Albert B. Cherns

Studying the client's role in construction management

Construction industry researchers tend to oversimplify the role of the client in the construction management process. This partly results from the propensity of researchers to use ‘broadcast’ survey method approaches which typically achieve shallow penetration of the clients world. Obtaining access to critical data involves a different relationship between researcher and client. When the client is seen as complex rather than unitary, the history and prehistory of the project loom large. What has occurred in the past can have a crucial effect on the operations of the project team assembled to manage the construction. A pilot study to test the feasibility of obtaining valid information from building clients is described. Twenty ‘points’ or hypotheses about the clients role in construction management are advanced and are to be tested in a forthcoming major study.

Alienation and accountancy

Abstract Alienation is the product of social segmentation and stratification. Increasingly organizations by invading all spheres of life, even the most private, are the engines of alienation. We know how to design organizations which themselves will be less segmented, less stratified. But organization design is constrained by the requirements for measurement. These no longer, even if they ever did, truly reflect their value to society. Recognizing this, accountants are sponsoring new approaches which can however prove manipulative. Sociologists should join the debate.

Behavioral Science Engagements: Taxonomy and Dynamics

In this paper we discuss the modes of engagement between social scientists and their clients. There are three significant variables: the negotiability of the problem, the openness of the client to the nature of the solution, and the discretion allowed to the social scientist in choice of method. During engagements clients experience pressure to close options, while social scientists wish to keep them open. The resulting balance determines the nature of the engagement at any time.

Contribution of social psychology to the nature and function of work and its relevance to societies of the third world

Abstract It is argued that the concept of work is central to consideration of the future both of the industrialized and the Third World. Work must be sharply distinguished from paid employment to which we cannot look to provide entitlement to full citizenship, a role which it has acquired over a comparatively short period of time in industrial civilization. Work and education are artificially divided, the price for which is greatly higher in the developing than in the developed world. Sociotechnical assessment should be undertaken to ensure that the selection of technologies for use in developing countries will meet their requirements for the encouragement and growth of social and political as well as manual skills. The re is a need for community processes to be studied and understood without neglect of their historical dimension.

Analyzing Social Systems: An Application of Parsons's Macrosystem Model to the Organizational Level and the Sociotechnical Perspective

An analysis of a social system requires, in addition to data-collection instruments, an organizing paradigm by which the data can be made to depict the system as a unified, functioning entity. The Parsonian model of social systems is applied to organizations. Four basic social subsystemsgoal attainment, adaptation, latency, and integration-are discussed along with data-collection techniques. Some data can be obtained with formal instruments, others only with more casual techniques. The technology employed by an organization affects all four subsystems; it should not be looked upon as a monolithic subsystem by itself. There is a particular sequence of interaction among the four subsystems, beginning with goal attainment and ending with integration. This has implications for organizational diagnosis, design, and development.

Organizations as Instruments of Social Change in Postindustrial Societies

There are two ways of looking at the relationship between organizations and society. One features the impact of society on the organization, the social environment; the other attends to the impact on society of the organization and its appetite for resources. The first shows organizations lagging in their cultural prescriptions, the second shows them leading. Both are right. The relationship is circular. Because the work organization, is the principal agent of distribution of societys resources, both material and immaterial, it is a splendid fulcrum for a sociotechnical Archimedes.

Work or Life

Work is a curse. For that we have the authority of the Bible: ‘Because you have listened to your wife and have eaten from the tree which I forbade you accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return’. Marx was equally lyrical., if less contemptuous. The worker has spun, and the product is his web’.1 However he is apparently caught in his own web because To be a productive worker is not a piece of good luck, but a misfortune’.2

Action Research and the Development of the Social Sciences

Action research is more than an addition to the armory of social science techniques of inquiry, more than a method for relating the insights derived from social science theory to practical issues. It challenges the position of the social scientist as privileged observer, analyst, and critic (P. A. Clark, 1972). It is an emergent phenomenon whose characteristics illuminate the dynamic relationship between the social sciences and society. In this chapter we set out to describe this relationship and to present a model to cover the development of knowledge-based activities.