Socio-technical Design: An Unfulfilled Promise or a Future Opportunity

Socio-technical design is now more than 50 years old. It began with the desire of a group of therapists, researchers, and consultants to use more widely the techniques they had developed to assist war damaged soldiers regain their psychological health and return to civilian life. This group, most of whom had been associated with the London Tavistock Clinic before the war and some of whom were medically qualified, believed that the therapeutic tools and techniques they had developed could usefully be applied to the organization of work in industry. They saw this as restricting and degrading many lower rank employees who were forced to spend their days carrying out simple, routine tasks with no possibility of personal development or job satisfaction.