonging to the ‘factory family’. On the other hand, the rising interest in the emotions of the workers can be attributed to efforts to increase work performance: The rationalization movement of the 1920s was the founding moment of the idea that the ‘happy’ worker is all the more ‘productive’. The constitution of this link gave rise to the development of entirely new scientific disciplines. Occupational science, labor sociology as well as work psychology started to create knowledge about how the inner life of the worker could be reconciled and interwoven with the requirements of industrial production. The project analyzes this development until the 1970s pursuing the following key questions: How were emotions conceptionalized in the above mentioned disciplines? How did this scientific knowledge translate into corporate emotional norms and practices? How did processes of psychologization and work performance enhancement change the evaluation and expression of emotions at work? These questions will be answered by using publications from the occupational sciences, source material from corporate archives as well as advisory literature and training manuals for interpersonal skills development in companies.