Eric Trist Quotes

Socio-technical studies needed to be carried out at three broad levels - from micro to macro - all of which are interrelated:

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 main problem in the study of is that the environmental contexts in which organizations exist are themselves changing, at an increasing rate and towards increasing complexity. This point, in itself, scarcely needs laboring. Nevertheless, characteristics of organizational environments demand consideration for their own sake if there is to be an advancement of understanding in the behavioral sciences of a great deal that is taking place under the impact of technological change, especially at the present time.

# It treated the individual as complementary to the machine rather than as an extension of it (Jordan, 1963).

The work organization of the new seam was, to us, a novel phenomenon consisting of relatively autonomous groups interchanging roles and shifts and regulating their affairs with a minimum of supervision. Cooperation between task groups was everywhere in evidence, personal commitment obvious, absenteeism low, accidents infrequent, productivity high. The contrast was large between the atmosphere and arrangements on these faces and those in the conventional areas of the pit, where the negative features characteristic of the industry were glaringly apparent. The men told us that in order to adapt with best advantage to the technical conditions in the new seam, they had evolved a form of work organization based on practices common in the unmechanized days when small groups, who took responsibility for the entire cycle, had worked autonomously.

# Internal regulation of the system by the group was thus rendered possible rather than the external regulation of individuals by supervisors.

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:

The advantage of placing responsibility for the complete coal-getting task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership. [And furthermore], for each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure .

# 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.

# Correspondingly, the work group became central rather than the individual jobholder.

The outstanding feature of the social pattern with which the pre-mechanized equilibrium was associated is its emphasis on small group organisation at the coal face. [Indeed], under these conditions there is no possibility of continuous supervision, in the factory sense, from any individual external to the primary work 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.

We know from experience that technology can be changed. We have learned in the quality-of-working-life enterprise not to accept the technological imperative.

[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.