ABSTRACT
Henry Ford, perhaps more than any other industrialist in modern history, helped sow the seeds of change in the workplace and in management theory. Ford gave the human relations school and the unions the proof they had been waiting for. The school and the unions had serious ammunition with which to continue their struggle against the modern-day Machiavellian humanists. After the war, use of operations research techniques spread rapidly to government and industry. The first academic course in the field was offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1948. After the war the Tavistock Institute tried to apply the management-related insights gained from this research to industry. Based on a growing amount of data gathered from research projects the Tavistock Institute staff, led by Eric Trist, developed “a new paradigm of work,” the concept of sociotechnical systems, that contradicted the technological imperative.
