Industrial and Organizational Psychology

I'm starting with the Industrial and Organizational Psychology wikipedia page.  It has quite a few links to other articles and books at the bottom of the page, so I think I'll use this as a starting place for a basic overview of this field.

So, here are some notes:

• This is also called work psychology;
• "scientific study of employees, workplaces, and organizations";
• focuses on "improving the workplace" and "performance, satisfaction, and well-being of its people"
• a form of applied psychology along with clinical, consumer, educational, environmental, etc.;
• deals with job performance, recruitment, admissions, testing, performance appraisal, motivation, ethics, etc.;
• field developed during WWI;
• use "surveys, experiments, quasi-experiments, and observational studies";
• also rely on "human judgments, historical databases, objective measures of work performance, and questionnaires and surveys";
• research is quantitative and qualitative;
• qualitative methods include "focus groups, interviews, case studies";
• and also enthnography! and participant observation!;
• "job satisfaction reflects an employee's overall assessment of their job, particularly their emotions, behaviors, and attitudes about their work experience.  It is one of the most heavily researched topics in industrial-organizational psychology with several thousand published studies"'

Sources to pursue next?:

• Guion (1965)
• Blum and Naylor (1968)
• Building Better Organizations

What intrigues me? 

I'm interested in the variety of research methods that this field utilizes.  It is encouraging to see something that is considered "science" include ethnography and qualitative methods like case studies and interviews.  It's not that I think these methods are better, but they're more attainable for someone like me who has never taken a stats class.  (Like Eric, I feel like I need to take more research methods courses).

Parts of this remind me of Dorothy Smith's Institutional Ethnography.  This might be something worth revisiting.

I'm also interested in the focus on workers and how to improve their experiences with work. 

My fear is that this is ''hyper-managerial'' and might result in some of the problematic working conditions (like jobs at Walmart) since managers might know how to motivate workers and keep them on task, somehow also resulting in the workers overlooking their low wages.  I suppose that most systems intended for good can be used for bad, though.  Sigh.

Anyway, I think I'm going to continue pursuing this.  Onward and forward!  What is industrial and organizational psychology all about, and what might it have to offer to Rhet/Comp and contingent labor studies?