Advanced Safety Management, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 6A SOCIO-TECHNICAL MODEL FOR AN OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Several writers on socio-technical systems say that the term “socio-technical” was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery. They were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London. Personnel at Tavistock said, based on their research and from their experience, that a good fit between the technical subsystems and the social subsystems in operations was needed to achieve superior results.

Trist and Emery, the writers say, postulated that stellar performance can be obtained only if the interdependency of the technical and social subsystems is unequivocally recognized. Thus, in the design process, the decision-makers must recognize the impact each subsystem has on the other and design accordingly to assure that the subsystems are working in harmony.

Even though the term—“socio-technical systems”—is not prominent in the current literature about the organization of work, the idea it conveys is dominant in conventional thinking about the interrelationship between the technical and social aspects of operations.

Sidney Dekker (2006), in The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error, spoke of “the socio-technical system” as follows:

The Systemic Accident Model focuses on the whole [system], not [just] the parts. It does not help you much to just focus on human errors, for example, or an equipment failure, without taking into account the socio-technical system that helped shape the conditions ...