Human Relations

http://hum.sagepub.com 60 years of Human Relations

Ray Loveridge, Paul Willman and Stephen Deery Human Relations 2007; 60; 1873 DOI: 10.1177/0018726707084917 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/12/1873

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

The Tavistock Institute

Additional services and information for Human Relations can be found at: Email Alerts: http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://hum.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Citations http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/60/12/1873

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Human Relations DOI: 10.1177/0018726707084917 Volume 60(12): 18731888 Copyright 2007 The Tavistock Institute SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore http://hum.sagepub.com

60 years of Human Relations

Ray Loveridge, Paul Willman and Stephen Deery

A B S T R AC T

Human Relations was founded in 1947 as a collaborative transatlantic project between the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its objective was to encourage theoretical and methodological contributions to the social sciences and to promote their practical application to solve community problems. This article traces the development and evolution of the journal and seeks to assess its contribution to social science research. It examines the intellectual role of the Tavistock Institute and the tensions and pressures that the journal has faced over the past 60 years as it has sought to full its mission and achieve its academic goals.

K E Y WO R D S

action research Human Relations integration of the social sciences organizational behaviour Tavistock Institute

Institutional entrepreneurs
In Northern Europe the winter of 1947 was the coldest in modern times. In Britain, national coal stocks declined to zero causing electricity supplies to become intermittent. In mainland Europe many displaced refugees froze to death among the bombed-out ruins of former homes. Yet there was a growing sense of self-condence bordering on hubris among both natural and social scientists working in the USA and in the then British Empire. Victory in war was associated, in their own self-image, with their technical
1873

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1874

Human Relations 60(12)

inventiveness and with their successes in logistical organization. A report by Cartwright (1948) on Social psychology in the United States during the Second World War which appeared in the rst volume of Human Relations reects this collective self-condence. Moreover, the steady movement in university scholarship and teaching, begun in the 19th century, from moral philosophy to contemporary claims to scientic expertise in the design of social organization, seemed at last to have reached a wide measure of acceptability among practitioners. In Britain especially, this had entailed overcoming resistance from classically trained amateurs in public administration, the pragmatism of self-educated industrial managers and the vested interests of older professional bodies in the case of the formation of the Tavistock Clinic, the British Medical Association and the Royal Colleges of Medicine. In the USA, the lines of battle between psychological behaviourists and Taylorist engineers were, perhaps, more long-standing and professionalized in management teaching and research. It is against this background that the choice of title for a new journal, Human Relations, can, perhaps, be seen as reecting a gathering popularity among scholars, consultants and some prominent corporate executives in the USA for the message conveyed in Roethlisberger and Dicksons (1939) account of the Western Electric experiments. It might also be seen to express the founding editors belief in what Roethlisberger himself described as the phenomenological interconnectedness between the individual, the primary group and the social system. In particular, the wartime experiences of both managers and social scientists afrmed a belief that both personal and group needs in the workplace were created and shaped through social relationships within wider corporate and social structures such as the family. The journals strap line was chosen to explicate this belief Towards the integration of the social sciences. Harvard University had, in fact, just organizationally and physically integrated all of its social science departments in one Department of Social Relations as a clear indication of the expected future of this intellectual eld and of the dissolution of still nascent disciplinary boundaries within it. As with the rst editors of this journal, there was a belief among many American and British scholars that an integration of social studies would come, as it often had under war-time conditions, through a shared focus on the need to address operational management problems. The leader in the rst issue of Human Relations saw it as a main purpose of the new journal to encourage and facilitate . . . [t]he practical application of social science in collaborative response to community needs (1947: 1).

