60 Yrs of Human Relations

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Human Relations

DOI: 10.1177/0018726707084917 2007; 60; 1873 Human Relations

Ray Loveridge, Paul Willman and Stephen Deery 60 years of Human Relations

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60 years of Human RelationsRay 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 fulfil its mission and achieve its academic

goals.

K E Y WO R D S action research � Human Relations � integration of the socialsciences � organizational behaviour � Tavistock Institute

Institutional entrepreneurs

In Northern Europe the winter of 1947 was the coldest in modern times. InBritain, national coal stocks declined to zero causing electricity supplies tobecome intermittent. In mainland Europe many displaced refugees froze todeath among the bombed-out ruins of former homes. Yet there was agrowing sense of self-confidence bordering on hubris among both naturaland 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

1 8 7 3

Human Relations

DOI: 10.1177/0018726707084917

Volume 60(12): 1873–1888

Copyright © 2007

The Tavistock Institute ®

SAGE Publications

Los Angeles, London,

New Delhi, Singapore




inventiveness and with their successes in logistical organization. A report byCartwright (1948) on ‘Social psychology in the United States during theSecond World War’ which appeared in the first volume of Human Relationsreflects this collective self-confidence. Moreover, the steady movement inuniversity scholarship and teaching, begun in the 19th century, from moralphilosophy to contemporary claims to scientific expertise in the design ofsocial organization, seemed at last to have reached a wide measure ofacceptability among practitioners. In Britain especially, this had entailedovercoming resistance from classically trained ‘amateurs’ in public adminis-tration, the pragmatism of ‘self-educated’ industrial managers and thevested interests of older professional bodies – in the case of the formationof the Tavistock Clinic, the British Medical Association and the RoyalColleges of Medicine. In the USA, the lines of battle between psychologicalbehaviourists and Taylorist engineers were, perhaps, more long-standingand 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 reflecting a gathering popularityamong scholars, consultants and some prominent corporate executives in theUSA for the message conveyed in Roethlisberger and Dickson’s (1939)account of the Western Electric experiments. It might also be seen to expressthe founding editors’ belief in what Roethlisberger himself described as thephenomenological interconnectedness between the individual, the primarygroup and the social system. In particular, the wartime experiences of bothmanagers and social scientists affirmed a belief that both personal and group‘needs’ in the workplace were created and shaped through social relation-ships within wider corporate and social structures such as the family. Thejournal’s strap line was chosen to explicate this belief – ‘Towards the inte-gration of the social sciences’. Harvard University had, in fact, just organ-izationally and physically integrated all of its social science departments inone Department of Social Relations as a clear indication of the expectedfuture of this intellectual field and of the dissolution of still nascent disci-plinary boundaries within it. As with the first editors of this journal, therewas a belief among many American and British scholars that an integrationof social studies would come, as it often had under war-time conditions,through a shared focus on the need to address operational managementproblems. The leader in the first issue of Human Relations saw it as ‘a mainpurpose of the new journal to encourage and facilitate . . . [t]he practicalapplication of social science in collaborative response to community needs’(1947: 1).

Human Relations 60(12)1 8 7 4



Incommensurable perspectives?

Eric Miller (1997) observed in the Golden Jubilee issue of the journal thatthe founding and evolution of Human Relations was built around three inter-connected strands. The first was the creation of the Tavistock Institute andits inter-organizational alliances, first with the Research Centre for GroupDynamics (RCGD) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and thenwith the migratory group that later joined the Survey Research Center at theUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. This foundation of itself might be seenas an act of considerable courage on the part of the ‘returning warriors’, asMiller describes them. That it was facilitated by a long-term grant from theRockefeller Foundation can be taken as an indication of the reputation of itsfounders in the USA and of the willingness of their benefactors to see ‘actionresearch’ taken into the post-war reconstruction of British industry on asignificant scale. The second was the creation of the Tavistock Publicationsin 1946 as a means of propagation and outreach to both scholars and prac-titioners. The third was the foundation of a journal to be published inLondon by Tavistock Publications but edited jointly from both sides of theAtlantic. The editorial committee was made up of leading research scientistssuch as Elliot Jaques and Eric Trist from the Tavistock Institute and KurtLewin and Rensis Likert from the RCGD and an advisory board whichconsisted of established American scholars from the fields of social psy-chology, sociology and politics including Douglas McGregor, RobertMerton, Harold Lasswell and Lloyd Warner.

