Lisl Klein - Publications

THE MEANING OF WORK : Papers on Work Organization and the Design of Jobs

London: Karnac Books, 2008, (ISBN: 978-1-8557-5348-8) Price: £29.99 WORKING ACROSS THE GAP: The Practice of Social Science in Organizations

London: Karnac Books, 2005, (ISBN: 978-1-8557-5382-2) Price £23.50

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Academic interest in the conduct and organization of work dates from long before business schools had been thought of. The demand came most emphatically from governments in wartime. Both World Wars provided an unprecedented stimulus to the development of occupational psychology and industrial sociology. Researchers were recruited by the state to help deal with the strategic necessity of managing people to get them to produce and to fight. The personnel management profession and specialist consultancies developed to help employers to apply the lessons. The researchers who rose to these challenges were all the more productive because they came from varied disciplinary backgrounds: engineering; psychology; economics, sociology; anthropology; and politics. They were blissfully free of the dead hand of homogenized orthodoxies and methods that came with the late 20th century international business school industry and its favoured journals.

Women researchers were at the forefront of what in retrospect was a golden age of British empirical sociological and psychological research in industry following the Second World War. List Klein was one of these pioneers, along with Joan Woodward, Margaret Simey, Marie Jahoda, Nancy Seear, Silvia Shimmin, Dorothy Wedderburn, Enid Mumford and Margaret Stacey. They transformed our understanding of work by getting out into workplaces and talking to the data. In the tradition of Beatrice Webb, they were motivated by the deeply humane instinct that one can best understand why workers and employers engage in sometimes ostensibly irrational behaviour by listening to the men and women directly involved, and identifying their perceptions and motivations. It is a tradition sadly remote from contemporary number crunching and web-searching.

Klein worked for much of her long career at the Tavistock Institute, contributing to its illustrious reputation for original research. Working Across the Gap is a collection of writings, providing a reflective analysis of her role as a consultant, on the interface between the academic and the practitioner. The reader is first introduced to the history of this role. Klein then uses cases from her own experience to analyse and illustrate how best it works and how it goes wrong. Her light touch and lively style prevent the reader from being bogged down; details illuminate her argument rather than congest it. The politically sensitive role of government funding receives special attention, as does a substantial study of the way practitioners use, selectively, social science. The waves of bright young things heading into consultancy firms in the 21st century doubtless are confronted by very similar problems of analysis and persuasion. Whether their employers allow them to respond with comparable candour is to be doubted.

The challenge of making toil seem worthwhile lies at the heart of The Meaning of Work, the more recent companion to `Working Across the Gap'. Again, this is a collection of writings, exploring the social processes whereby workers can be made to feel fulfilled, or alternatively alienated, by the way their work is organized, by the wider socio-technical system of which it is a part, by their scope to be part of a social group, and by the way they are consulted and treated. A discussion of Luddism links the motives of a worker fiddling piecework payments in the mid-20th century to one devising computer viruses in the 21st. Studies of hospital workers illuminate ways in which the supposed rationalization of work can, if not thought through with an eye for the participants' perceptions and interests, have messy collateral consequences.

The accounts of interventions in very varied technical circumstances leave the reader wondering whether the role of the research-led consultant is comparable to that of a psychotherapist. The intervention may provide an opportunity for the client's employees to reflect a little on their path-dependent trajectories, but how far, in any particular case, that process achieves worthwhile changes in behaviour remains a matter of speculation. But Klein's reflections on working with engineers and scientists suggest that perhaps the outsider's role is more comparable with that of an industrial mediator. It is one of facilitating a complex intra-organizational negotiation with the insights of a social scientist.

These two collections are both accessible and stimulating. The fact that they make little reference to social science research of the past 20 or so years may discourage some readers, but that would be missing the point. They are grounded in a well-ordered understanding of the nature of work that draws on extraordinarily wide, and always reflective, experience. Most social science starts with theoretical questions and often struggles to engage them with reality. These essays start with real problems and explore how social science can be used to ameliorate them.-Social science would be healthier today if there were more Lisl Kleins.

Dr Lisl Klein worked in industry, on the shop floor and in personnel management, before moving into organization research. From 1965 to 1970 she was Social Sciences Adviser in Esso Petroleum Company Ltd and, from 1971 to 1989, senior social scientist in the Tavistock Institute. She founded the Bayswater Institute in 1990.