Works
- The causal texture of organizational environments, Human Relations 18(1), 21 to 32, 1965
- Form and Content in Industrial Democracy: Some Experiences from Norway and Other European Countries, Tavistock Publications, London; reissued by Routledge, 1969
- Democracy at Work: The Report of the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program, Martinus Nijhoff Social Sciences Division, Leiden (179 pages; in cooperation with Per H. Engelstad, Jon Gulowsen, and Thoralf Qvale), 1976
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Open-systems thinking and the Norwegian industrial democracy program
Ideas
Causal texture of environments. With Trist, Emery named four ideal types of causal texture in organizational environments, placid randomized, placid clustered, disturbed-reactive, and turbulent fields, in which the dynamic processes that create significant variances for the component organizations arise from the field itself. Caveat: A conceptual typology. Only short passages of two reprints were read.
The Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program. Semi-autonomous work groups, introduced by field experiment at four Norwegian companies, as the route to democracy at work. Caveat: The experiments spread less than hoped (Gustavsen 1992).
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.