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Topics: Work & Empowerment

Tavistock Institute Develops Practices of Contemporary Work Reform

A 1949 visit to a coal mine in which a Tavistock researcher used to work led to a discovery that began a long process of innovation in workplace redesign that is still going on today. Miners were reinventing old forms of team collaboration that proved to be particularly appropriate to new technologies. Computer-based technologies and turbulent organizational environments in the decades ahead have proved, under certain conditions, to be particularly fertile ground for redesigning work according to Tavistock principles and practices: team collaboration, self development, continuous learning, and shared access to information. Case study plus.

Case Study Plus: Tavistock Institute Develops Practices of Contemporary Work Reform

In 1949 trade unionist and former coal miner Ken Bamforth made a trip back to the colliery where he used to work in South Yorkshire. At the time, he was a postgraduate fellow being trained for industrial fieldwork at the Tavistock Institute for Social Research in London and, like the other fellows, had been encouraged to return to his former industry after a year's work at "the Tavvy" to report any new perceptions of work organization. At a newly opened seam known as the Haighmoor, Bamforth noticed an interesting development indeed. Technical improvements in roof control had made it possible to mine "shortwall," and the men in the pits, with the support of their union, proposed to reorganize the labor process. Instead of each miner being responsible for a separate task, as had become characteristic of mechanized "longwall" mining, workers organized relatively autonomous groups that rotated tasks and shifts among themselves with a minimum of supervision.

To take advantage of new technical opportunities, they reinvigorated a tradition of small group autonomy and responsibility that had been dominant in the days before mechanization. The old had been reborn in the new. Eric Trist, one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute after the war who had done critical analyses of deskilling and managerial control in Scottish jute spinning in the 1930s, quickly joined Bamforth to study mining practices in a variety of settings, and Trist, in turn, was soon joined by Fred Emery, an Australian social scientist on sabbatical at the Tavistock. The practical and theoretical collaboration of Emery and Trist over the next several decades resulted in what has become perhaps the most influential approach to work redesign, known as the sociotechnical systems approach, and in the development of a "new paradigm of work" based on principles of democratic participation.1

Despite the discovery of quite a few more mines organized on the basis of autonomous (or composite) groups, and despite their demonstrated success in raising productivity and enhancing commitment, the Tavistock researchers could not get support for their ideas from either the National Coal Board or the miners' union. While theory proceeded apace, practical experimentation with post-Taylorist forms of work organization stagnated in the 1950s. Seymour Melman's study of the Standard Motor Company in Coventry, done independently of Tavistock influence, disclosed a similar phenomenon of autonomous "gang" organization on the shop floor. And Louis Davis, a professor of management at UCLA who soon thereafter linked up with the Tavistock group, provided a critique of industrial job design that opened the door to group autonomy and participation. But even at the International Conference on Workers' Participation in Management held in Vienna in 1958, the idea of reorganizing the labor process itself on a more collaborative and democratic basis was almost completely alien to those interested in formal representation on boards of directors, as in German codetermination or Yugoslav self-management.

Only in the 1960s did the sociotechnical approach get the boost it was waiting for. This first came in 1962, when Emery and Trist were invited by Einar Thorsrud of the Technical University in Oslo to participate in the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Project, which developed as a joint labor-management response to pressure within the trade union movement for workers' control. As Emery and Thorsrud were to demonstrate, worker directors had little impact on the feelings of alienation on the shop floor and, therefore, direct participation ought to be tried as well. The insights of their field experiments in participatory work redesign were diffused to Sweden later in the decade, as well as to selected companies interested in how new approaches to work organization might be particularly suitable to advanced technologies and continuous process production. The most notable example of the latter was the Shell Philosophy Project, which had been initiated with Tavistock researchers after a visit by Shell (U.K.) managers to the Norwegian experiments. A highly innovative example of work redesign that grew out of this Shell project is presented below.2

The Tavistock researchers were not initially guided by explicit ideals of participatory democracy, and as late as 1970 political theory still only marginally appreciated their import.3 Rather, they had been influenced by the research on small groups of Kurt Lewin and Wilfred Bion (also at the Tavistock), and by the development of open systems theory originally in biology. Lewin's experiments in group decision making, and Bion's work in the leaderless group techniques, showed that democratic process was superior for a variety of group tasks, and that small groups had great capacity for self-regulating their own behavior. Cybernetic theory reinforced the idea of self-regulating activity through feedback. The initial formulation of Emery and Trist's new approach was very much in systems theoretical language of the "joint optimization of the social and technical systems." Each of these systems was independent, with its own laws and purposes, and yet interdependent in the production process. And the optimal development of the latter could only be achieved by the proper fit of the social and technical, rather than the development of one at the expense of the other.

Despite their propensity for systems language, however, sociotechnical researchers listened to the voice of workers themselves, first in the coalfields, and later in the development of various "action research" techniques that relied on direct worker input in the analysis of job requirements and design alternatives. The evolving principles of sociotechnical work design have thus reflected this voice from below as much as any systems theoretical precepts or managerial imperatives. And the emerging ideal, as Trist himself has noted, resembles a kind of pentacostal speaking in tongues, where all voices help to generate practical alternatives.

These principles might be summarized briefly as follows. Jobs should be designed in a way that provides variety and challenge to the workers, and permits them to continually learn. Indeed, personal growth on the job should be seen as a basic human right, Trist argued already in 1963, anticipating the theme of self-development and workplace participation in the later work of political theorists such as Carol Gould. Workers should be permitted to develop multiple and broad skills, and should exercise autonomy and discretion as individuals and as work groups.

Team collaboration on the basis of mutual support and recognition is both desirable and technically effective, especially in the use of computer based technologies and in turbulent organizational environments. Workers must have ways of relating their work to end products of social value and meaningful purpose. Shared access to information, rather than hierarchical controls and artificial barriers, is the basis for continual learning at the individual and organizational levels, and for innovative and flexible responses to problems. In fact, the learning model that is relevant in the workplace might be extended to the society at large, Emery has subsequently argued: learning to learn and developing confidence in how to learn from everyday experience is central to revitalizing democracy throughout society.4

For a contemporary case study that derives directly from this approach, see Union and Management Collaborate to Democratize Work at the Shell Sarnia Plant.

Notes

1 Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal Getting," Human Relations 4 (1951), 3-38; Eric Trist et al., Organizational Choice: the Loss, Rediscovery and Transformation of a Work Tradition (London: Tavistock, 1963); Fred Emery, The Emergence of a New Paradigm of Work (Canberra: Centre for Continuing Education, Australian National University, 1978).

2 Eric Trist, "The Sociotechnical Perspective," in Andrew Van de Ven and William Joyce, eds., Perspectives on Organizational Design and Behavior (New York: Wiley, 1981), 19-75; Fred Emery and Einar Thorsrud, Democracy at Work (Leiden, Martinus Nijoff, 1976); C.P.Hill, Towards a New Philosophy of Management (London: Gower, 1971); Seymour Melman, Decision Making and Productivity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958); Louis Davis, "Job Design Research," Journal of Industrial Engineering 5 (Nov.-Dec. 1957), 19-23.

3 Carol Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 60-61.

4 Trist, "The Sociotechnical Perspective," 41ff.; Fred Emery, "Sociotechnical Foundations for a New Social Order," in Harvey Kolodny and Hans van Beinum, eds., The Quality of Working Life in the 1980s (New York: Praeger, 1983), 109-137; and Trevor Williams, Learning to Manage Our Futures: The Participative Redesign of Societies in Turbulent Transition (New York: Wiley, 1982).

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