The Enterprise and its Environment

A system theory of management organization

A. L. Rice

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415264457
• eBook ISBN: 9781136431807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1963 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER I

The Consultant Role

This book is a sequel to the story of reorganization in the Calico Mills that was left in April 1956.³ It also includes new material about different kinds of industry and carries forward the theory and concepts that were adumbrated in simpler form in the earlier book. I have tried to make this book complete in itself, without, I hope, repeating myself so much as to make it tedious for those who have read the earlier version. And I have tried to give examples from non-industrial institutions as well, in the hope that their administrators and managers will find the theory and concepts of some value.

The book is in four parts. The remainder of this first part describes briefly my view of my role as a consultant in helping to bring about change, and outlines the concepts and assumptions used to analyse enterprises and their organizations. The second part continues the story of the reorganization of the Calico Mills management. The developments and results of previous experiments in work organization and management reorganization are given as a background to the further changes in management. Part III describes the reorganization of a group of expanding and diversifying companies that have grown out of a pharmaceutical and fine chemical enterprise. Examination of a centralized organization led to the redefinition of tasks at various levels in the management hierarchy and to the creation of an embryo ‘holding’ company that managed relatively autonomous, though interdependent, units. The material is included as an example of the direct application of the methods of analysis outlined in Part I, under conditions in which the relations between members of the client organization and myself had been previously stabilized. In the final part further consideration is given to the concepts used and the assumptions made. Some of the consequences for ‘line’ managers and specialists in charge of control functions are discussed, and an attempt is made to describe some of the implications of the application of the theories for those who have to work in and to manage various kinds of enterprise. Some of the social and psychological problems of managing organizational change are also examined.

THE CONSULTANT-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP

The work reported in Parts II and III was carried out within a consultant-client relationship. My job was to help my clients, so far as I was able, to solve the problems they encountered in running the various enterprises for which they were responsible. My terms of reference have been broad; starting-points have been technological, economic, sociological, political, and psychological. In practice this has meant discussion of whatever problems chief executives, managers, or workers have found most urgent and collaboration with them in trying to find some kind of solution. I was not, and am not, the only consultant employed in the enterprises I describe, and with those whose fields have impinged on, or overlapped, my own I have been able to cooperate.

The elaboration of theories about organization and the collection of data to support hypotheses have usually had the severely practical objective of attempting to clarify the difficulties that my clients and I were meeting. The book is also based on work of a similar kind with other Institute clients and on research work carried out by my colleagues and myself in the Tavistock Institute.

Sofer (1961) has discussed the therapeutic and research components in work of this kind and has outlined some regularities and principles in the field of what he has called ‘social consultancy’. He has added new dimensions to, and formalized, earlier attempts to describe an approach to problem solving and data collection.⁴ He makes a sharp distinction between the collection of data and their presentation to those from whom they have been collected in such a way that they can become aware of relations between variables that have not previously been explicit. He discusses in detail the effects of the ‘observer’ on the field he is studying and the way in which the consultant can use these effects to enrich his perceptions of what is happening. He argues the advantages and the disadvantages of the approach. On the one hand, the data are biased and may be unique, and it is virtually impossible to obtain concrete measures for comparison or control; on the other, without identification and sympathy between the observer and those with whom he collaborates, access to data about close personal relationships is invariably limited and usually denied.

He describes the conflicts that can and do arise in the complex constellation of relationships between the client organization, the consultant, and the groups and the individuals with whom he works. In such conflicts he says: ‘Whatever arrangements are made it is necessary to give absolute priority to the needs of the organization, to serve its overall interests and contribute to its primary task.’ Wilson⁵ has made a similar point about research in the same field: ‘Within the approach described, however, any action for research purposes alone, without regard for the needs of the client, would be regarded as a breach of the professional role of the research worker.’ Sofer concludes with a description of the similarities and differences in the course run by each of three projects he carried out with widely differing kinds of enterprise—an industrial company, a technical college, and a research laboratory attached to a hospital.

It is not my purpose in this book to argue for a particular approach or to suggest that the role I took was the only one available. Most of my colleagues would accept that our own feelings of pleasure and pain, anxiety and relief, excitement and sobriety, are frequently the only measures we have available to assess what is real and what unreal in a difficult situation. The use we make of our feelings may differ. Sofer states that he avoided remarks about his clients’ feelings towards him and his work ‘which would have included elements not fully conscious to respondents or displaced from other real and fantasy relationships’. By contrast it will be seen that I frequently did make such comments. I used my experience of my clients’ attitudes towards me and my feelings about them when I thought that, by so doing, I could illuminate the problems we were discussing.

