ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the need to change one of these key institutions: the workplace. Changing perceptions and changing behaviour is the bread-and-butter work of personnel practitioners and is central to the achievement of environmental responsibility in work organisations. By conceiving of work organisations in terms of homeostasis, and by encouraging a goal of the maintenance of a steady state, the function of the organisation would be to sustain equilibrium within its environment. Perceptions of work organisations in these terms would encourage decentralisation of power and replacement of hierarchical control with loosely-knit, flexible and temporary groups bound together in informal mutually-supporting networks: characteristics more suited to the dynamic conditions of today. One of the reasons for this is the centralisation of power in work organisations and the operation of power in our wider society. By failing to cater for the 'whole person', work organisations are becoming an anachronism.