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1875

Incommensurable perspectives?
Eric Miller (1997) observed in the Golden Jubilee issue of the journal that the founding and evolution of Human Relations was built around three interconnected strands. The rst was the creation of the Tavistock Institute and its inter-organizational alliances, rst with the Research Centre for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then with the migratory group that later joined the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This foundation of itself might be seen as an act of considerable courage on the part of the returning warriors, as Miller describes them. That it was facilitated by a long-term grant from the Rockefeller Foundation can be taken as an indication of the reputation of its founders in the USA and of the willingness of their benefactors to see action research taken into the post-war reconstruction of British industry on a signicant scale. The second was the creation of the Tavistock Publications in 1946 as a means of propagation and outreach to both scholars and practitioners. The third was the foundation of a journal to be published in London by Tavistock Publications but edited jointly from both sides of the Atlantic. The editorial committee was made up of leading research scientists such as Elliot Jaques and Eric Trist from the Tavistock Institute and Kurt Lewin and Rensis Likert from the RCGD and an advisory board which consisted of established American scholars from the elds of social psychology, sociology and politics including Douglas McGregor, Robert Merton, Harold Lasswell and Lloyd Warner. An objective narrative of the co-evolution of these three enterprises would require something far more detailed than we can attempt here. We can however offer a commentary on Eric Millers more detailed narrative published in the Golden Jubilee issue of January 1997 and speculate about the ideational contests over which we and other past editors have adjudicated. Eric Millers article and Eric Trists prefaces, variously written with Hugh Murray and Fred Emery, in the three volume anthology, The social engagement of social science (Trist & Murray, 1990, 1993; Trist et al., 1997) convey some of the excitement of discovery and formulation of new explanation that underlay and drove the three inter-related projects. But from the start the aims of the journal were much more eclectic than the mission set out by its joint editors. Indeed, the listed aims of the journal included the formulation and discussion of new concepts arising from practical needs or eld work and descriptions of new techniques in social science (Human Relations 1: 2). Therefore it was always as likely that a conscientious editor would record a growing differentiation of concepts and techniques within submitted manuscripts as that he or she would discover an underlying convergence in analytical paths.

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1876

Human Relations 60(12)

This seems to have been the case. In what was to become a classical critique of organizational analysis, Pugh et al. (1963) suggested a growing divide between those scholars pursuing an interest in the analysis of group process within organizations and those who set more store on erecting structural congurations of bureaucracy. Their article appeared in the eighth volume of a comparatively new journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and was followed by a series of theoretically innovative empirical studies (the Aston Studies) that helped to establish that journal as the leading outlet in a newly labelled eld of Organization Theory. The authors cited by Pugh et al. (1963) were, by that time, all scholars who had published their early work in Human Relations. They included British anthropologists such as Tom Lupton on the embeddedness of work groups in external communities, Tom Burns on the micro-politics of management and their effects on technological innovation as well as North American social psychologists such as Chris Argyris and Douglas McGregor. By the 1960s these studies formed the bases of an eclectic collection of micro-approaches to workplace relationships under the text book heading of Organizational Behaviour (OB). Such texts served the needs of the growing number of management teachers in college departments of administrative science throughout the world, including the post-colonial world, who took their lead from the curricula of North American business schools. Differences were to emerge, however, between OB and other cognate disciplinary elds of study such as Industrial Relations (IR). In both the USA and Britain, IR scholars tended to view OB, particularly when described in terms that recalled the Hawthorne studies, as a managerially biased attempt to coopt labour and to diminish the likelihood of unionization. The attack on plant sociologists launched by Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher, two already distinguished IR authors, in a widely reviewed reader entitled Common frontiers in the social sciences (1957) epitomized this hostility. The title of their chapter implied that an academic elite of social scientists studied manual workers as anthropologists observed aborigines, rather than seeing them as citizens with a collective identity and legal rights in the sale of their labour. These differences in scholarly approach were described by the authors as based in underlying ideological belief. In a more recent article, George Strauss (2001) has commented on the longevity of the dissonant perspectives conveyed in British scholarly writing around the use of the term Human Resource Management. He sees the more sceptical and conictual British view as contrasting with that In the US, (where) HRM, OB (and even IR) have evolved into normal (quantitative, deductive) sciences to a greater extent than they have in the UK, especially since HRM in the USA is so heavily inuenced by psychology (Strauss, 2001: 890). For some, the study

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1877

of HRM has mutated into a search for the practices that can best enhance organizational performance (see Wall & Wood, 2005).

