Prof. Joan Woodward - Biography and Contribution

Joan Woodward (September 27, 1916 – 1971) was a British professor in organization sociology

Joan Woodward undertook her research at South East Essex College of Technology. She  joined Imperial College in 1957 as a part-time lecturer in Industrial Sociology and was appointed to a Senior Lectureship in the Production Engineering Section in 1962. Woodward was a leading academic and researchers  in the field of Organization Theory. Woodward was a pioneer for empirical research in organizational structures and author of analytical frameworks that establish the link between technology and production systems and their role in shaping effective organizational structures. She classified the technology into Unit based or (Small scale), Mass based or (large scale) and Continuous process organizations. In 1969, she was appointed  as Professor of Industrial Sociology and Director of the Industrial Sociology Unit.

Her work received international recognition, leading to an invitation to join a group of the top seven organization theorists that was called the Magnificent Seven. In 1970, Prof. Woodward published a book "Industrial Organization: Behaviour and Control".  This text contains description of  the complete work of her research group since 1962.

Woodward died in 1971, aged 54 due to breast cancer. She was the second woman to receive a chair at Imperial College and she  is a role model for women in science, engineering and technology.I

The bi-annual Joan Woodward Memorial Lecture takes place at Imperial College Business School. The Joan Woodward Prize is bestowed annually on an undergraduate or post-graduate undertaking a thesis in a topic that matches the research interests of Joan Woodward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Woodward



ndustrial Organization
Theory and Practice
Second Edition
Joan Woodward
Introduction by Dorothy Wedderburn and Sandra Dawson
288 pages | text-figures, tables | 216x138mm
978-0-19-874122-0 | Paperback | 18 December 1980
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198741220.do


http://www.provenmodels.com/39/technology-typology/joan-woodward

Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal - Biography and Contribution

Sumantra Ghoshal
Birthday 26 September 1948

Death 3 March 2004  Hampstead, United Kingdom due to Brain Haemorrage


Sumantra Ghoshal was born in Calcutaa. He attended the Ballygaunge Government High School, and graduated from Delhi University with Physics major and attended the Indian Institute of Social Welfare and Business Management.

He started his career in Indian Oil Corporation. He went ot United States on a Fulbright Fellowship and Humphrey Fellowship in 1981. Ghoshal was awarded an M.S. and a PhD by  the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1983 and 1985 respectively. He  was  awarded a D.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School in 1986. He worked on these two doctoral degrees at the same time, writing two distinct dissertations on two different topics

In 1985, he joined INSEAD Business School in France. He  wrote a number of influential articles and books. In 1994, he joined the London Business School. Ghoshal was a Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) in the U.K.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumantra_Ghoshal

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/mar/08/guardianobituaries.india

https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/subject-areas/strategy-and-entrepreneurship/sumantra-ghoshal-conference-2015/about-sumantra-ghoshal#.VgZ1vtKqqko

http://www.economist.com/node/13760551

Sociotechnical Systems Approach - Management Thought Development Approach

Based on the premise that technical system has a great effect on social system (personal attitudes and group behavior)

 The term socio-technical system was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.


Based on
Socio-technical systems: From design methods to systems engineering
Gordon Baxter⁎ and Ian Sommerville
Interacting with Computers Volume 23, Issue 1, 2011, Pp. 4-17.
http://iwc.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/1/4.full

The term socio-technical systems was originally coined by Emery and Trist (1960) to describe systems that involve a complex interaction between humans, machines and the environmental aspects of the work system—nowadays, this interaction is true of most enterprise systems. The corollary of this definition is that all of these factors—people, machines and context—need to be considered when developing such systems using STSD methods.  STSD methods mostly provide advice for sympathetic systems designers rather than detailed notations and a process that should be followed.

There are five key characteristics of open socio-technical systems (Badham et al., 2000):

Systems should have interdependent parts.

Systems should adapt to and pursue goals in external environments.

Systems have an internal environment comprising separate but interdependent technical and social subsystems.

Systems have equifinality. In other words, systems goals can be achieved by more than one means. This implies that there are design choices to be made during system development.

System performance relies on the joint optimisation of the technical and social subsystems. Focusing on one of these systems to the exclusion of the other is likely to lead to degraded system performance and utility.

STSD methods were developed to facilitate the design of such systems.


Mumford (2006) provides an historical overview of developments in STSD. The general aim was to investigate the organisation of work, with early work in STSD focused mostly on manufacturing and production industries such as coal, textiles, and petrochemicals. The aim was to see whether work in these industries could be made more humanistic. In other words, the intention was to move away from the mechanistic view of work encompassed by Taylor’s (1911) principles of scientific management, which largely relied on the specialisation of work and the division of labour.

