Eric Trist Quotes

The socio-technical concept arose in conjunction with the first of several field projects undertaken by the Tavistock Institute in the coal-mining industry in Britain. The time (1949) was that of the postwar reconstruction of industry in relation to which the Institute had two action research projects.(2) One project was concerned with group relations in depth at all levels (including the management/labor interface) in a single organization - an engineering company in the private sector. The other project focused on the diffusion of innovative work practices and organizational arrangements that did not require major capital expenditure but which gave promise of raising productivity. The former project represented the first comprehensive application in an industrial setting of the socio-clinical ideas concerning groups being developed at the Tavistock.

# Whole organization systems. At one limit these would be plants or equivalent self-standing workplaces. At the other, they would be entire corporations or public agencies. They persist by maintaining a steady state with their environment.

#This principle valued the discretionary rather than the prescribed part of work roles (Jaques, 1956).

The longwall method [can be] regarded as a technological system expressive of the prevailing outlook of mass-production engineering and as a social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use.

Considering enterprises as "open socio-technical systems" helps to provide a more realistic picture of how they are both influenced by and able to act back on their environment. It points in particular to the various ways in which enterprises are enabled by their structural and functional characteristics (“system constants”) to cope with the “lacks” and “gluts” in their available environment.

Fellows were encouraged to revisit their former industries and make a report on any new perceptions they might have. One of these Fellows, Ken Bamforth, returned with news of an innovation in work practice and organization which had occurred in a new seam in the colliery where he used to work in the South Yorkshire coalfield. The seam, the Haighmoor, had become possible to mine "shortwall" because of improved roof control.

# A design principle based on the redundancy of functions rather than on the redundancy of parts (Emery, 1967) characterized the underlying organizational philosophy which tended to develop multiple skills in the individual and immensely increase the response repertoire of the group.

We are moving towards another type of society than that to which we have become accustomed. This is sometimes referred to as a new service society, the society of the second industrial revolution or the post-industrial society. There is no guarantee of our safe arrival. Not only are the interdependencies greater – they are differently structured... The changes in the policy field [housing, health care, urban rehabilitation, education, etc.] demand a new mobilization of the sciences.

Socio-technical analysis is made at three levels - the primary work system; the whole organization; and macrosocial phenomena.

Every time the cycle is stopped, some 200 tons of coal are lost. So close is the task interdependence that the system becomes vulnerable from its need for 100 percent performance at each step.

What happened in the Haighmoor seam gave to Bamforth and myself a first glimpse of the "emergence of a new paradigm of work" (Emery, 1978) in which the best match would be sought between the requirements of the social and technical systems. Some of the principles involved were as follows:

Occupational roles express the relationship between a production process and the social organization of the group. In one direction, they are related to tasks, which are related to each other; in the other, to people, who are also related to each other.

This paper introduces a concept of organizational ecology. This refers to the organizational field created by a number of organizations, whose interrelations compose a system at the level of the field as a whole. The overall field becomes the object of inquiry, not the single organization as related to its organization-set. The emergence of organizational ecology from earlier organization theory is traced and illustrated from empirical studies. Its relevance to the task of institution-building, in a world in which the environment has become exceedingly complex and more interdependent, is argued.

# Primary work systems. These are the systems which carry out the set of' activities involved in an identifiable and bounded subsystem of a whole organization - such as a line department or a service unit...

[The workmethods had] evolved from the experience of successive generations... Each other, often being members of the same family; supervision was internal, having the quality of 'responsible autonomy.