How do you find the right employees? It is a question that occupied the German economy under the conditions of growing international competition and modernization after the First World War. At that time, a young science stepped in to answer this question - industrial psychology. Versatility and adaptability were the bases for the success of industrial psychology in companies of the early 1920s. The discipline of application provided answers and instructions during a phase of social and economic upheaval. It placed knowledge above rank in the production process, which proved suitable to bring about social balance and reform industrial structures. The institutional economics and cultural studies of the history of industrial psychology provides insights into organizational structures of German big business and their adaptation to changed social relations in the years of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, it provides the perspective of institutional learning in relation to science and its practice to contribute to temporally overarching issues of social change. German text.