An ‘objective’ narrative of the co-evolution of these three enterpriseswould require something far more detailed than we can attempt here. We canhowever offer a commentary on Eric Miller’s more detailed narrative publishedin the Golden Jubilee issue of January 1997 and speculate about the ideationalcontests over which we and other past editors have adjudicated. Eric Miller’sarticle and Eric Trist’s prefaces, variously written with Hugh Murray and FredEmery, in the three volume anthology, The social engagement of social science(Trist & Murray, 1990, 1993; Trist et al., 1997) convey some of the excite-ment of discovery and formulation of new explanation that underlay anddrove the three inter-related projects. But from the start the aims of the journalwere 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 newconcepts arising from practical needs or field work’ and ‘descriptions of newtechniques in social science’ (Human Relations 1: 2). Therefore it was alwaysas likely that a conscientious editor would record a growing differentiation ofconcepts and techniques within submitted manuscripts as that he or she woulddiscover an underlying convergence in analytical paths.

Loveridge et al. 60 years of Human Relations 1 8 7 5



This seems to have been the case. In what was to become a classicalcritique of organizational analysis, Pugh et al. (1963) suggested a growingdivide between those scholars pursuing an interest in the analysis of groupprocess within organizations and those who set more store on erecting struc-tural configurations of bureaucracy. Their article appeared in the eighthvolume of a comparatively new journal, Administrative Science Quarterly,and was followed by a series of theoretically innovative empirical studies (theAston Studies) that helped to establish that journal as the leading outlet in anewly labelled field of Organization Theory. The authors cited by Pugh etal. (1963) were, by that time, all scholars who had published their early workin Human Relations. They included British anthropologists such as TomLupton on the embeddedness of work groups in external communities, TomBurns on the micro-politics of management and their effects on techno-logical innovation as well as North American social psychologists such asChris Argyris and Douglas McGregor.

By the 1960s these studies formed the bases of an eclectic collection ofmicro-approaches to workplace relationships under the text book headingof Organizational Behaviour (OB). Such texts served the needs of thegrowing number of management teachers in college departments of adminis-trative science throughout the world, including the post-colonial world, whotook their lead from the curricula of North American business schools.Differences were to emerge, however, between OB and other cognate disci-plinary fields of study such as Industrial Relations (IR). In both the USA andBritain, IR scholars tended to view OB, particularly when described in termsthat recalled the Hawthorne studies, as a managerially biased attempt to co-opt labour and to diminish the likelihood of unionization. The attack on‘plant sociologists’ launched by Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher, two alreadydistinguished IR authors, in a widely reviewed reader entitled Commonfrontiers in the social sciences (1957) epitomized this hostility. The title oftheir chapter implied that an academic elite of ‘social scientists’ studiedmanual workers as anthropologists observed ‘aborigines’, rather than seeingthem as citizens with a collective identity and legal rights in the sale of theirlabour. These differences in scholarly approach were described by the authorsas based in underlying ideological belief. In a more recent article, GeorgeStrauss (2001) has commented on the longevity of the dissonant perspectivesconveyed in British scholarly writing around the use of the term HumanResource Management. He sees the more sceptical and conflictual Britishview as contrasting with that ‘In the US, (where) HRM, OB (and even IR)have evolved into “normal’’ (quantitative, deductive) sciences to a greaterextent than they have in the UK, especially since HRM in the USA is soheavily influenced by psychology’ (Strauss, 2001: 890). For some, the study




