Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
"In the Service of Production": Labor Psychology in Socialist China
Speaker
- Victor Seow, Faculty Associate. John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
When accidents, defects, and slowdowns occur in sites of production, who—or what—tends to be held responsible: the worker, the machine, or the conditions of work? In 1950s China, psychologists would offer a distinctive answer to this question under the banner labor psychology. Based largely at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology, they entered factories and mines and treated breakdowns less as episodes of human error than as evidence of misalignment that could be redesigned. Their attention turned to work rhythms, signals, instruments, targets, and feedback. This talk follows labor psychology across three areas: accident research that reframed responsibility in terms of objective conditions; training studies that accelerated skilled perception and judgment at the point of production; and investigations of innovation and competition that used prototypes, indicator boards, and timely knowledge of results to organize collective creativity. Together, these projects reveal a Mao-era effort to engineer a socialist “human factor” through feedback-rich arrangements of cues and comparison, promising safety, efficiency, and initiative at once while rendering work newly legible and regulable.
Bio
Victor Seow is a historian of science and technology, focusing on China and Japan in their global contexts. His work examines how scientific knowledge, technological artifacts, and forces of production intersect in shaping economic life and environmental outcomes in industrial society. He is a author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), an exploration of the relationship between energy and power through the history of Asia’s onetime largest coal mine. Carbon Technocracy received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States’ Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History. Victor is currently completing a book titled The Human Factor: How Chinese Psychologists Reimagined the Science of Work in the Machine Age. In 2025, his work was recognized with the Sarton Prize for the History of Science from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.