Description
University of Pennsylvania Press The Social Engagement of Social Science a Tavistock Anthology Volume 1 The Socio-Psychological Perspective by Consultant editor Beulah Trist, Eric Trist, Hugh Murray
World War II brought together a group of psychiatrists and clinical and social psychologists in the British Army where they developed radical, action-oriented innovations in social psychiatry. They became known as the "Tavistock Group" since the core members had been at the pre-war Tavistock Clinic. They created the post-war Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and expanded on their wartime achievements by pioneering a new mode of relating theory and practice, called in these volumes, "The Social Engagement of Social Science."_x000D__x000D__x000D_There are three perspectives: the socio-psychological, the socio-technical, and the socio-ecological. These perspectives are interdependent, yet each has its own focus and is represented in a separate volume._x000D__x000D__x000D_Volume I, The Socio-Psychological Perspective, extends the object-relations approach in psychoanalysis to group, organizational, and wider social life. This extension is related to field theory, the personality/culture approach, and open systems theory. Action-oriented papers deal with key ideas in social psychiatry, varieties of group process, new paths in family studies, the dynamics of organizational change, and the unconscious in culture and society._x000D__x000D__x000D_The Institute's dynamic social science approach to industrial problems, which will be presented in Volume II, began with Eric Trist's coal-mining program for the development of more productive and personally satisfying self-regulating forms of work organization. The whole "Quality of Working Life" movement owes its theoretical and empirical basis to this pathfinding endeavor._x000D__x000D__x000D_Volume III will focus on non-hierarchical forms of organization facilitating inter-organizational relations in complex and rapidly changing environments-the socio-ecological perspective. This perspective is offered as a guide to institution building for the future._x000D_