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

The intellectual role of the Tavistock Institute

As Miller’s earlier history suggests, the number of articles contributed byTavistock authors to the first issues of the journal were not excessive and haddeclined greatly by the 1970s. Nevertheless, the significance of particularcontributions by the core of leading Tavistock theorists helped to establishthe early reputation of the Institute and were destined to become classics inthemselves (viz., Emery & Trist, 1965; Rice et al., 1950; Trist & Bamforth,1951). The eclectic policy adopted by successive editorial panels alsoprovided a distinctive position for the journal across a number of emergentdisciplines such as social psychology and social anthropology. This, in turn,contributed to the reputation of the Institute as an independent intellectualbase comparable to any existing in European universities. It is noteworthythat even when the Institute was encountering considerable difficulties inmaintaining its own research levels in the 1970s, the journal published papersthat proved foundational to new schools of social enquiry such as HowardAldridge on ‘Organizational boundaries and inter-organizational conflict’(1971) and Andrew Pettigrew ‘Towards a political theory of organizationalintervention’ (1975).

Many – though by no means all – articles contributed by Tavistockauthors might be seen to represent three important themes in the work ofthe Institute. Perhaps the most famous in present-day literature is that of thetask and sentient system – or as it became more popularly known – the socio-technical system. The notion of autonomous group working contained inTrist and Bamforth’s (1951) article ‘Some social and psychological conse-quences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting’ can be seen as many yearsahead of both theory and practice. Many of the observations contained inthis first revelatory description of the spontaneous reaction of Yorkshire coalminers to the use of automation were to be rediscovered in the 1980s byexponents of variations on the more contrived Toyota style of management.A second major theme was, of course, that of group dynamics exploredthrough a psychoanalytic lens provided by the early work of Kurt Lewin andmore domestic referents such as Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein. By contrastto the secular catholicism of the socio-technical framework the psycho-analytic basis of group dynamics seems often to have triggered a much moreheated debate among practitioners which only occasionally found its wayinto journal papers. Yet, for many Tavistock researchers it remained, and




remains, central to their understanding of organized communal relationships.The annual Leicester Conference which helps to foster expertise in psycho-dynamic consultancy marks a continuity in thought and practice in sensi-tivity training that goes back to the pre-Second World War origins of theTavistock approach and its wartime applications. This two-week-longannual event seeks to allow participants to experience the construction ofauthority 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 thework of the Tavistock Institute. There was a conscious effort to provide abroader systems framework within which to locate socio-technical researchand group dynamics. This resulted in a book, Systems of organization byEric Miller and A.K. Rice (1967), which anticipated much of the later end-of-century writing by others on the transitivity of organizational boundaries.Of more immediate importance was, perhaps, Emery and Trist’s (1965)article ‘The causal texture of organizational environments’. The latter repre-sented a major movement towards a contemporary concern for contextualcontingency in the Institute’s thinking and was subject to a two-dayworkshop before its publication. Ignoring the dominant modes of systemsthinking – Weberian-Parsonian and neo-Marxian – at that time, the authorsdetermined on a ‘socio-ecological’ perspective.

This article was reproduced in the Golden Jubilee (August 1997) issueof the journal because of its relevance to the very contemporary problem ofmanaging the adaptation of organizational boundaries to varying types of‘turbulence’ in their environment. This concern addressed managerialproblems of the 1990s in a still very pertinent way. At the time of its firstpublication the notion that any single organization belonged to an ‘ecologicalpopulation of organizations’ can be seen to have anticipated later schools ofthought in Organization Theory by some 20 years. Against this, it may beargued that the influence of the cybernetic thinking of von Bertalanffydisplayed in the article was too great (see Emery, 1997). The mechanisticlanguage of self-equilibriating systems might also not entirely be appropri-ate for a paradigm seen ultimately to be dependent upon the expression ofunconscious personal need within socially varied events and inter-personalsituations. Perhaps this need to express psycho-analytic forces in a‘scientifically’ quantifiable way might well also be seen as part of a Lewinianinheritance.

