ABSTRACT
The Institut des Sciences Sociales du Travail (ISST) team suggests that the 'crisis' of payments by results (PBR) originated in advanced technical change, which rendered PBR irrational under modern conditions, and that the method was in decline in most industrialised countries. The ISST's most ambitious studies of work focused on plants in the steel industry. They were funded by bodies such as the European Productivity Agency and the European Coal and Steel Community, no doubt in a pronounced technocratic spirit. Industrial sociology largely grew up as a critique of scientific management doctrine which centred upon the introduction of piece-rate systems whose effort and reward structures went along with time and motion studies, redesigned work-tasks, and tighter production control techniques: in a word, with rationalisation. The resort to a technological explanation, however coquettish, raises once more the question of the independence of the ISST's investigators from non-scientific involvements.