The heyday of STSD was, perhaps, the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s.  The XSEL (eXpert SELler) system of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was developed using STSD (see Mumford and MacDonald, 1989 for a retrospective view). It was an expert system designed to help DEC sales staff assist customers in properly configuring their VAX computer installations. This system was a success and at its peak the family of expert systems, including XSEL, that were being used to support configuration and location of DEC-VAX computers was claimed to be saving the company tens of millions of dollars a year (Barker and O’Connor, 1989). The example illustrates that socio-technical approaches can be used effectively in real systems engineering.

 The late 1980s and early 1990s also saw the emergence of ethnographic studies of work, stimulated by Suchman’s (1987) seminal research at Xerox PARC. These ethnographic approaches (e.g., Heath and Luff, 1991) highlighted the significance of socio-technical issues in the design of software-intensive systems (e.g., Blomberg, 1988).

The 21st century has seen a revival of interest in socio-technical approaches.  The ideas appear in areas such as participatory design methods, CSCW and ethnographic approaches to design. Indeed, one of the key tenets of STSD is a focus on participatory methods, where end users are involved during the design process (e.g., Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991). However, these methods, all of which have their roots in STSD, differ in important respects. Participatory design, which covers a whole range of methods (e.g., see Muller et al., 1993), often involves the users (or user representatives) effectively moving into the territory of the system developers for the duration of the project. By contrast, empathic design (Leonard and Rayport, 1997) and contextual design (e.g., Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1999), which reflect STSD ideas, adopt the inverse view and put the developers into the users’ world as part of the development process.

The field of CSCW came about partly in response to a need to discuss the development of group support applications (Grudin, 1994), but it has implicit roots in socio-technical thinking. Bowker et al. (1997) make the link explicit, dealing with the socio-technical system and CSCW, as does the recent special issue of the journal Computer-Supported Cooperative Work which deals with CSCW and dependability in health care systems (Procter et al., 2006). The field of dependability (Laprie, 1985; Avizienis et al., 2004) is also intrinsically concerned with socio-technical systems, although this field sometimes uses the term ‘computer-based systems’ to refer to socio-technical systems.

Socio-technical ideas are equally applicable in other settings where technology is deployed. In recent years, there has been an increasing uptake of technology in the home, particularly as smart home technologies and assistive technologies.  Sommerville and Dewsbury (2007), for example, developed a model for the design of dependable domestic systems, which adopts a socio-technical view in which the system comprises the user, the home environment, and the installed technology.





http://cptransform.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/sociotechnicalsystem/


Philosophy of Socio Technical Systems
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v4_n3html/ROPOHL.html

Reviewed Work: Management of Work: A Socio-Technical System Approach by Thomas G. Cummings, Suresh Srivasta
Review by: Fremont Shull
The Academy of Management Review
Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1977), pp. 700-703

The Management of Socio-technical Systems using Configuration Modelling
Simon Lock
http://www.dirc.org.uk/publications/articles/papers/57.pdf


Sociotechnical Management Model for
Governance of an Ecosystem
Antonio J. Balloni1
, Adalberto Mantovani Martiniano de Azevedo2
 and Marco
Antonio Silveira
International Journal of Managing Information Technology (IJMIT) Vol.4, No.3, August 2012
http://airccse.org/journal/ijmit/papers/4312ijmit01.pdf


Updated  18 Sep 2015,  13 May 2014

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy - Biography - Contribution

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (September 19, 1901 – June 12, 1972) was an Austrian-born biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST).

GST is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics, and other fields.

General system theory
The theory attempted to provide alternatives to conventional models of organization. GST defined new foundations and developments as a generalized theory of systems with applications to numerous areas of study, emphasizing holism over reductionism, organism over mechanism.

Foundational to GST are the inter-relationships between elements which all together form the whole.

Open systems
Bertalanffy's contribution to systems theory is best known for his theory of open systems. The system theorist argued that traditional closed system models based on classical science and the second law of thermodynamics were inadequate for explaining large classes of phenomena. Bertalanffy maintained that “the conventional formulation of physics are, in principle, inapplicable to the living organism being open system having steady state.

In Bertalanffy’s model, the theorist defined general principles of open systems and the limitations of conventional models. Concerning biology, examples from the open systems view suggested they “may suffice to indicate briefly the large fields of application” that could be the “outlines of a wider generalization;” He developed implications for cybernetics also. Bertalanffy also noted unsolved problems.