Whatever view one takes on its theoretical underpinnings, the opensystems language became synonymous with the later writing of manyTavistock authors. Sometimes it might be seen as to have obscured theirmessage and to frustrate their attempts to join mainstream conversations in




social studies or to engage with the specialized jargons of post-modernism.Paradoxically then, the gap between the action-orientation of Tavistockresearchers (also strengthened by a Lewinian inheritance) and the reificationof the language in which it was so often expressed was to become a problemfor journal editors keen to disseminate their empirical findings and con-ceptual explanations. The resulting frustrations of action researchers invitedcomparisons 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 networkedorganization in the late 1960s had significant implications for the journal. Inpart this came about as a result of positive extensions of existing collabor-ations with overseas partners such as Louis Davies in the USA, Hans vanBeinum in Rotterdam and Canada and Einer Thorsrud at Trondheim. It alsocame about through the movement of leading Tavistock thinkers to positionsin overseas universities, particularly of Eric Trist to the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Fred Emery to the Australian NationalUniversity, as well as to the demise or to the spinning-off of the consultancyactivities of other pioneer members. In one sense then, this diffusion of ideas-champions helped to ensure a stable worldwide market for the journal anda level of circulation that probably outstripped that of any other socialscience journal for a period of years. The numbers of submitted manuscriptsalso rose and publication went from four to six issues a year in 1969, to ninein 1974 and moved to a monthly issue in 1977. Publication had moved fromthe now commercially owned Tavistock Publications to a New York basedPlenum Publications in 1968. This, together with a strongly internationaleditorial panel, probably helped preserve the trans-Atlantic reputation thathad been weakened by the withdrawal of the Michigan-based RCGD editorsin 1964. Certainly the stable level of subscriptions from North Americanuniversity libraries remained the basis of journal support until the mid-1990s.

During the 1970s national governments in the West were becomingincreasingly anxious about a failing level of productivity and the oftenconflict ridden state of labour–management relations in manufacturingindustries. Government sponsorship of Quality-of-Working Life programmesin Europe, Canada and Australia, taken together with the impending draftFifth Directive of the European Commission on Worker Participation,enlisted a wider potential audience of bureaucrats and consultants interested




in developing earlier Tavistock concepts. Frank Heller had announced hisarrival in the Institute with an initial statement of his approach to actionresearch, or as he preferred to call it, ‘research action’, in an article in HumanRelations on group feedback analysis (Heller, 1970). This method made useof questionnaire data to prompt small group dialogue with researchers in away quite different from previous Tavistock approaches to case analysis.Over the next two decades the Institute’s presence in the expanding field ofcross-national research on industrial democracy was largely to be found inthe reports that Heller presented in the journal and in many other publi-cations (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 designer-oriented approach to workplace democracy taking place in the USA thatpresaged the coming of autonomous group working.

For the Institute itself however the 1970s proved to be a period offinancial and organizational turbulence. The support of the RockefellerFoundation had long since ended and financial income depended upon theattraction of programme grants from public and private client organizations.Much of the leadership in workplace action research might be seen to haveshifted to Scandinavia, particularly to the University of Trondheim, and tothe Netherlands, where government funding enabled the establishment ofgroups working in the Tavistock tradition. Outside of existing industrialcollaborators in process industries (such as Shell and Unilever) there was littleinterest among beleaguered British manufacturers for worker participationor for organizational change of a radical nature (Cronin, 2000). With thedepartures of Emery and Trist, the journal lost much of its editorial driveand, perhaps, operational problems took on a much greater short-termsignificance for the elected members of the Institute’s ManagementCommittee and for the external members of Council.