If the members of an organization ask me to discuss some problem with them I assume that they have done so because they have not been able to find a satisfactory solution by themselves. Implicit in my being called in, therefore, is their acceptance, consciously or unconsciously, of failure—a failure to which they are likely to be very sensitive if the problem involves human relationships. Their inability to solve it may be due to its intrinsic difficulty. It may also be due, in part, to other problems, the causes of which are hidden and of which the overt problem is only a symptom. What appears on the surface as a simple organizational problem, for example, may often be found to have underlying it deep-seated and largely unrecognized emotional conflicts—conflicts which, if brought into the open, would cause great distress and even destruction. A solution to the overt problem may therefore provide no relief; indeed it may exacerbate the underlying difficulties by removing a symptom, attention to which has provided a defence against the anxiety of having to face the real causes. In the extreme, a client may well wish to keep the overt problem alive and unsolved as a means of containing the anxiety inherent in its solution.⁶ Unconsciously, the client may demand that his consultant go into collusion with him not to find a solution. If the consultant accepts collusion he only confirms insolubility; if he tackles only the overt problem, he does nothing to help with the underlying difficulties.

So far as the client is aware, however faintly, of the symptomatic nature of the overt problem, so far will he want the underlying difficulties dealt with, and, at the same time, hope that such drastic action will be unnecessary. If by what he says or how he behaves the consultant shows that he is aware of the underlying difficulties and that he is prepared to tackle them, the client’s feelings about him can be expected to range all the way from profound relief at his insight to hatred at his dashing of hopes. Usually the consultant will be regarded with a mixture of both—the relief will be mixed with a fear that the insight will not be backed by sufficient practical skill, and the hatred with a knowledge that the hopes were forlorn.

In responding to the contradictory demands made on him the consultant can behave in four ways: take up the overt problem only; deal with the overt problem but take account of what he believes to be the underlying difficulties without referring to them; take up both directly; or ignore the overt problem and take up directly only what is underlying. Which of these courses he takes will depend on his insight into the total situation; on his judgement of the real, as distinct from the expressed, needs of his client; on the relationship he has already built with his client; and on his belief in his ability to cope with whatever develops in the situation he helps to create.

If, as a consultant, I find I am becoming anxious, embarrassed, hurt, or pleased, I can ask myself why I am feeling what I am feeling and attempt to sort out what comes from within myself and what from the consultant-client relationship. So far as I am sure that some of the feeling arises in the situation and not as a result of idiosyncrasies of my own personality, I can use myself as a measuring instrument—however rough and ready—to give me information about the underlying difficulties and their strength. With this information I may then be able to take action. Even then my intervention may be inappropriate or ill-timed, or both. But I believe I have the right to intervene only when I feel sure, at the time, that what I say will be helpful. Sometimes, in the light of subsequent events, it is possible to look back and to realize that a particular intervention was helpful, or that it was not. More frequently it is impossible to relate cause and effect so precisely, and the uncertainty has to be accepted by both client and consultant.

In the accounts that follow, readers will make their own judgements about the appropriateness and timing, in terms of results, of my interventions. In practice I try to state how I am feeling and why I think I feel as I do. To some extent, such statements can provide a framework in which my clients, too, can release for discussion data that would otherwise be unavailable. If the data are essential for making adequate decisions, their release, however painful and embarrassing at the time, can be reassuring.

TERMS OF REFERENCE

When I first visited Ahmedabad I discussed my role and my terms of reference with Mr Gautam Sarabhai, Chairman of the Calico Mills, and then with his senior managers. It was agreed that I should be responsible directly and only to the chairman, and that, except in any selection procedures in which I might be involved, I would not report on any individuals working in the company. It was also agreed that any managers or workers could, if they wished, discuss with me, as individuals or as groups, their work, their roles, and their relationships, and that such discussions would be private: that is, nothing would be reported from them without full permission of the participants. I then spoke about the Institute, myself, and my proposed work to a meeting of all ranks of management, which was attended also by the president and leading members of the Textile Labour Association (the recognized trade union) and some members of the Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association.⁷ Thereafter it became standard practice to invite the members of the Textile Labour Association to inspect any work that involved reorganization on the mill floor.

Formally, my role has continued as it was first defined, but in my more recent work there has been the added complication that I have been working with Dr Vikram Sarabhai, Mr Gautam Sarabhai’s brother, and in other companies than the Calico Mills. In the Calico Mills I have continued to report, as before, to Mr Gautam Sarabhai. In other companies I have reported to Dr Vikram Sarabhai.

Mr Gautam and Dr Vikram Sarabhai are both members of the Boards of directors of all the companies with which I worked, and many of their managers have previously reported to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II The Continuous And Controlled Assimilation Of Change: Further Reorganization In The Calico Mills
• Part III The Initiation And Implementation Of Change: The Differentiation And Reintegration Of Diversified Parts Through A Model-Building Exercise
• Part IV The Living Organization
• Appendices Examples Of Working Notes
• Bibliography
• Index