The director of the Yale Labor and Management Center, Wight Bakke, stressed that the center not take ivory tower approaches, where people are cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits,  when dealing with problems in the field such as, why does he change from one kind of behavior to another?
As founding director of the Yale Labor and Management Center, Bakke's aim was to establish a scientific approach towards establishing and testing hypotheses about human actions in industrial relations and thereby establish an explanatory theory of behavior that could eventually help find ways to reduce the amount of labor-management conflict. Bakke stressed that the center not take ivory tower approaches and instead it held clinical working sessions between labor and management representatives on campus and established research "listening posts" in places such as Detroit and Charlotte. An ivory tower is a metaphorical placeor an atmospherewhere people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits, usually mental and esoteric ones. Management, union leaders and workers all must have a working knowledge, validated by experience, of such questions as: (1) why does the other person behave as he does? (2) why does he change from one kind of behavior to another? The research program established to work on these problems drew considerable attention within the field. 