Over most of the 1980s the position of editor was combined with thatof Institute Secretary in the person of Michael Foster, who was subsequentlyassisted by Maggie Adam in the considerable task of manuscript manage-ment around a monthly schedule of publication. In 1988 the editorialposition was externally advertised and in January 1989 Ray Loveridge wasappointed as senior editor-in-waiting. Perhaps a major consideration was hisown personal involvement in action-oriented research in worker partici-pation throughout the previous two decades. For the first year he workedalongside Foster and it was not until 1990 that his name appeared as editor-in-chief allied with those of Jean Neumann and Richard Holti as associatesfrom within the Institute. In the following year an Editorial ManagementCommittee (HREMC) came into being chaired by Eric Miller containingboth internal representatives Frank Heller and John Kellaher and external




advisers Anthony Hopwood, at that time at the London Business School, and David Guest from Birkbeck College, London University. Quarterlymeetings of this body ensured that the drive towards regaining a competitiveedge in the proliferating field of new social studies journals was given a newpriority in Institute activities. In particular outside representatives on theHREMC served to ‘externalize’ the mission of the new editorial team and toprovide a continuing source of suggested topics for special issues and newwriters around emergent themes. At that time this was to prove critical tothe negotiation of a changing relationship between the journal editorship andthe role of the Institute Management Committee.

New directions

One of the priorities of the editor-in-chief was to restore the pluralism inapproach to the publication of research papers from which the journal hadgained its earlier reputation. More especially it seemed necessary to reflectmovements in social studies towards ‘the cultural turn’ and away from ‘thenominalism of attitude measurement’ (Trist, 1960) that had dominated thejournal’s content over the previous decade. This openness was signalled in aseries of editorials and in the commissioning of special issues. It did notprevent some contributors bewailing ‘the paradigm plague’ (Holland, 1990)that was seen as besetting the social sciences. It did allow discussion of someof the ‘sacred cows’ of Bionian/Lewinian approaches to group dynamics inthe light of post-modern critiques in articles like that of Frosh (1991).Articles such as those of Clark and Soulsby (1998) called attention to work-place changes taking place in ‘transitional societies’ outside of the ethno-centric focus of most Anglo-Saxon empiricists.

The cognitive frames of strategists, so long addressed in Tavistocktraining programmes, was explored in articles such as those of Starkey(1995) and by Spender and Kessler (1995). Willmott’s (1997) article alsodrew attention to the importance of management work within organizationsin which job distinctions were less easy to draw, but where their influencewas so evidently pervasive. The importance of these new strands in the workof the Institute was illustrated by Dione Hills’s (1998) article on ‘Engagingnew social movements’ and Joe Cullen’s (1998) ‘The needle and the damagedone’, a Foucauldian interpretation of the workings of the Government’santi-AIDS campaign both published in a millennium special issue. Heller’s(1998) contribution to that issue was a masterly summary of the historicalevolution of western constitutional democracy within the workplace. In onesense a profoundly discouraging account, in another its emphasis on




‘capabilities’ and ‘commitments’ shifted the terms of the discussion towardsthe more radical change in social institutions taking place around work.

In order to achieve this mission of greater openness a number of moreprosaic managerial tasks had to be undertaken. First, the team had to regaineditorial control over the content of each issue of the journal and second, ithad to seek out a greatly expanded community of authors, reviewers as wellas subscribers within vocational schools and, more particularly, withinbusiness schools. Conference representation began in earnest with a receptionat the Academy of Management in Miami in 1991 and at the InternationalIndustrial Relations Association in Sydney in the following year. The retire-ment of Maggie Adam in 1994 led to the appointment of Tamar Jeffers asadministrative assistant, a title that was eventually to be converted tomanaging editor as an acknowledgement of her contribution to thesystemization of both back and front office activities. The highly personalrelationships she developed with an expanding community of authors andreviewers complemented and helped bring about the changes that she initiatedwith the achievement of electronic manuscript submission and processing. Afurther movement towards the externalization of journal control came whenthe associate editorship passed to two academics: Rob Briner and TimothyClark, with Ken Starkey as the first review editor. Yiannis Gabriel replacedTimothy Clark in 2001.

