Dear Colleagues,
I would like to draw your attention to the below events and the launch of the Tavistock archive with Wellcome Library. There are interesting parallels between historical Tavistock studies and Mass Observation. If you cannot attend the symposium
and/or festival, please do visit the archive catalogue via the Wellcome Library website.
Symposium: In the Shadow and Light of the Tavistock Institute’s Archive
This email is to warmly invite you to attend a
symposium
celebrating 70 years of applied social sciences work at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and its distinctive contribution to the development of organisational
research, business management studies and consultancy. The symposium takes place at the Conway Hall in central London on Thursday 19th October 2017. It is free to attend but booking is required and can be made as either a full day or a morning or
afternoon session here.
The symposium forms part of a four day festival celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Tavistock Institute, which is taking place in central London from Tuesday
17th October to Friday 20th October. Full information can be found here on the
festival website. These events also mark the launch
of the Tavistock Institute’s Archive
detailed here at: Wellcome Library.
For information on accessing the Tavistock Archive, please take a library tour on
Tuesday 17th October (book
here) or Wednesday 18th October
(book here).
To see highlights from the Archive please visit the exhibition, ‘Past, Present & Future: From the Tavistock Institute Archive’,
on display
at the Swiss Church from 17th to 20th October (detailed
here).
The Symposium:
The symposium will be opened by
Cliff Oswick
(Professor in Organisation Theory at Cass Business School; chair of the Tavistock Institute’s Council).
Two morning sessions follow: the first paper, ‘Sites of Selection’
will be presented by Daniel Monninger
(Max Planck Institute, Cologne) and Dr Alice White
(Wellcome Library); the second, ‘Community Development and Organisational
Change: Large scale industrial action research in the 1970s’, will be presented by
Elliot Stern (Fellow of UK Academy of Social Sciences; Emeritus Professor,
Lancaster University; and Visiting Fellow, Bristol University; formerly Tavistock Institute) and
Frances Abraham (Tavistock Institute).
The afternoon session will open with a keynote presented by the CEO of the Tavistock Institute,
Dr Eliat Aram, ‘On
Being an Orphan: An untold story’. It will close with a performance by
Dreadlockalien (performance poet at University of Warwick 2015; Birmingham’s
Poet Laureate 2005-6; host to BBC Radio 4’s Slam Poetry; and Director of ‘Colour Free Visions’, ‘New October Poets’, and ‘Write Down Speak Up’).
The Presentations:
Sites of Selection
Monninger
and
White trace the wartime work of a group of army psychiatrists who would
go on to form the Tavistock Institute, as they worked with soldiers to devise new and more democratic methods for selecting army officers, incorporating also intelligence on German approaches. These selection methods were taken up by business interests – most
notably Unilever, a multinational consumer goods company.
‘Managing’ became a general and distinct ability (irrespective of subject) and management candidates were assessed with respect to their future potential, rather than an existing
record or skill. Managing others became intertwined with managing (and improving) oneself, and these qualities were ascertained using Tavistock methods, techniques which remain evident in what are known today as ‘assessment centres’.
Community Development and Organisational Change: Large scale industrial action research in the 1970s
Abraham and
Stern present a paper on two large-scale industrial action research programmes: one in the Irish fertiliser industry, another in an Anglo-Norwegian shipping
company. Abraham and Stern worked closely with managements and trade unions at a time when notions of ‘industrial democracy’ were being explored in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
These projects demonstrate how work at the Tavistock Institute was at once woven into societal change, and how project learning fed back into conceptual thinking at a research
institute where theory is distinctively derived from the ground.
The discussion will highlight two such dynamics: these projects and their global ‘socio-technical context’ (poised as they were, between Taylorism, teamwork and automation);
and these projects and their ‘socio-political context’ (as they struggled to accommodate demands for workplace democracy and the attendant tension between ‘community development’ approaches and a prevailing world view favouring ‘autonomous work groups’ with
small groups of ‘senior managers’ and/or ‘board members’).
On Being an Orphan: An untold story
Aram explores 70 years of the Tavistock Institute’s work on the care and mental health of
children and young people, focusing on the lived experience of ‘orphanness’ – of being looked after and abandoned – through both the Institute’s work and through conversations with colleagues and reflections from her own experience.
Aram’s talk proposes that the Tavistock Institute’s identity – as an independent, autonomous, defiant and self-sufficient social science organisation – is co-created through
and by the untold life journeys of its employees as much as by the work done. The Institute’s identity is rooted in a lived experience of ‘orphanness’ that is an untold story of living with and thriving through a void, and not ‘just surviving’ it.
Performance Poetry
Dreadlockalien will use words, melodies and beatbox to soundscape a performance of poetry
generated in creative response to the day’s discussions and the festival’s themes. Dreadlockalien’s work addresses social issues – including citizenship, immigration and Black British experiences – and he has worked with the Tavistock Institute on projects
concerned with the mental health of looked after young people.
Dr Elizabeth Cory-Pearce
Researcher & Consultant
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
30 Tabernacle Street, London EC2A 4UE
Tel: 020 7417 0407 (Switchboard)
(M): +44 (0)7984 692 454
2017 marks the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations’ 70th anniversary celebrations 17-20 October 2017 and the launch of the Tavistock Institute’s
Archive project
with the Wellcome Library, a creative testimony to the continuing intellectual contribution of the Tavistock Institute to improving human relations.
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