The organization of work is under critique in many industrialized countries. Bureaucracy, specialization, repetitive technology, and hierarchical control structures are criticized by politicians, trade unionists, and social scientists. They argue for improved quality of work, for work democratization, and for the humanization of work. This book evaluates Norwegian field ex periments in the area of job redesign which started already in 1964. Norway has therefore a lead in experience compared to most other countries, particu to the United States, where debates and subsequent experiments re...

This book is written for students and scholars seeking a rather 'unconven tional' approach to the problem of water supply planning. The 'uncon ventionality' is present in the adoption of social psychological tools for the economic planning of water system design in an arid environment. The theoretics of Chapter I provides the framework for the empirical analysis of the ensuing chapters. The language of that chapter is designed to be under standable to students in introductory regional science, economics or geography courses, as well as professionals in allied fields. The fresh approach of the...

I have worked as a manager in a large industrial organisation for the last twenty years. During that time I have seen the job of a manager change almost out of recognition in both complexity and difficulty. For the last five ofthose years I have held ajob which has been much concerned with the problems which managers face under these cir cumstances, and I have been in the position to discuss these pro blems with people doing similar jobs in other large organisations, who have in turn often asked me for advice on their problems. The result has been to build up a general picture of the manager...

The organization of work is under critique in many industrialized countries. Bureaucracy, specialization, repetitive technology, and hierarchical control structures are criticized by politicians, trade unionists, and social scientists. They argue for improved quality of work, for work democratization, and for the humanization of work. This book evaluates Norwegian field ex periments in the area of job redesign which started already in 1964. Norway has therefore a lead in experience compared to most other countries, particu to the United States, where debates and subsequent experiments re...

Giving on occasions a talk on the subject of this book, one of the queries raised was, 'surely, what you mean are flat hierarchies'. This, I think, gives an indication of how difficult it can be to conceive of organizations which do not have a hierarchical structure. A rather similar response was obtained when, in the 1950's, an account was given to a manager of the British Coal Board of an autonomous composite team of more than 40 miners, who had taken over complete responsibility for a three-shift cycle, and divided the income obtained among themselves. His comment was that this could not...

Exploration of the nature of human communication and the media is a pre requisite to any assessment of the likely future role of communications . . We cannot assume that the nature of these things is transparently obvious to everyone and therefore commonly understood. Three developments in recent decades should adequately warn against such an assumption. First, we had the fiasco of social scientists trying to apply Shannon's mathematical theory of information as if it were a theory of human communication. 'In Shannon's use of information we cannot speak of how much information a person has...

Politicians, social scientists, entrepreneurs, trade unionists, church leaders, philosophers, all of us in fact have caused such vast vague ness and confusion about the term 'power' that this can hardly be attributed to mere chance. Apparently, there is so much at stake, whenever we think about power or are involved, that it may be worth our while to keep the concept blurred. This is most clearly seen in social science. Power, inequality in power, struggle for power are a kind of prime movers in social life, but power problems have seldom been studied, compared to the research done on other...

After explicating the analytical framework I will proceed to develop scenarios as follows: I. General scenarios -maladaptive and adaptive. 2. The future for the Western group of societies. Within this will seek to identify the main changes in the natures of work, leisure, family organisation, education and life styles. 3. The future for the major Asian powers, China, Japan and India. 4. A world scenario centred about the first two scenarios but also aimed to locate within this pattern the most probable future for sets of the smaller societies and under-developed countries. The scenarios will...

In November 1975, the German Marshall Fund of the United States agreed to support a proposal from the International Council for the Quality of Working Life for study of 'cross-cultural com munication' on developments associated with the quality of work ing life -a shared interest of the fund and the council. In early 1976 the council invited four action researchers, each from a major language area in Europe Andreas Alioth, Switzerland and Germany; Max Elden, Norway and Sweden; Oscar Ortsman, France; and Rene van der Vlist, the Netherlands, to consider pro duction of a joint publication which...