The Hawthorne studies took place at the Hawthorne Works of which company?

The Hawthorne studies took place at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric.

Hawthorne Works was a large Western Electric manufacturing complex in Cicero, Illinois, near Chicago. The plant produced telephone equipment for the Bell System and employed thousands of workers. Researchers conducted a series of workplace experiments there during the 1920s and early 1930s, examining issues such as lighting, rest breaks, work hours, and group incentives.

The studies became associated with the idea that workers may change their behavior when they know they are being observed. This later became known as the Hawthorne effect, although the original experiments were more complicated than the simplified textbook version suggests. Elton Mayo and colleagues are especially associated with interpreting the findings in terms of social relations and supervision.

AT&T is an understandable distractor because Western Electric was part of the Bell System and closely connected to AT&T. However, AT&T was the parent telephone company, while Western Electric operated the manufacturing works where the experiments occurred. Hawthorne Works opened in 1905 and remained in operation until the early 1980s.