Organizational Design in Industry—Towards a Democratic, Socio‐technical Approach
| Pages | 30-37 |
| Date | 01 February 1973 |
| Published date | 01 February 1973 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055229 |
| Author | Jon Gulowsen |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Organizational Design in Industry-
Towards a Democratic, Socio-technical Approach
Jon Gulowsen
Introduction
Industrial engineers have traditionally made an impact upon
the behaviour of people in organizations in two ways.
Through the design of technology they have established a
technical framework to which the social system has had to
adapt [1]. Also because a large proportion of supervisory
and managerial positions has been held by engineers, they
have often had responsibility for specifying the network of
roles and relationships which make up an industrial
organization. Usually they have approached this task by
taking a technological orientation to human beings and
human problems. People have been treated like uniform
bits and pieces, capable of being split up and put together
at the will of the management. Social systems design has
been treated as a one-off job, such concepts as organiza-
tional development or stepwise design have been seldom
taken into consideration. The goals of the organization and
society have been stated in terms of technology and
economy; social and psychological aspects of human
behaviour have generally been neglected.
This neglect and degrading of the human aspects of
industry has become the source of a number of problems.
In this article I will briefly touch upon three of them:
—
In many organizations technology has created jobs and
systems of work organizations which are unsatisfactory in
human terms. Social scientists have long been aware of the
widespread dissatisfaction with certain types of work found
among large groups of employees; they now predict that
social unrest stemming from this cause will become a major
problem of the future.
— Engineers, because of their superior technological
knowledge, have frequently neglected to take advantage of
the competence of other members of the organization. Yet
Norwegian experience has shown that workers and foremen
not only possess a great deal of relevant technological
knowledge; they also are very aware of technological
changes that could have a positive impact upon the work
situation and upon the general effectiveness of the organiza-
tion. By neglecting the knowledge of these people engineers
and managers remove themselves from an important source
of innovative competence.
—
Engineering and technological values have had a domin-
ant impact, not only upon the internal behaviour of the
organization but also upon the role of industry in society.
Today much of society is coming to believe that an
industry which perceives only technical values and
objectives is out of step with the values of other sectors of
the community.
This article describes an experiment performed by a major
Norwegian company which wished (a) to improve its
organization and the working conditions of employees, (b)
to find ways whereby the company could better benefit
from its human resources and (c) in the long run, to
re-examine its value base. The evolution of a new concept
of organizational design based on socio-technical systems
theory was a significant part of this attempt. Through the
experiment it became possible to combine
social
experience
in a particular task environment with
engineering
expertise
and to develop a procedure for better organizational design.
This development process will be described here as it
throws some light on the problems that have been referred
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