Introduction

This chapter suggests that organizations pursue unconscious tasks alongside their conscious ones, and that these affect both their efficiency and the degree of stress experienced by staff. Organizations as socio-technical systems can be understood as the product of the interaction between a work task, its appropriate techniques and technology, and the social organization of the workers pursuing it. The project was undertaken by Elliott Jaques at the Glacier Metal Company, and led to extensive change in the culture and organization of the firm. The open systems view sees an organization as having boundaries across which inputs are drawn in, processed in accordance with a primary task, and then passed out as outputs. As government and charitable funding became more difficult to secure through the 1950s and 1960s, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations shifted its focus from grant-aided research towards consultancy work directly commissioned by client organizations.