Chapter 16, Research Report 16.1 – Sociotechnical systems

The Trist and Bamforth (1951) article is a foundation article, so it should be possible to find something more recent than this article. The point of the exercise is to find another article dealing with sociotechnical systems.

To that end it may be helpful to:

1. Use the library databases to search on “sociotechnical systems” as well as the authors’ names to find related articles. “Social systems” and “technical systems” might also be used, but “sociotechnical systems” is the term usually used in the literature.
2. Use Research report 16.1 to generate search terms, as previously suggested. The narrative has useful phrases that can be used for a literature search.
3. You do not want to merely summarize the article. You want to indicate whether the article you found is consistent or inconsistent with the Trist and Bamforth (1951) findings. Then you want to discuss what these results, as a whole (both articles together), mean to leaders and managers in terms of being able to consider sociotechnical systems successfully when planning change efforts.