The intellectual role of the Tavistock Institute

As Millers earlier history suggests, the number of articles contributed by Tavistock authors to the rst issues of the journal were not excessive and had declined greatly by the 1970s. Nevertheless, the signicance of particular contributions by the core of leading Tavistock theorists helped to establish the early reputation of the Institute and were destined to become classics in themselves (viz., Emery & Trist, 1965; Rice et al., 1950; Trist & Bamforth, 1951). The eclectic policy adopted by successive editorial panels also provided a distinctive position for the journal across a number of emergent disciplines such as social psychology and social anthropology. This, in turn, contributed to the reputation of the Institute as an independent intellectual base comparable to any existing in European universities. It is noteworthy that even when the Institute was encountering considerable difculties in maintaining its own research levels in the 1970s, the journal published papers that proved foundational to new schools of social enquiry such as Howard Aldridge on Organizational boundaries and inter-organizational conict (1971) and Andrew Pettigrew Towards a political theory of organizational intervention (1975). Many though by no means all articles contributed by Tavistock authors might be seen to represent three important themes in the work of the Institute. Perhaps the most famous in present-day literature is that of the task and sentient system or as it became more popularly known the sociotechnical system. The notion of autonomous group working contained in Trist and Bamforths (1951) article Some social and psychological consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting can be seen as many years ahead of both theory and practice. Many of the observations contained in this rst revelatory description of the spontaneous reaction of Yorkshire coal miners to the use of automation were to be rediscovered in the 1980s by exponents of variations on the more contrived Toyota style of management. A second major theme was, of course, that of group dynamics explored through a psychoanalytic lens provided by the early work of Kurt Lewin and more domestic referents such as Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein. By contrast to the secular catholicism of the socio-technical framework the psychoanalytic basis of group dynamics seems often to have triggered a much more heated debate among practitioners which only occasionally found its way into journal papers. Yet, for many Tavistock researchers it remained, and

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1878

Human Relations 60(12)

remains, central to their understanding of organized communal relationships. The annual Leicester Conference which helps to foster expertise in psychodynamic consultancy marks a continuity in thought and practice in sensitivity training that goes back to the pre-Second World War origins of the Tavistock approach and its wartime applications. This two-week-long annual event seeks to allow participants to experience the construction of authority and role within an interactive group or temporary organization setting (Miller, 1989).1 Over the decade of the 1960s a third important theme emerged in the work of the Tavistock Institute. There was a conscious effort to provide a broader systems framework within which to locate socio-technical research and group dynamics. This resulted in a book, Systems of organization by Eric Miller and A.K. Rice (1967), which anticipated much of the later endof-century writing by others on the transitivity of organizational boundaries. Of more immediate importance was, perhaps, Emery and Trists (1965) article The causal texture of organizational environments. The latter represented a major movement towards a contemporary concern for contextual contingency in the Institutes thinking and was subject to a two-day workshop before its publication. Ignoring the dominant modes of systems thinking Weberian-Parsonian and neo-Marxian at that time, the authors determined on a socio-ecological perspective. This article was reproduced in the Golden Jubilee (August 1997) issue of the journal because of its relevance to the very contemporary problem of managing the adaptation of organizational boundaries to varying types of turbulence in their environment. This concern addressed managerial problems of the 1990s in a still very pertinent way. At the time of its rst publication the notion that any single organization belonged to an ecological population of organizations can be seen to have anticipated later schools of thought in Organization Theory by some 20 years. Against this, it may be argued that the inuence of the cybernetic thinking of von Bertalanffy displayed in the article was too great (see Emery, 1997). The mechanistic language of self-equilibriating systems might also not entirely be appropriate for a paradigm seen ultimately to be dependent upon the expression of unconscious personal need within socially varied events and inter-personal situations. Perhaps this need to express psycho-analytic forces in a scientically quantiable way might well also be seen as part of a Lewinian inheritance. Whatever view one takes on its theoretical underpinnings, the open systems language became synonymous with the later writing of many Tavistock authors. Sometimes it might be seen as to have obscured their message and to frustrate their attempts to join mainstream conversations in

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1879

social studies or to engage with the specialized jargons of post-modernism. Paradoxically then, the gap between the action-orientation of Tavistock researchers (also strengthened by a Lewinian inheritance) and the reication of the language in which it was so often expressed was to become a problem for journal editors keen to disseminate their empirical ndings and conceptual explanations. The resulting frustrations of action researchers invited comparisons with some scholars in universities who engaged in what Emery (1997: 934) described as the Faustian bargain of disengaged objective research oblivious of the impact they make on their passive subjects.

