Victor Seow
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences
Department of the History of Science
Harvard University
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, this text had been written by a young psychologist who recently returned from his doctoral studies in 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 how did those who promoted and practiced it do so across multiple political and productive regimes? In this talk, I trace the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the 1990s, focusing on how this systematic study of work and the workplace reflected shifts in the meaning and value of labor and of science over those decades.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies, and Global Asias