Human Relations

Organizational innovation is now widely seen to be a major source of competitive advantage for firms, along with product and process innovation. One of the major intellectual sources for the current organizational upheavals, in which firms strive for some form of "international best practice," is the sociotechnical systems tradition, which traces its roots back to innovations such as semi-autonomous work teams in manufacturing in the 1960s, associated with the work of the Tavistock Institute. An international Colloquium was staged in Melbourne, Australia, in May 1995, to explore the current relevance and contribution of STS ideas to organizational innovation.

Organization redesign has become widely accepted as a regular task for management, recently invigorated by the interest in Business Process Reengineering. In spite of that, it is still a neglected area in organization science. This paper emphasizes the importance of design theory and design-oriented research. The potential role of design theory is exemplified by the description of Integral Organizational Renewal (I0R), a design theory grounded in practical experience in the Netherlands. This approach can be viewed as a Dutch variant of Sociotechnical Systems Design. The essence of this approach lies in the transformation of complex organizations offering simple jobs into simple organizations offering complex jobs. IOR can both be regarded as an expert approach and as a route for self-design. The approach enables the members of the organization to develop and use their own design expertise. IOR is therefore not only a strategy for organization design, but for organization development as well. The paper points to opportunities to make organization research more relevant to organization practice.

It is often the case that ideal sociotechnical systems (STS) profiles cannot be implemented. Consequently, STS designers often must decide which among the many design features in an ideal STS profile to implement. This paper presents a theory for understanding the dependencies among ideal design features. With such a theory, if choices among ideal features must be made, the relative impact of choosing not to implement one ideal feature on the effectiveness of other ideal features will be better understood. Several propositions are offered based on the theory, including a proposal that not all ideal design features are needed since some can compensate for others. The theory was applied to manufacturing organizations and tested using data obtained from site visits to 86 companies. The results indicated that the theory significantly differentiated higher from lower performing manufacturing organizations. The theory has been embodied in a computational modeling software program that has been used by over 50 industrial sites in the United States. Implications of such a theory for STS practice as well as furthering STS theory-building are discussed.

This paper makes a comparison between the basic elements of lean production and sociotechnical systems design (STSD) and compares them both with the characteristics of the traditional Fordist system of mass production. It argues that lean production can hardly be considered as an alternative to mass production, as its proponents suggest, but is on the contrary extending the life of mass production methods. However, lean production does appear to contain some building blocks for the innovative production systems that are expected to prevail in the 21st century. STSD, which has always presented itself as an alternative and possible successor to Fordist methods, will need to link its traditional concerns for quality of work and flexibility of work organizations with the new issues of continuous improvement, learning, and innovation.

Sociotechnical systems (STS) theorists have largely ignored the role of unions both in their theoretical framework and in STS implementation. This oversight weakens the potential application and dissemination of STS theory and practice. STS democracy is frequently seen by its proponents as preferable to union democracy except when they come to the same conclusion. Unions have historically played a key role in the development and success of seminal STS initiatives but are not seen as a critical specification for success. Many practitioners have noted the instrumental importance of unions in unionized settings without acknowledging class, conflict, or union values. As such, many unions have dismissed or resisted STS innovations. Despite these serious shortcomings, the labor process argument has failed to produce a credible alternative to STS principles. In some cases, the union role has been central to STS reforms and examples like these have prompted some national union movements to promote work reform with an STS base. Recently, the American labor movement has endorsed work reform approaches akin to STS approaches. STS changes are seen not just as ways to change managerial practices but also to alter union structures and functioning. As such, a union-rooted STS approach provides greater societal and workplace impact benefitting employees, employers, trade unions, and the society.

The founders of the sociotechnical model perceived its relevance at the macro level of the community, at the meso level of whole organizations, as well as at the micro level of the primary work systems, but it is at the primary work system that most applications have been carried out. An efficient micro level sociotechnical solution may still cause the technology to have a harmful impact on the environment. An increasing popular awareness of environmental damage due to certain technologies leads one to consider an extension of the Important joint optimization concept to a systemic heuristic device called the socioecotechnical model in which the intra and extra-organizational factors can be jointly assessed and optimized.