The changing managerial role of the Tavistock Institute

The transformation of the work of the Institute into that of a networked organization in the late 1960s had signicant implications for the journal. In part this came about as a result of positive extensions of existing collaborations with overseas partners such as Louis Davies in the USA, Hans van Beinum in Rotterdam and Canada and Einer Thorsrud at Trondheim. It also came about through the movement of leading Tavistock thinkers to positions in overseas universities, particularly of Eric Trist to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Fred Emery to the Australian National University, as well as to the demise or to the spinning-off of the consultancy activities of other pioneer members. In one sense then, this diffusion of ideaschampions helped to ensure a stable worldwide market for the journal and a level of circulation that probably outstripped that of any other social science journal for a period of years. The numbers of submitted manuscripts also rose and publication went from four to six issues a year in 1969, to nine in 1974 and moved to a monthly issue in 1977. Publication had moved from the now commercially owned Tavistock Publications to a New York based Plenum Publications in 1968. This, together with a strongly international editorial panel, probably helped preserve the trans-Atlantic reputation that had been weakened by the withdrawal of the Michigan-based RCGD editors in 1964. Certainly the stable level of subscriptions from North American university libraries remained the basis of journal support until the mid-1990s. During the 1970s national governments in the West were becoming increasingly anxious about a failing level of productivity and the often conict ridden state of labourmanagement relations in manufacturing industries. Government sponsorship of Quality-of-Working Life programmes in Europe, Canada and Australia, taken together with the impending draft Fifth Directive of the European Commission on Worker Participation, enlisted a wider potential audience of bureaucrats and consultants interested

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1880

Human Relations 60(12)

in developing earlier Tavistock concepts. Frank Heller had announced his arrival in the Institute with an initial statement of his approach to action research, or as he preferred to call it, research action, in an article in Human Relations on group feedback analysis (Heller, 1970). This method made use of questionnaire data to prompt small group dialogue with researchers in a way quite different from previous Tavistock approaches to case analysis. Over the next two decades the Institutes presence in the expanding eld of cross-national research on industrial democracy was largely to be found in the reports that Heller presented in the journal and in many other publications (Heller et al., 1977). Other articles such as those of Armenakis et al. (1977), Davies (1977), and Trist et al. (1977) pointed to a more designeroriented approach to workplace democracy taking place in the USA that presaged the coming of autonomous group working. For the Institute itself however the 1970s proved to be a period of nancial and organizational turbulence. The support of the Rockefeller Foundation had long since ended and nancial income depended upon the attraction of programme grants from public and private client organizations. Much of the leadership in workplace action research might be seen to have shifted to Scandinavia, particularly to the University of Trondheim, and to the Netherlands, where government funding enabled the establishment of groups working in the Tavistock tradition. Outside of existing industrial collaborators in process industries (such as Shell and Unilever) there was little interest among beleaguered British manufacturers for worker participation or for organizational change of a radical nature (Cronin, 2000). With the departures of Emery and Trist, the journal lost much of its editorial drive and, perhaps, operational problems took on a much greater short-term signicance for the elected members of the Institutes Management Committee and for the external members of Council. Over most of the 1980s the position of editor was combined with that of Institute Secretary in the person of Michael Foster, who was subsequently assisted by Maggie Adam in the considerable task of manuscript management around a monthly schedule of publication. In 1988 the editorial position was externally advertised and in January 1989 Ray Loveridge was appointed as senior editor-in-waiting. Perhaps a major consideration was his own personal involvement in action-oriented research in worker participation throughout the previous two decades. For the rst year he worked alongside Foster and it was not until 1990 that his name appeared as editorin-chief allied with those of Jean Neumann and Richard Holti as associates from within the Institute. In the following year an Editorial Management Committee (HREMC) came into being chaired by Eric Miller containing both internal representatives Frank Heller and John Kellaher and external

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1881

advisers Anthony Hopwood, at that time at the London Business School, and David Guest from Birkbeck College, London University. Quarterly meetings of this body ensured that the drive towards regaining a competitive edge in the proliferating eld of new social studies journals was given a new priority in Institute activities. In particular outside representatives on the HREMC served to externalize the mission of the new editorial team and to provide a continuing source of suggested topics for special issues and new writers around emergent themes. At that time this was to prove critical to the negotiation of a changing relationship between the journal editorship and the role of the Institute Management Committee.

New directions
One of the priorities of the editor-in-chief was to restore the pluralism in approach to the publication of research papers from which the journal had gained its earlier reputation. More especially it seemed necessary to reect movements in social studies towards the cultural turn and away from the nominalism of attitude measurement (Trist, 1960) that had dominated the journals content over the previous decade. This openness was signalled in a series of editorials and in the commissioning of special issues. It did not prevent some contributors bewailing the paradigm plague (Holland, 1990) that was seen as besetting the social sciences. It did allow discussion of some of the sacred cows of Bionian/Lewinian approaches to group dynamics in the light of post-modern critiques in articles like that of Frosh (1991). Articles such as those of Clark and Soulsby (1998) called attention to workplace changes taking place in transitional societies outside of the ethnocentric focus of most Anglo-Saxon empiricists. The cognitive frames of strategists, so long addressed in Tavistock training programmes, was explored in articles such as those of Starkey (1995) and by Spender and Kessler (1995). Willmotts (1997) article also drew attention to the importance of management work within organizations in which job distinctions were less easy to draw, but where their inuence was so evidently pervasive. The importance of these new strands in the work of the Institute was illustrated by Dione Hillss (1998) article on Engaging new social movements and Joe Cullens (1998) The needle and the damage done, a Foucauldian interpretation of the workings of the Governments anti-AIDS campaign both published in a millennium special issue. Hellers (1998) contribution to that issue was a masterly summary of the historical evolution of western constitutional democracy within the workplace. In one sense a profoundly discouraging account, in another its emphasis on

