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 ‘The problem is organising time, not work.’ Exploring Working Time Regulations and the Determination of ‘Scientific Wages’ in Ahmedabad through the Archives of the Wellcome Collection, London

How do we organize working time? This question has repeatedly come to the fore, particularly at historical junctures of technological change. Following the Second World War, countries in both the Global North and South sought to find new answers to problems of human–machine interactions. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations’ studies on sociotechnical systems— today in the archives of the Wellcome Collection, London—have recently attracted renewed attention.1 As questions on the future of work re-emerge, it may be useful to look back at the past.

The Birth of a Discipline

The Tavistock Institute in London was at the forefront of promoting ‘Action Research’—an approach building on the analysis of active transformation of the workplace rather than on the observation of existing patterns. Established in 1947 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation as a centre of research for scholars who were working together at the Tavistock Clinic, it had initially been a psychotherapeutic institution for soldiers during the Second World War. During the same year, the institute began publishing the Human Relations journal for management studies, with a particular focus on ‘small-group studies’. The journal still exists today. In one of their first and most prominent studies, published in 1951, founders Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth examined the workplace organization of British coal mines.2 This study developed a theory of socio-technical systems, which aimed to bring about better co-action between machines and humans in production based on an interdisciplinary framework of psychology, engineering science, and sociology. According to their findings, productivity could be enhanced by reducing monotonous, subdivided tasks and instead creating small groups of workers performing a wider range of tasks. From these findings, they developed four general principles. (1) ‘Whole tasks’ enable each group to cover the entire production cycle, if possible, the aim being to create (2) ‘meaningful tasks’ for each individual, based on (3) ‘adaptability’—the best possible use of technology. Across this cycle of work, each group should enjoy (4) the ‘responsible autonomy’ to self-manage, thereby reducing direct supervisory intervention.

Theory into Practice

The institute’s findings were applied not only in the UK, but in various parts of the world. In 1952, Tavistock received a request from Gautam Sarabhai, chairman of the Calico Mills in Ahmedabad, India, to undertake a commission in his textile loom-shed. As the Sarabhai family intended to introduce automatic machinery at certain points in their production line, they sought the expertise of Tavistock’s researcher A. K. Rice to reorganize work shifts, supervisory structures, and corresponding wage regimes. In India, such processes had been highly contentious. Under the label ‘rationalization’, the 1950s marked a period of heightened strike waves, as workers feared that automation would lead to job losses and reduced income. To prevent any unrest in Ahmedabad, the second largest textile production hub in India, Rice was commissioned to implement measures that would humanize the workplace and lead to the acceptance of technological change. Instead, however, the project further aggravated existing conflicts and eventually had to be stopped two years after its inception due to worker protests. It was only in the weaving department that it slowly led to systems of incentive pay.

The effective termination of the experiment was unfortunate for the Tavistock Institute, as it had been hoped that the project would attract the attention of the Ford Foundation in the US, which would have ‘taken a major interest in the development of community projects’.3 Aspirations to attract a broader pool of funding opportunities by inserting the institute’s work into larger debates on the role of management in development did not come to fruition either.

Source: The Calico Mills, 73rd report. Balance sheet and profit and loss account. 1 April 1952 to 31 March 1953

Workload Studies and the Indian Developmental State

If we consider the reordering of the production line in Ahmedabad to be a failed experiment, how are the archival sources of the Tavistock study still relevant to our understanding of conflicts over working time and wages? In my project, rather than reading these materials as indications of a change in technological regimes—one that was only partially realized—I use the study as an indication of how negotiations around working time and wages shifted amid tensions between employers, workers, and the emerging Indian developmental state. The study’s design both opened up and closed down new possibilities of what workplace interactions could have looked like.

At the time, workload studies were being employed to focus on the arrangement of working time and job roles. This was part of a broader tendency to depoliticize wage matters by subsuming them into the ‘rationalized’ processes of running machinery’. Several industry-wide agreements in the Ahmedabad textile sector subsequently introduced ‘scientific wages’ as a category of pay bargaining. This opened the door for a political shift away from needs-based wage calculations and towards greater emphasis on work processes. Therefore, the growing importance of workload studies within negotiations meant unions had less and less scope to operate outside such studies.

In the Indian context, these opportunities for workers to participate in the design of studies were already limited by the nature of the interaction between the Tavistock Institute and the Ahmedabad workers. Applying a postcolonial perspective through textual analysis, Banerjee and Bloomfield describe the dynamics between Rice and his study participants as an ‘imposition of Western systems of knowledge about order/organization onto non-Western contexts’.4 In their view, Rice did not take into account local modes of production, organization, and workplace relations.

The tendency of the Ahmedabad project to limit workers’ participation rather than improve it becomes particularly clear when we compare it with similar projects that took place in cooperation with the Tavistock Institute in Scandinavia and Germany twenty years later, and which have been studied by various sociologists.5 On the one hand, decreased direct pressure from outside managers promised more flexibility and autonomy for workers in terms of decision-making about workplace-related matters. On the other hand, the continuous erosion of boundaries between internal and external forms of control over work also ran the risk of higher levels of self-exploitation and intensification of work.6 Incentivizing pay and offering training programmes increased the potential for higher earnings, but also higher workloads.