The new millennium

The journal market in which Human Relations found itself in the 21stcentury indicated both the strength of its legacy and the external changesparticularly in the business academe from which the Tavistock Institute waslargely shielded. The legacy meant that Human Relations remained a highlyinternational journal. However, the international academic marketplaceremained dominated by the USA. This affected both the types of scholarshipsubmitted and published in the journal and the implications of publishingwithin it. Large US-based journals both defined the parameters of academicdebate in many fields and secured academic tenure for those successful in thereview process.

The change to business academe most relevant to the journal was therise in the study of management in universities. Whether in business schoolsor in departments of management, many of the journal’s readers and writerswere concerned with what was becoming addressed as macro- and micro-OB, with the object of interest being the study of firms or large public sectororganizations and the individuals who worked within them. Academic




societies such as the Academy of Management in the USA, the BritishAcademy of Management and the European Group for OrganizationalStudies came to embrace many of the journal’s contributors – whethereditors, referees, writers or readers.

There were a number of implications. The first has been well discussedby Pfeffer (1997). The location of much organizational analysis in businessschools meant that economists became both interested and active in develop-ments in organizational theory. One can debate the merits of this but theimplications for the journal were considerable. On the one hand, therational-choice, prescriptive and reductionist thrust of organizationaleconomics 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 ofthe journal’s traditions, such as an engagement with psychodynamics, weredifficult to sustain. The number of articles both submitted to and publishedin the journal in this field has been modest over the last five years or so. Inaddition, articles that did not focus on industrial organizations or individualswithin them became rare.

The third was that the journal operated in a more crowded intellectualand publishing space. The learned societies covering the Human Relations‘family’ mentioned above all supported their own journals, for which theirannual meetings provided content feed. By contrast, Human Relations,having no natural constituency and without intellectual input from anyTavistock research, operated in a more open market for ideas. This allowedchoices but also implied an eclectic approach. In ways similar to itsconstituents’ own employing institutions, the journal could keep an eye tothe innovative and interdisciplinary but only while the other was focused oncitation counts and impact factors among competing journals.

This can be illustrated by looking at the diversity of the five most citedarticles from the 2000–6 period. Two, from a special issue, are broad pieceson discourse analysis (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000; Hardy et al., 2000).Fournier and Grey’s (2000) similarly expansive piece on critical managementstudies from the same year is also well cited. Arguably, these are instances ofEuropean scholarship finding favour with a transatlantic management studiesaudience. Jennifer George’s (2000) piece on emotional intelligence and leader-ship which was the 2000 article of the year is an example of US scholarshipfrom those years, while Brendan McSweeney’s (2002) controversial piece onthe work of Hofstede excited substantial interest both in Europe and the USA.

Much of the journal’s most cited work in this period was qualitative,and the journal provided a broad audience for the sort of work that morequantitative US management journals might not have looked on favourably.




However, as the examples above indicate, much of the journal’s content wasnot interdisciplinary and this, together with the fear that the strap line mightdiscourage innovative or unusual contributions, led the editors to argue forthe removal of the traditional ‘integration’ strap line (Gabriel & Willman,2004).

Following Paul Willman’s appointment as editor-in-chief in 2000, theeditorial team changed to reflect the scope and internationalism of the journalin the new millennium. Suzy Fox, Linda Putnam and Barbara Townley wereappointed as associate editors. All had academic experience in NorthAmerica. Alice Gilbertson was appointed managing editor in 2004 and NeilWalshe joined as editorial assistant in 2005. At this stage also, Tavistock Insti-tute membership of the team ended, indicating the intellectual parting of theways that had been underway for some time.