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1882

Human Relations 60(12)

capabilities and commitments shifted the terms of the discussion towards the more radical change in social institutions taking place around work. In order to achieve this mission of greater openness a number of more prosaic managerial tasks had to be undertaken. First, the team had to regain editorial control over the content of each issue of the journal and second, it had to seek out a greatly expanded community of authors, reviewers as well as subscribers within vocational schools and, more particularly, within business schools. Conference representation began in earnest with a reception at the Academy of Management in Miami in 1991 and at the International Industrial Relations Association in Sydney in the following year. The retirement of Maggie Adam in 1994 led to the appointment of Tamar Jeffers as administrative assistant, a title that was eventually to be converted to managing editor as an acknowledgement of her contribution to the systemization of both back and front ofce activities. The highly personal relationships she developed with an expanding community of authors and reviewers complemented and helped bring about the changes that she initiated with the achievement of electronic manuscript submission and processing. A further movement towards the externalization of journal control came when the associate editorship passed to two academics: Rob Briner and Timothy Clark, with Ken Starkey as the rst review editor. Yiannis Gabriel replaced Timothy Clark in 2001.

The new millennium

The journal market in which Human Relations found itself in the 21st century indicated both the strength of its legacy and the external changes particularly in the business academe from which the Tavistock Institute was largely shielded. The legacy meant that Human Relations remained a highly international journal. However, the international academic marketplace remained dominated by the USA. This affected both the types of scholarship submitted and published in the journal and the implications of publishing within it. Large US-based journals both dened the parameters of academic debate in many elds and secured academic tenure for those successful in the review process. The change to business academe most relevant to the journal was the rise in the study of management in universities. Whether in business schools or in departments of management, many of the journals readers and writers were concerned with what was becoming addressed as macro- and microOB, with the object of interest being the study of rms or large public sector organizations and the individuals who worked within them. Academic

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1883

societies such as the Academy of Management in the USA, the British Academy of Management and the European Group for Organizational Studies came to embrace many of the journals contributors whether editors, referees, writers or readers. There were a number of implications. The rst has been well discussed by Pfeffer (1997). The location of much organizational analysis in business schools meant that economists became both interested and active in developments in organizational theory. One can debate the merits of this but the implications for the journal were considerable. On the one hand, the rational-choice, prescriptive and reductionist thrust of organizational economics is a world away from the traditions of the journal outlined above. On the other, the strap line indicating integration of the social sciences implied some form of engagement. The second implication was that some of the journals traditions, such as an engagement with psychodynamics, were difcult to sustain. The number of articles both submitted to and published in the journal in this eld has been modest over the last ve years or so. In addition, articles that did not focus on industrial organizations or individuals within them became rare. The third was that the journal operated in a more crowded intellectual and publishing space. The learned societies covering the Human Relations family mentioned above all supported their own journals, for which their annual meetings provided content feed. By contrast, Human Relations, having no natural constituency and without intellectual input from any Tavistock research, operated in a more open market for ideas. This allowed choices but also implied an eclectic approach. In ways similar to its constituents own employing institutions, the journal could keep an eye to the innovative and interdisciplinary but only while the other was focused on citation counts and impact factors among competing journals. This can be illustrated by looking at the diversity of the ve most cited articles from the 20006 period. Two, from a special issue, are broad pieces on discourse analysis (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Hardy et al., 2000). Fournier and Greys (2000) similarly expansive piece on critical management studies from the same year is also well cited. Arguably, these are instances of European scholarship nding favour with a transatlantic management studies audience. Jennifer Georges (2000) piece on emotional intelligence and leadership which was the 2000 article of the year is an example of US scholarship from those years, while Brendan McSweeneys (2002) controversial piece on the work of Hofstede excited substantial interest both in Europe and the USA. Much of the journals most cited work in this period was qualitative, and the journal provided a broad audience for the sort of work that more quantitative US management journals might not have looked on favourably.

