World War II brought together a group of psychiatrists and clinical and social psychologists in the British Army who developed a number of radical, action-oriented organizational innovations in social psychiatry. They became known as the "Tavistock Group," since the core members had been at the pre-war Tavistock Clinic. At the post-war Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, they developed a pioneering mode of relating theory and practice, called in these volumes "The Social Engagement of Social Science." Previous volumes presented two of three interdependent perspectives: the...

This book develops and applies a new approach to the study of the working group and indeed of productive enterprises more generally. Unlike similar studies, in this volume the human is related back to the technological, and it is the socio-technical system as a whole that is the object of study. The work reported in this book shows how alternative modes of work organization can exist for the same technology, giving the possibility of organizational choice.