Sociotechnical Systems

Conceptual Overview

The post–World War II British underground coal mines were the cradle within which STS was innovated. [Page 1449]Mechanized longwall mining caused a sharp increase in the number of accidents because of fragmentation of work over shifts under dangerous, unpredictable, underground work conditions. However, in the Elsecar Colliery in South Yorkshire, miners continued to use their original all-in method in the Haighmoor seam, due to its short coal front. They worked in traditionally emergent composite groups of eight miners who interchanged roles, and who did a full coal-extracting cycle during a single shift. In those small, self-managed groups, accident rates were much lower, and both motivation and productivity were higher compared to the other mechanized work settings. The publication and presentation of this ancient tradition of underground working in semiautonomous work groups as reinvention, by social scientist Eric Trist and ex-miner Ken Bamforth, from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, marked the birth of a new paradigm of work that aimed for a better integration of social and technical aspects in production systems.

Fred Emery grounded STS in terms of an opensystems approach at the end of the 1950s and started, together with Norwegian Einar Thorsrud, to experiment with the design of teamwork in companies to increase the level of industrial democracy. In that sense, the classical approach toward STS was developed in action-research projects in Norway in the 1960s, which were followed by hundreds of renewal projects in Sweden. So, Scandinavia, more than Britain, deserves the credit for implementing STS in industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, four typical regional conceptual varieties emerged.

• 1.
  On his return, Emery instantiated participative design in his homeland, Australia, which best can be characterized as a do-it-yourself approach to STS. Potentially interested applicants were offered a small document with only a few simple guidelines—nicknamed the “little golden book” after a popular TV series for children—that enabled them to start a sociotechnically inspired change initiative.
• 2.
  Trist, together with industrial engineer Lou Davis, founded North American STS by administering a short university masterclass, which gradually developed further into a multiple states-spanning design-oriented consultancy approach to improve the quality of working life in both factories and offices.
• 3.
  From Stockholm, Bj⊘rn Gustavsen instigated Democratic Dialogue as a broadly based communitydevelopment program in Sweden. Some 150 organizations and 60 researchers participated. Instead of a design-oriented approach, he used a conversational approach to STS: communication between actors served as the basic change engine.
• 4.
  The social scientist and industrial engineer Ulbo de Sitter articulated STS into an integral approach to organizational renewal in the Netherlands. He emphasized the design of structure as being of primordial importance. In Holland, STS blossomed into a designoriented, industrial-engineering approach that was taught at several universities and was applied to hundreds of Dutch companies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Although conceptually quite distinct from each other, those four regional varieties share a common core of work organization

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