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1884

Human Relations 60(12)

However, as the examples above indicate, much of the journals content was not interdisciplinary and this, together with the fear that the strap line might discourage innovative or unusual contributions, led the editors to argue for the removal of the traditional integration strap line (Gabriel & Willman, 2004). Following Paul Willmans appointment as editor-in-chief in 2000, the editorial team changed to reect the scope and internationalism of the journal in the new millennium. Suzy Fox, Linda Putnam and Barbara Townley were appointed as associate editors. All had academic experience in North America. Alice Gilbertson was appointed managing editor in 2004 and Neil Walshe joined as editorial assistant in 2005. At this stage also, Tavistock Institute membership of the team ended, indicating the intellectual parting of the ways that had been underway for some time. The internationalization of the journal continued under the editorship of Stephen Deery (2006) with a substantial expansion of the membership of the Editorial Board from North America, Australasia and Europe and with the appointments of Dan Gallagher and Gail Fairhurst from the USA and Samuel Aryee and Paul Edwards from the UK as associate editors. At the same time the aims and scope of the journal were re-examined. There was a strong belief among the editorial team that the journal should clarify its objectives in the light of its original mission and in the context of the competitive journal market in which it was located. Three guiding principles were reafrmed. First, the journal would seek to encourage research that examined issues from different disciplinary perspectives. We believed that insights from various social science disciplines would continue to nd application in those elds of research that were relevant to our understanding of human interaction and work organizations. Second, the journal would focus on research that sought to advance our understanding of social relationships at and around work through theoretical development and empirical investigation. It was seen as important to maintain the long commitment of the journal to issues that were germane to the nature, structure and conditions of work and to the organizational practices, arrangements and processes that affected them. The interface between work and non-work was also seen as highly relevant. Third, the journal would seek to encourage research that sought to relate social theory to social practice and would explore policy choices and options that could help to improve the well-being of employees and the effectiveness of organizations. It was expected that those policy choices for social action would be informed by an understanding of the complexities of human relationships at work and by the nature of political processes within organizations. In keeping with the Tavistock tradition we also believed that it was important for the journal to

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1885

continue to stress the context within which the research was conducted. Consequently, we signalled our intention to ask that research where possible should seek to locate the study of issues within their organizational context, and where relevant within their wider social and political environment (see www. humanrelationsjournal.org). Although the character of Human Relations has changed over the last 60 years with greater specicity being applied to the research questions at hand and with the acquisition of more rigorous research methodologies and statistical techniques of analysis there have been important continuities. The types of issues and the matters of concern that spawned the transatlantic academic alliance in 1947 and formed the research agenda in the early years of the journal still resonate today. The journal has maintained its focus on intergroup relations, teamworking and work tasks (Coupland et al., 2005; Kang et al., 2006; Tjosvold et al., 2005) as well as on the stressful aspects of work and work relationships (Bakker et al., 2005; Bamberger & Bacharach, 2006; Daniels, 2006). In keeping with the Tavistocks concern with the wider context within which work is performed issues pertaining to worklife issues are widely researched and debated (Brotheridge & Lee, 2006; Dallimore & Mickel, 2006; Powell & Greenhaus, 2006). Furthermore, the Tavistocks roots in psychodynamics are still evident (Driver, 2005; Fotaki, 2006). The journal has also sought to engage with other issues as well and in particular contemporary developments in the leadership of groups and organizations (Collinson, 2005; Grint, 2005; Krantz, 2006; Morrell & Hartley, 2006; Morris et al., 2005), matters pertaining to social capital and the communication and transfer of knowledge across organizations (Willem & Scarbrough, 2006) and issues associated with the new service economy (ODonohoe & Turley, 2006; Rosenthal & Peccei, 2006).

Conclusion
As a journal founded to disseminate an action research, innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of social issues, Human Relations can uniquely look back on 60 years of continuous publication. The journal has generated a corpus of work, available to subscribers, that has had an enormous impact on the growth of the organizational behaviour eld. International and eclectic from the outset, it has achieved sustained and almost global reach in its author, reviewer and readership base. But much has changed. Once an integral part of the intellectual life and output of the Tavistock Institute, it has been editorially independent for two decades. Drawing its intellectual agenda from the broader academic

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1886

Human Relations 60(12)

community, it conforms to the powerful isomorphic pressures of that community in terms of its academic standards, processes and distribution. Once, perhaps, the only journal in its eld, it now seeks to retain its distinctiveness in a much more densely populated academic landscape in which journal publishing is the main activity and indeed career objective of its readership. It has retained distinctiveness in a number of ways, but one particular difference has dened its approach in recent years. Not tied to any academic society or academy, it can sustain a catholicism of approach to the innovative, creative or unusual contribution to academic debate.

