| Abstract: | Recent organizational design efforts to provide more attractive jobs, including most attempts to apply socio-technical system principles, have failed to account for the dynamic nature of the environment. The practice of socio-technical design should respond to this failing by accommodating both environmental change and workers' confidence to cope with it. An attempt to make this accommodation, in a design for a model future steelworks, is described. The design incorporates principles such as anticipatory learning, a “tent” organization culture, a task oriented plant layout, a democratic governance system, local information systems, and dialectical decision making. It offers one answer to how careers within organizations, and organizations surrounding careers, can each influence the other while remaining adaptive to external change. The problems raised by dynamic environments can be met by putting learning and exploration back into workers' careers. |
