Eric Trist

Another study by members of the Tavistock Institute, itself a post-war development founded in 1946 under grant aid from the Rockefeller Foundation and elsewhere (Sutherland, 1951) came under heading five. This explored various aspects of communication in industry (Cook, 1951a) and made a case study of one of the Anglo-American Productivity Teams that followed the inauguration of the Marshall Plan for economic aid to Europe (Pelling, 1988), whereby British managers and workers were given first-hand knowledge of American production methods and practices (Cook, 1951b). Perhaps the most well-known and important study listed by the Schuster Panel under the Tavistock Institutes communication project, however, is the paper by Trist and Bamforth (1951) on “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-getting". This was the first account of the Institutes investigation of the human effects of technological change in mining, later to be published under the title of organisational Choice (Trist, Higgin, Murray and Pollock, 1963). It was from this study that the concept of an organisation as an open sociotechnical system evolved, as well as that of adaptive work organisations, which had a profound and significant impact on the study of organisations and the growth of organisational psychology in the 1960’s. Two investigations came under the Panels third heading of comparative case studies. First there were the morale surveys of the MRC’s Group for Research in Industrial Psychology (Marriott, 1951) and, second, the sociological studies of joint consultation by Liverpool University Department of Social Science (Scott, 1952). They illustrate a growing awareness of the limitations of viewing the individual worker in isolation from his/her social context, and the significance of the social ‘climate’ of organisations as observed variously in employee-management relations, company morale and overall performance. Here again, one can see the foreshadowing of later developments in organisational psychology, although it was to be more than a decade later before they came into prominence. As would be expected, given the reputation of its wartime work, the Panel looked to the MRC Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge for human engineering research that would extend the knowledge of skilled performance gained in the Services to civilian jobs