Influence on Management Strategies and Industrial Relations

However, rather than reading A. K. Rice’s study as applying Tavistock’s interventions on ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ shop floors to a ‘traditional’ context in Ahmedabad, it should be seen as a moment when the field of management science became co-constituted by both management and workers. Revisiting Rice’s work and his contributions to the field of organizational change, the business scholars Antonio Sama and Jean Neumann have recently labelled him a ‘forgotten giant’7 who had significant influence on the Tavistock Institute and beyond. When his work was finally published in 1958, it stood out as the institute’s only ever project in the Global South during the Cold War. Simultaneously, it put Ahmedabad on the global map of management studies. Most notably, it became one of the main reasons for setting up the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in 1961 in cooperation with Harvard University.8 The IIM eventually became an important entry point for several research collaborations on management practices between scholars from India and abroad. The divergences between management scholarship and its fragmented application on the shop floor in Ahmedabad are in themselves important processes which we can map in the sources. They hint at how the study material served different functions on the shop floor and within the emerging field of management science. In wage negotiations between workers and textile mill owners, it became a basis for securing employer control over the labour process. Within emerging knowledge institutions, it embedded particular ideas of ‘human resource development’ in curricula that reached far beyond the shop floor. Based on the Tavistock Institute’s influence, such courses aimed to conceptualize management strategies in order to prepare people ‘for adult participation in political processes, particularly as citizens in a democracy’.9 The aim of increasing wages on the basis of results was eventually included in the Second Five Year Plan. As such, research projects like the Tavistock’s experiment significantly shaped not only management education, but also the Indian state’s framework of industrial relations for economic development.


Title quote from: Wellcome Collection, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations Archive, Field notes of the ‘Ahmedabad Experiment’ conducted by A. K. Rice, No. 8, 15 Dec. 1953.

Feature image: Calico Mills chimney from distance; Baba Lului’s Mosque in foreground. Photo by Imfarhad7, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  1. e.g. Kena Wani, ‘Pedagogies of Development, Conceptions of Efficiency: Modern Managerialism in Industrial Ahmedabad, 1950s–1960s’, Enterprise & Society, FirstView (2023), 1–34. []
  2. E. L. Trist and K. W. Bamforth, ‘Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An Examination of the Psychological Situation and Defences of a Work Group in Relation to the Social Structure and Technological Content of the Work System’, Human Relations, 4/1 (1951), 3–38. []
  3. Wellcome Collection, Tavistock Institute of Human Relations Archive (hereafter TIHR), SA/TIH/B/2/4/1/3, Eric Trist to A. K. Rice, 23 Feb. 1954. []
  4. Anindita Banerjee and Brian Bloomfield, ‘Disorganizing through Texts: The Case of A. K. Rice’s Account of Socio-Technical Systems Theory’, in Consuelo Vásquez and Timothy Kuhn (eds.), Dis/organization as Communication: Exploring the Disordering, Disruptive and Chaotic Properties of Communication (London, 2019), 172–96, at 174. []
  5. Action research of this kind was particularly interested in reordering the workplace and setting up new institutions, such as works councils, in order to enhance worker participation along with overall productivity and efficiency. See Werner Fricke and Hildo Wagner (eds.), Demokratisierung der Arbeit: Neuansätze für Humanisierung und Wirtschaftsdemokratie (Hamburg, 2012). []
  6. Sarah Nies and Dieter Sauer, ‘Arbeit—mehr als Beschäftigung? Zur arbeitssoziologischen Kapitalismuskritik‘, in Klaus Dörre, Dieter Sauer, and Volker Wittke (eds.), Kapitalismustheorie und Arbeit: Neue Ansätze soziologischer Kritik (Frankfurt am Main, 2012), 34–62. However, it is important to keep in mind the distinction and tension outlined by Thompson between the localization of power under ‘managerial control’ (analyses of agency) versus ‘workplace regimes’ (analyses of structure). Diane van den Broek and Paul Thompson, ‘Managerial Control and Workplace Regimes: An Introduction’, Work, Employment and Society, 24/3 (2010), 1–12. []
  7. Antonio Sama and Jean E. Neumann, ‘Rice, Albert Kenneth: Forgotten Giant, Shaper of a Field’, in David B. Szabla (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers (Cham, 2021), 1455–78. []
  8. Lourens van Haaften, ‘Management Science and Nation Building: The Sociotechnical Imaginary behind the Making of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 58/3 (2021), 333–59; Dinyar Phiroze Patel, ‘Making Swadeshi Managers: The Antecedents of Professional Management Education in India, 1860s–1950s’, Enterprise & Society, 25/2 (2024), 454–85; Wani, ‘Pedagogies of Development’. []
  9. Frederick Harbison and Charles A. Myers, Education, Manpower, and Economic Growth: Strategies of Human Resource Development (New York, 1964), 2. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Catharina Hänsel (October 10, 2024).  ‘The problem is organising time, not work.’ Exploring Working Time Regulations and the Determination of ‘Scientific Wages’ in Ahmedabad through the Archives of the Wellcome Collection, London. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved March 25, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12g2x


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Catharina Hänsel

Catharina is a PhD student at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies of the University of Göttingen. Her project explores the emergence of wage regulation during the 1940s in India, with special emphasis on the textile industry of Ahmedabad.

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