Alternatives to hierarchies
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 hierarchica
- PDF / 10,615,883 Bytes
- 117 Pages / 430.87 x 649.12 pts Page_size
- 99 Downloads / 239 Views
International series on the quality of working life
Vol .• Editor - in - Chief
Hans van Beinum, Foundation for Business Administration, Delft-Rotterdam Editorial Panel
Fred Emery, Australian National University, Canberra Nitish R. De National Labour Institute, New Delhi Mauk Mulder Foundation for Business Administration, Delft-Rotterdam Einar Thorsrud, Work Research Institutes, Oslo Eric Trist, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Dick Walton, Harvard University, Boston Tommy Wilson, London Graduate School of Business Studies, London
Alternatives to hierarchies
Ph. G. Herbst
Work Research Institutes, Oslo
cfMartinus8'lijhoff Social Sciences Division
CLeiden 1976
ISBN-13: 978-1-4684-6947-9 DOl: 10.1007/978-1-4684-6945-5
e-ISBN-13: 978-1-4684-6945-5
© 1976 by H. E. Stenfert Kroese b.v., Leiden, the Netherlands. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1976 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form.
Preface
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 possibly work. The new mode of work organization which had been evolved by the miners in several pits in the Durham coal fields was, at the time, well ahead of the prevailing concepts and philosophy of both management and the Trade Union. It did not help matters very much that the detailed accounts were presented in an academic and scientific form (Trist et aI., 1963; Herbst, 1962). I think that we felt that all the backing of systematic research and data analysis would be needed to present the case for modes of organization, which deviated from conventional practice. However, something was learned from this experience. When at the beginning of the 1960's the Norwegian Work Democratization Project was started, a number of demonstration sites were set up which people could look at, and which could function as centers for diffusion. There was no immediate success with this as far as Norwegian industry was concerned; however, a rapid diffusion occurred some years later in Sweden. Action research is essentially a long term collaborative learning process of those who are involved in a process of organizational change. It was results of this type, where theoretical expectation and practical experience diverged, which in recent years have led to reflections on and a reappraisal of the socio-technical approach which was developed in the course of project work, of the strategies of organizational change which have been utilised, of the role of t
Data Loading...
