ABSTRACT
The preliminary studies towards this book began over ten years ago in the period, very different from the present, which followed the nationalization of the British coal industry. Expectation then was widespread that management-worker relations would improve and that productivity would increase simply through the change-over from private to public ownership. Such results, however, were not so easily forthcoming. Moreover, men continued to leave the pits though they were needed, and the incidence of stress illnesses at the coal face remained high (Halliday, 1949). Indeed, it was a medical source—the observations of a doctor practising in a colliery district in the interwar period (Dickson, 1936)—which provided some of the first evidence in favour of the general theory of organizational health and work effectiveness which underlies this book.
