12 quotes
Socio-technical analysis is made at three levels - the primary work system; the whole organization; and macrosocial phenomena.
The evolution of socio-technical systems (1981)
Every time the cycle is stopped, some 200 tons of coal are lost. So close is the task interdependence that the system becomes vulnerable from its need for 100 percent performance at each step.
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.
Eric Trist cited in: Alternatives. Vol 8 (1980)
Socio-technical studies needed to be carried out at three broad levels - from micro to macro - all of which are interrelated
The evolution of socio-technical systems (1981)
The longwall method [can be] regarded as a technological system expressive of the prevailing outlook of mass-production engineering and as a social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use.
Occupational roles express the relationship between a production process and the social organization of the group. In one direction, they are related to tasks, which are related to each other; in the other, to people, who are also related to each other.
Faced with low productivity despite improved equipment, and with drift from the pits despite both higher wages and better amenities... a point seems to have been reached where the [coal] industry is in a mood to question a method it has taken for granted.
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.
Organizational choice (1963)
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.
The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963)
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 .
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.
A main problem in the study of organizational change 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.
The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963)