BEHAVIOR, TECHNOLOGY, AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com BEHAVIOR, TECHNOLOGY, AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ERIC TRIST ANDTHE TAVISTOCI< INSTITUTE Richard Trahair ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014030054 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trahair, R. C. S. Behavior, technology, and organizational development : Eric Trist and the Tavistock Institute / Richard Trahair. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5567-9 1. Trist, E. L. 2. Social scientists—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Orga- nizational sociology. 4. Organizational behavior. 5. Industrial sociology. I. Title. H59.T75T73 2015 300.92—dc23 [B] 2014030054 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5567-9 (hbk) Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Family and Schooling 1 2 English Studies at Cambridge 11 3 Psychology Studies at Cambridge 25 4 The American Experience, 1933–1934 43 5 The American Experience, 1934–1935 63 6 Back Home in Dundee 77 7 Trist’s War 97 8 At the Tavistock Clinic 115 9 Early Research and Teaching 129 10 Institute Colleagues 147 11 Institute Administration and Funding, 1952–1958 163 12 Early Research with Emery 177 13 Marriage, Palo Alto, and the Split 191 14 Formalizing the Split 207 15 Back to America 221 16 Three-Generation Family 233 17 Projects in the United Kingdom, the Americas, and Canada 245 18 Working Style and Future View 267 19 Retirement to York 281 20 Final Years 297 Writings of Eric Trist, 1925–2001 317 Index 333 Acknowledgments I am extremely grateful to my family and friends for their patience and help and to my academic colleagues who supported this work with valuable information, discussions, advice, and occasional travel accommodation. At Latrobe University’s Borchardt Library, I had the guidance of several members of the staff, including Eva Fisch and Julie Marshall. Also, I received generous help from the staff at the Yale University Library, the Victorian State Library, and the University of Melbourne Library, as well as from Harry W. Bass at the Business History Collection of the University of Oklahoma, David Farrell at the Library of the University of California, and David Kessler at the Ban- croft Library of the University of California. Also, I am most grateful to Erwin Levold and his associates at the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Funds to travel to Europe and the United States came from La Trobe University’s School of Social Sciences. I thank the secretarial staff in the Department of Sociology who helped type the many interviews that I conducted. In addition, I received valuable help from Heather Eather in this regard. In Australia, I received professional advice and support from Alastair Bain, Roger Buckle, Alf Clark, Robert Cope, Fred and Merrelyn Em- ery, Sam Hammond, Jill Murray, Col Osman, and the archivist Mark Richmond. I received similar help from Stijn Vandevelde in Belgium, John Service in Canada, and Outi Alestalo and Sally Boyd in Sweden. In London, England, I talked with administrators, staff, and retired social scientists at, and associated with, the Tavistock Institute of Hu- man Relations. Among them were Neil Barnes, Lynn Barnett, Elizabeth Bott-Spillius, Harold Bridger, Bill Cooke, John D. Mollon, Gillian Dwyer, John Hall, Frank Heller, Pearl King, John Margarson, Mike Maskill, Hugh Murray, Isabel Menzies-Lyth, and Eric Miller. At the University of Cambridge, I received help from Kerry Wood, Leslie Wilkins, and Jonathon Smith. I received immensely useful information from the staff of Trinity College Library and the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory. vii Behavior, Technology, and Organizational Development I am extremely grateful for the support I received from Jane Ringrose, an archivist at Pembroke College in Cambridge, and from the British Psychological Society. I received generous help from the staff of The Guardian, The Times, and The Independent. Late in the 1980s and during the 1990s in Gainesville and Carmel, I talked with members and friends of the Trist family including Alan, Carolyn, and Beulah Trist. Following Eric’s death in June 1993, the Trist Archives were maintained by Beulah in Carmel, California. I received friendly and illuminating editorial support from Alan. Many of Trist’s associates were available to discuss his work and life, including Steve Burgess, Lyman Ketchum, Marvin Weisbord, Stu Winby, Sara Raffetto, Paul Lawrence and George Lombard of the Harvard Business School, Riane Eisler, Bob Dreher, Bob Tannenbaum, Gina White, and Dan A. Wren. viii Introduction This life of Eric Lansdown Trist (1909–1993) describes the personal origins of his work on the application of social science theory, knowl- edge, and methods to the organization of working life and its manage- ment. The book outlines his socio-technical theory of organization, and how it applies to the use of group relations in advancing efficiency, productivity, creativeness, and gratification at work. It describes his outstanding educational career, in England, experience in America, his attitude to American and English education, the suffering among the unemployed in America and Scotland in the 1930s, inefficiencies in the UK Army’s method for selecting men to be officers in wartime, and the establishment of Civil Resettlement Units in England to help army veterans to overcome feeling like aliens in the society they defended in World War II. In America Trist married Virginia Traylor, had a son, Alan, in Scotland. For over twenty-five years, his wife suffered from schizophrenia and lived in an institution. Trist’s working life was inspired by the social psychiatrists in the British Army who had practiced community medicine while at the Tavistock Clinic in the years between the world wars. After World War II, as the only non-medical member of the Tavistock Group, Trist helped establish the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and with A. T. M. Wilson led the management of its work, tirelessly advocated a psycho-dynamic approach to psychiatry, helped select and train man- agers for large British corporations, and while teaching younger fellows at the Institute studied the efficacy of autonomous working groups in the nationalized coal mines of Great Britain. In place of the traditional technology-driven bureaucracies of industry, Trist recommended that social science research reorganize industries on socio-technical lines. His recommendations were recognized by the National Coal Board but were resisted at almost every turn largely because managers and union leaders perceived threats to their personal control at work and the future of their careers. Management of this resistance became a major ix Behavior, Technology, and Organizational Development theme in Trist’s work with the Institute’s clients and the communities surrounding their firms. Trist met this resistance not by publicly denouncing established bureaucratic procedures and management, but with evidence from reliable research studies that showed how inefficient, uncreative, rigid, and ungratifying were organizations that were dominated by technol- ogy-driven bureaucracy and the assumption that work was performed best by people who were considered to be little more than costly extensions of machines. He advocated changing technology-driven employment with the socio-technical work systems to overcome the resistance to changed attitudes at work. Reliable socio-technical re- search was done in the coal industry with colleagues from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the 1950s and was not published fully until 1963 due largely to requests by the National Coal Board, Trist’s workload in editing the interdisciplinary journal, Human Relations, and his heavy teaching and administrative load at the Institute. During these difficult years, Trist raised Alan, insisted he be well-educated, and was supported with the love of Beulah Varney, the Institute’s assistant sec- retary. They married in 1959 and had a daughter, Carolyn in 1962. She would later follow ideas and research of her father. Together Eric and Beulah founded the first Leicester Conference for industrial managers who would learn from personal interaction with others how better to understand themselves and find a more effective and sensitive way to deal with the interpersonal problems that arise in organized life. In the hands of other colleagues, the conference would become one of the more noted achievements of the Institute. The practical application of socio-technical research findings, the action research method and the understanding of oneself through interaction with others through work with staff of in the Tavistock In- stitute of Human Relations, gradually secured an acceptable reputation among a few social scientists