Victor Seow, “The Human Factor: Work as Science in Twentieth-Century China”

In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text was written by a young psychologist who was trained in and recently returned from Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was industrial psychology, and why did those who promoted or practiced it across multiple political and productive regimes choose to do so? In this talk, Victor Seow will trace the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the 1990s, focusing on how this science of work reflected shifts in the meaning and value of labor over those decades.

Victor Seow is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in their global contexts and in histories of energy and work.

Event cosponsored by the Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Fund, the IHC’s Machines, People, and Politics Research Focus Group, and the Department of History’s History of Science field.