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Dissertation Information for Laura Kim Lee

NAME:
- Laura Kim Lee

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Sharon Jean Traweek
- Janice L. Reiff

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Michael Salman
- Samuel A. Culbert

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Changing selves, changing society: Human relations experts and the invention of T Groups, sensitivity training, and encounter in the United States, 1938--1980

Abstract: This dissertation traces the historical evolution and circulation of human relations training groups as a social technology that embodied changing ideas about individuals, groups, society, change, politics, and culture in the post-World War Two United States. Beginning in the late-1940s, a cohort of social psychologists and educators designed the T Group as a tool for training social workers, teachers, nurses, and ministers to be "change agents" who would help form a more democratic society. During the 1950s, however, a faction of clinical academics at UCLA reshaped the T Group into the more individually oriented sensitivity training, which then became a staple of the management training programs of many corporations and large organizations. In the late 1960s, this same technique entered popular culture as encounter groups, which claimed to help individuals reach their full "potential" as human beings. Drawing on published research findings, institutional records, personal papers, audiovisual materials, and oral history interviews, this dissertation explains the unusual career of this group technology that successfully circulated through the university, industry, and then into popular culture.

While the inventors of T Groups hoped to gain greater scientific control over society through democratically planned change, human relations trainers ultimately focused on the therapeutic goal of realizing human potential. This shift from a social scientific and socially activist orientation to a humanistic and therapeutic orientation in part mirrored a broader cultural shift from the social action politics reaching back to the Progressive era, to the new cultural mores and the more personalized politics of the late 1960s. Moreover, the interests of participants, the large proportion of psychologists, the lure of business and of building a profession, and the more pragmatic goals of organizational effectiveness all worked to forestall a sustained, politically oriented social change effort and to push human relations training in more therapeutic, professional, and commercial directions. Human relations training groups ultimately contributed to a reworking of notions of effective leadership and authentic selfhood. The arc of this study tracks their transformation from a technology developed by a handful of academics into a central feature of contemporary American culture.

MPACT Scores for Laura Kim Lee

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-13 16:33:14

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Students under Laura Kim Lee

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None