The internationalization of the journal continued under the editorshipof Stephen Deery (2006–) with a substantial expansion of the membershipof the Editorial Board from North America, Australasia and Europe and withthe appointments of Dan Gallagher and Gail Fairhurst from the USA andSamuel Aryee and Paul Edwards from the UK as associate editors. At thesame time the aims and scope of the journal were re-examined. There was astrong belief among the editorial team that the journal should clarify itsobjectives in the light of its original mission and in the context of thecompetitive journal market in which it was located.

Three guiding principles were reaffirmed. First, the journal would seekto encourage research that examined issues from different disciplinaryperspectives. We believed that insights from various social science disciplineswould continue to find application in those fields of research that wererelevant to our understanding of human interaction and work organizations.Second, the journal would focus on research that sought to advance ourunderstanding of social relationships at and around work through theoreti-cal development and empirical investigation. It was seen as important tomaintain the long commitment of the journal to issues that were germane tothe nature, structure and conditions of work and to the organizational prac-tices, arrangements and processes that affected them. The interface betweenwork and non-work was also seen as highly relevant. Third, the journalwould seek to encourage research that sought to relate social theory to socialpractice and would explore policy choices and options that could help toimprove the well-being of employees and the effectiveness of organizations.It was expected that those policy choices for social action would be informedby an understanding of the complexities of human relationships at work andby the nature of political processes within organizations. In keeping with theTavistock tradition we also believed that it was important for the journal to




continue to stress the context within which the research was conducted.Consequently, we signalled our intention to ask that research where possibleshould seek to locate the study of issues within their organizational context,and where relevant within their wider social and political environment (seewww. humanrelationsjournal.org).

Although the character of Human Relations has changed over the last60 years with greater specificity being applied to the research questions athand and with the acquisition of more rigorous research methodologies andstatistical techniques of analysis there have been important continuities. Thetypes of issues and the matters of concern that spawned the transatlanticacademic alliance in 1947 and formed the research agenda in the early yearsof the journal still resonate today. The journal has maintained its focus onintergroup relations, teamworking and work tasks (Coupland et al., 2005;Kang et al., 2006; Tjosvold et al., 2005) as well as on the stressful aspects ofwork and work relationships (Bakker et al., 2005; Bamberger & Bacharach,2006; Daniels, 2006). In keeping with the Tavistock’s concern with the widercontext within which work is performed issues pertaining to work–life issuesare widely researched and debated (Brotheridge & Lee, 2006; Dallimore &Mickel, 2006; Powell & Greenhaus, 2006). Furthermore, the Tavistock’sroots in psychodynamics are still evident (Driver, 2005; Fotaki, 2006). Thejournal has also sought to engage with other issues as well and in particularcontemporary 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 communi-cation and transfer of knowledge across organizations (Willem & Scarbrough,2006) and issues associated with the new service economy (O’Donohoe &Turley, 2006; Rosenthal & Peccei, 2006).

Conclusion

As a journal founded to disseminate an action research, innovative and inter-disciplinary approach to the understanding of social issues, Human Relationscan uniquely look back on 60 years of continuous publication. The journalhas generated a corpus of work, available to subscribers, that has had anenormous impact on the growth of the organizational behaviour field. Inter-national and eclectic from the outset, it has achieved sustained and almostglobal reach in its author, reviewer and readership base.

But much has changed. Once an integral part of the intellectual life andoutput of the Tavistock Institute, it has been editorially independent for twodecades. Drawing its intellectual agenda from the broader academic




community, it conforms to the powerful isomorphic pressures of thatcommunity in terms of its academic standards, processes and distribution.Once, perhaps, the only journal in its field, it now seeks to retain its distinc-tiveness in a much more densely populated academic landscape in whichjournal publishing is the main activity and indeed career objective of itsreadership. It has retained distinctiveness in a number of ways, but oneparticular difference has defined its approach in recent years. Not tied to anyacademic society or academy, it can sustain a catholicism of approach to theinnovative, 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 thework of the Institute, see Neumann (2005).

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