Considering enterprises as "open socio-technical systems" helps to provide a more realistic picture of how they are both influenced by and able to ac… - Eric Trist

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 .

Ludwig von Bertalanffy's formulation enables exchange processes between the organism, or organisation, and the elements in its environment to be dealt with in a new perspective, it does not deal at all with those processes in the environment itself which are among the determining conditions of the exchanges. To analyse these an additional concept is needed - the causal texture of the environment.

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