ABSTRACT
Throughout history the principal coal-producing agent has been the miner. Though various mechanical aids have more recently helped him to do his job, mining systems have still on the whole been designed primarily to make efficient use of human ability. Costs, productivity, and output targets have been largely determined by this need, as have face layouts and technical arrangements. The size of working groups and the customs and routines regulating mining practice have had the limitations of human capacity as an ever-present constraint. These elements together constitute a work culture. Despite the drive to increase mechanization, coal mining in Great Britain during the decade of the ′50s remained under the domination of a man-centred or manual work culture. 2 With the machines that now exist, and still more with those under development, a rapid shift is taking place from the human being to the machine. In these systems no longer is the producer a man serviced by machines but a machine serviced by men. For the possibilities of this new situation to be realized a change is required in the work culture from a man-centred to a machine-centred attitude—a machine culture. 2