Systems in the social sciences

In the social sciences, Bertalanffy did believe that general systems concepts were applicable, e.g. theories that had been introduced into the field of sociology from a modern systems approach that included “the concept of general system, of feedback, information, communication, etc.” He  critiqued classical “atomistic” conceptions of social systems and ideation “such as ‘social physics’ as was often attempted in a reductionist spirit.”  The theory  encouraged for new developments from sociology, to anthropology, economics, political science, and psychology among other areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Bertalanffy

http://www.isss.org/lumLVB.htm

Very detailed paper on General System Theory  http://www.mind-development.eu/systems.html

Systems Approach in Management

Prof A.D. Chandler - Biography - Contribution

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. (September 15, 1918 – May 9, 2007) was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School. His research area was  the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for his work, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977).

Chandler graduated from Harvard College in 1940. After World War II, he returned to Harvard, finished his M.A. in 1946, and earned his doctorate in 1952 under the direction of Frederick Merk. He taught at M.I.T. and Johns Hopkins University before joining Harvard Business School in 1970.


Chandler used the papers of his ancestor Henry Varnum Poor, a leading analyst of the railway industry, the publisher of the American Railroad Journal, and a founder of Standard & Poor's, for his Ph.D. thesis.

His book Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (1962) examined the organization of E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Motors, and Sears, Roebuck and Co.  The book was voted the eleventh most influential management book of the 20th century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management.

This emphasis on the importance of a cadre of managers to organize and run large-scale corporations was explained in more detail in  "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)" for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. He pursued the research  further and published "Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, (1990)" and co-edited an anthology  with Franco Amatori and Takashi Hikino, "Big Business and the Wealth of Nations (1997)."

Chandler continued to do research and write until the very end of his life. In 2001, he wrote “Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industry,” which focused on the fall of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the rise of Sony and Matsushita, as Japan conquered the worldwide consumer electronics market. That volume was followed in 2005 by “Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries.”

Management for Chandler was much more than the CEO, it was the whole system of techniques and included middle management  as well as the corporate structure of the biggest firms, Standard Oil, General Electric, US Steel, and DuPont. Chandler argued that managerial firms evolved in order to take advantage of productive techniques available after the rail network was in place. These firms had a higher productivity and lower costs resulting in higher profits. The firms created the "managerial class" in America because they needed to coordinate the increasingly complex and interdependent system.


According to Chandler, during the 19th century, the development of new systems based on steam power and electricity created a Second Industrial Revolution, which resulted in much more capital-intensive industries than had the industrial revolution of the previous century. The mobilization of the capital necessary to exploit these new systems required a larger number of workers and managers, and larger physical plants than ever before. More particularly, the thesis of The Visible Hand is that,  administrative structure and managerial coordination replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" (market forces) among perfectly competitive market system with large number of sellers and buyers as the core developmental and structuring impetus of modern business.

In the wake of this increase of industrial scale, three successful models of capitalism emerged, which Chandler associated with the three leading countries of the period: Great Britain ("personal capitalism"), the United States ("competitive capitalism") and Germany ("cooperative capitalism.")


Along with economist Oliver E. Williamson and historians Louis Galambos, Robert H. Wiebe, and Thomas C. Cochran, Chandler was a leading historian of the organizational synthesis.



Chandler is also credited with the foundational role in introducing and popularizing the concept of business strategy.

In sociology, prior to Chandler's research, some sociologists assumed there were no differences between governmental, corporate, and nonprofit organizations. Chandler's work on corporations clearly demonstrated that there were differences, and this thesis has influenced organizational sociologists' work since the late 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_D._Chandler,_Jr.
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/05/hbs-professor-alfred-chandler-jr-pre-eminent-business-historian-dead-at-88/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/business/12chandler.html?_r=0

Henri Fayol - Biography and Contribution

Date of Birth  29 July 1841

Henri Fayol was born in 1841 of a family of businessmen. At the age of 19, he graduated as a mining engineer. He got job as engineer in the Commentry groups of pits of the Commentry-Fourechambault Company in 1860. He remained with this company throughout his long and distinguished business career. He became its Managing Director and retired from the position in 1918.


His first address on administration was delivered on 23 June 1900.

He gave a second lecture on administration in 1908 in the Silver Jubilee Congress of the Societe de l'Industrie Minerale.

His famous work "Admininistration Industrielle et generale" was published in a bulletin in 1916.

Profesor Henry Mintzberg - Biography and Contribution

Date of birth 2 September 1939

http://www.mintzberg.org/


http://www.economist.com/node/12918770