ABSTRACT
To illustrate the first of our themes we have compared and contrasted different kinds of activity system and made a distinction between the boundaries of activity system, task group, and sentient group - the task group being the group that comprises the individuals employed in an activity system, and the sentient group being the group to which individuals are prepared to commit themselves and on which they depend for emotional support. We have suggested that the endeavour to find task organizations to satisfy human need, while serving as a valuable counterbalance to the machine theory of organization, has nevertheless impeded the formulation of a general theory of organization that is applicable to all tasks. More specifically, we have made the hypothesis that forms of organization in which task and sentient groups coincide may have relatively short-term effectiveness; in the longer term such groups can inhibit change and hence can lead eventually to deterioration of performance and, in consequence, to social and psychological deprivation rather than to satisfaction.