Acknowledgement
We are grateful for the help of Tamar Jeffers McDonald in compiling this article.

Note
1 For a sympathetic account of this tradition and its continued centrality within the work of the Institute, see Neumann (2005).

References
Aldridge H. Organizational boundaries and inter-organizational conict. Human Relations, 1971, 24, 27993. Alvesson, M. & Karreman, D. Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. Human Relations, 2000, 53(9), 112551. Armenakis, A.A., Feid, H.S., Holley, W.H., Bedeian, A.G. & Ledbetter, B. Human resource considerations in work redesign. Human Relations, 1977, 30(12), 114757. Bakker, A.B., Demerouti, E. & Schaufeli, W.B. The crossover of burnout and work engagement among working couples. Human Relations, 2005, 58(5), 66189. Bamberger, P.A. & Bacharach, S.B. Abusive supervision and subordinate problem drinking: Taking resistance, stress and subordinate personality into account. Human Relations, 2006, 59(6), 72352. Brotheridge, C.M. & Lee, R.T. We are family: Congruity between organizational and family functioning constructs. Human Relations, 2006, 59(1), 14161. Cartwright, D. Social psychology in the United States during the Second World War. Human Relations, 1948, 1, 33352. Clark, E. & Soulsby, A. Organizationcommunity embeddedness: Social impact of enterprise restructuring in the post-communist Czech Republic. Human Relations, 1998, 51(1), 2550. Collinson, D. Dialectics of leadership. Human Relations, 2005, 58(11), 141942. Coupland, C., Blyton, P. & Bacon, N. A longitudinal study of the inuence of shop oor work teams on expressions of us and them. Human Relations, 2005, 58(8), 105581. Cronin, J.E. Convergence by conviction. Journal of Social History, 2000, XXXIII(4), 781804. Cullen, J. The needle and the damage done: Action research and the organization. Social construction of health in the information society. Human Relations, 1998, 51(12), 154364.

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

Loveridge et al.

60 years of Human Relations

1887

Dallimore, E. & Mickel, A. Quality of life: Obstacles, advice, and employer assistance. Human Relations, 2006, 59(1), 61104. Daniels, K. Rethinking job characteristics in work stress research. Human Relations, 2006, 59(3), 26790. Davies, L.E. Evolving alternative organizational designs: Their socio-technical bases. Human Relations, 1977, 30(3), 26173. Driver, M. From empty speech to full speech? Reconceptualizing spirituality in organizations based on psychoanalytically grounded understanding of the self. Human Relations, 2005, 58(9), 1091110. Emery, F.E. Postscript: The next thirty years, a short reection. Human Relations, 1997, 50, 9315. Emery, F.E. & Trist, E.L. The causal texture of organizational environments. Human Relations, 1965, 18, 2132. Fotaki, M. Choice is yours: A psychodynamic exploration of health policy making and its consequences for the English National Health Service. Human Relations, 2006, 59(12), 171144. Fournier, V. & Grey, C. At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical management studies. Human Relations, 2000, 53(1), 732. Frosh, S. Psychoanalysis, psychosis, and postmodernism. Human Relations, 1991, 44(1), 93120. Gabriel, Y. & Willman, P. The journal strap-line: Boundaries or integration? Human Relations, 2004, 57(1), 79. George, J. Emotions and leadership: The role of emotional intelligence. Human Relations, 2000, 53(8), 102756. Grint, K. Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of leadership. Human Relations, 2005, 58(11), 146794. Hardy, C., Palmer, I. & Phillips, N. Discourse as a strategic resource. Human Relations, 2000, 53(9), 122748. Heller, F.A. Group feed-back analysis as a change agent. Human Relations, 1970, 23, 31933. Heller, F.A. Inuence at work: A 25 year program of research. Human Relations, 1998, 51(12), 142556. Heller, F.A., Drenth, P.J.D., Koopman, P. & Rus, V. A longitudinal study in participative decision making. Human Relations, 1977, 30(7), 56787. Hills, D. Engaging new social movements. Human Relations, 1998, 51(12), 145776. Holland, R. The paradigm plague: Prevention, cure and inoculation. Human Relations, 1990, 43(1), 2348. Kang, H., Yang, H. & Rowley, C. Factors in team effectiveness: Cognitive and demographic similarities of software development team members. Human Relations, 2006, 59(12), 1681710. Kerr, C. & Fisher, L.H. Plant sociology: The elite and the aboriginals. In M. Komarosky & R.C. Hinkle Jr (Eds), Common frontiers of the social sciences. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957, pp. 287309. Krantz, J. Leadership, betrayal and adaption. Human Relations, 2006, 59(2), 22140. McSweeney, B. Hofstedes model of national cultural differences and their consequences: A triumph of faith a failure of analysis. Human Relations, 2002, 55(1), 89118. Miller, E.J. The Leicester Model: Experiential study of group and organizational behaviour. TIHR Occasional Paper No. 10, London, 1989. Miller, E.J. On reaching the age of fty. Human Relations, 1997, 50(1), 19. Miller, E.J. & Rice, A.K. Systems of organization. London: Tavistock Publications, 1967. Morrell, K. & Hartley, J. A model of political leadership. Human Relations, 2006, 59(4), 483504. Morris, J.A., Brotheridge, C.M. & Urbanski, J.C. Bringing humility to leadership: Antecedents and consequences of leader humility. Human Relations, 2005, 58(10), 132350.

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009

1888

Human Relations 60(12)

Neumann, J.E. Kurt Lewin at the Tavistock Institute. Education Action Research, 2005, 13(1), 11935. ODonohoe, S. & Turley, D. Compassion at the counter: Service providers and bereaved consumers. Human Relations, 2006, 59(10), 142948. Pettigrew, A. Towards a political theory of organizational intervention. Human Relations, 1975, 28(3), 191208. Pfeffer, J. New directions for organization theory: Problems and prospects. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Powell, G.N. & Greenhaus, J.H. Managing incidents of workfamily conict: A decisionmaking perspective. Human Relations, 2006, 59(9), 1179212. Pugh, D.S., Hickson, D.J., Hinings, C.R., McDonald, K.M., Turner, C. & Lupton, T. A conceptual scheme for organizational analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1963, 8(3), 289315. Rice, A.K., Hill, J.M.M. & Trist, E.L. The representation of labour turnover as a social process: Studies in the social development of an industrial community (the Glacier Project) II. Human Relations, 1950, 3, 34972. Roethlisberger, F.J. & Dickson, W.J. Management and the worker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939. Rosenthal, P. & Peccei, R. The social construction of clients by service agents in reformed welfare administration. Human Relations, 2006, 59(12), 163358. Spender, J.C. & Kessler, E.H. Managing the uncertainties of innovation: Extending Thompson (1967). Human Relations, 1995, 48(1), 3556. Starkey, K. Opening up corporate governance. Human Relations, 1995, 48, 83744. Strauss, G. HRM in the USA: Correcting some British impressions. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2001, 12(6), 87397. Tjosvold, D., Poon, M. & Yu, Z. Team effectiveness in China: Cooperative conict for relationship building. Human Relations, 2005, 58(3), 34168. Trist, E.L. Foreword. In W. Brown, Exploration in management. London: Heinemann, 1960, pp. xiixxii. Trist, E.L. & Bamforth, K.W. Some social and psychological consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting: An examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system. Human Relations, 1951, 4, 338. Trist, E.L. & Murray, H. (Eds). The social engagement of social science. A Tavistock anthology: Volume one: The socio-psychological perspective. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Trist, E.L. & Murray, H. The social engagement of social science. A Tavistock anthology. Volume two: The socio-technical perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Trist, E.L., Murray, H. & Emery, F.E. The social engagement of social science. A Tavistock anthology. Volume three: A socio-ecological perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Trist, E.L., Sussman, G.I. & Brown, G.R. An experiment in autonomous working in an American underground coal mine. Human Relations, 1977, 30(3), 20136. Wall, T.D. & Wood, S.J. The romance of human resource management and business performance, and the case for big science. Human Relations, 2005, 58(4), 42962. Willem, A. & Scarbrough, H. Social capital and political bias in knowledge sharing: An exploratory study. Human Relations, 2006, 59(10), 134370. Willmott, H. Rethinking management and managerial work: Capitalism, control, and subjectivity. Human Relations, 1997, 50(11), 132959.

Downloaded from http://hum.sagepub.com by on June 23, 2009