Christopher alexander - A pattern language

“If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his freewill along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality.”

In contrast to this form of work stands the style of work that has been created by the technological progress of the past two hundred years. In this style workers are made to operate like parts of a machine; they create parts of no consequence, and have no responsibility for the whole. We may fairly say that the alienation of workers from the intrinsic pleasures of their work has been a primary product of the industrial revolution. The alienation is particularly acute in large organizations, where faceless workers repeat endlessly menial tasks to create products and services with which they cannot identify.

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In these organizations, with all the power and benefits that the unions have been able to wrest from the hands of the owners, there is still evidence that workers are fundamentally unhappy with their work. In the auto industry, for example, the absentee rate on Mondays and Fridays is staggering—15 to 20 per cent; and there is evidence of “massive alcoholism, similar to what the Russians are experiencing with their factory workers” (Nicholas von Hoffman, Washington Post). The fact is that people cannot find satisfaction in work unless it is performed at a human scale and in a setting where the worker has a say.

Job dissatisfaction in modern industry has also led to industrial sabotage and a faster turnover of workers in recent years. A new super-automated General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio, was sabotaged and shut down for several weeks. Absenteeism in the three largest automobile manufacturing companies has doubled in the past seven years. The turnover of workers has also doubled. Some industrial engineers believe that “American industry in some cases may have pushed technology too far by taking the last few bits of skill out of jobs, and that a point of human resistance has been reached” (Agis Salpukis, “Is the machine pushing man over the brink? San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle , April 16, 1972).

Perhaps the most dramatic empirical evidence for the connection between work and life is that presented in the recent study, “Work in America,” commissioned by Elliot Richardson, as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Department, 1972. This study finds that the single best -predictor of long life is not whether a person smokes or hozv often he sees a doctor , but the extent to which he is satisfied with his job. The report identifies the two main elements of job dissatisfaction as the diminishing independence of workers, and the increasing simplification, fragmentation, and isolation of tasks—both of which are rampant in modern industrial and office work alike.

But for most of human history, the production of goods and services was for a far more personal, self-regulating affair; when each job of work was a matter of creative interest. And there is no reason why work can’t be like that again, today.

For instance, Seymour Melman, in Decision Making and Pro-ductivity , compares the manufacture of tractors in Detroit and in

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Coventry, England. He contrasts Detroit’s managerial rule with Coventry’s gang system and shows that the gang system produced high quality products and the highest wages in British industry. “The most characteristic feature of the decision-formulation process is that of mutuality in decision-making with final authority residing in the hands of the group workers themselves.”

Other projects and experiments and evidence which indicate that modern work can be organized in this manner and still be compatible with sophisticated technology, have been collected by H unnius, Garson, and Chase. See Worker? Control , New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

And another example comes from the reports by E. L. Trist, Organizational Choice and P. Herbst, Autonomous Grouf Functioning. These authors describe the organization of work in mining pits in Durham which was put into practice by groups of miners.

The composite work organization may be described as one in which the group takes over complete responsibility for the total cycle of operations involved in mining the coal-face. No member of the group has a fixed work-role. Instead, the men deploy themselves, depending on the requirements of the ongoing group task. Within the limits of technological and safety requirements they are free to evolve their way of organizing and carrying out their task.

[The experiment demonstrates] the ability of quite large primary work groups of 40-50 members to act as self-regulating, self-developing social organisms able to maintain .themselves in a steady state of high productivity. (Quoted in Colin Ward, “The organization of anarchy,” Patterns of Anarchy , Krimerman and Perry, eds., New York: Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 349-51.)

We believe that these small self-governing groups are not only most efficient, but also the only possible source of job satisfaction. They provide the only style of work that is nourishing and intrinsically satisfying.

Therefore:

Encourage the formation of self-governing workshops and offices of 5 to 20 workers. Make each group autonomous—with respect to organization, style, relation to other groups, hiring and firing, work schedule. Where the work

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80 SELF-GOVERNING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES

self-governing workshops

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House the workgroup in a building of its own— office connections(82), building complex(95); if the workgroup is large enough, and if it serves the public, break it down into autonomous departments, easily identifiable, with no more than a dozen people each— small services without red tape (8i);in any case, divide all work into small team work, either directly within the cooperative workgroup or under the departments, with the people of each team in common space— master and apprentices(83) and small work groups (148). . . .

81 SMALL SERVICES WITHOUT RED TAPE*

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. . . all offices which provide service to the public— work community(41), UNIVERSITY AS A MARKETPLACE(43), LOCAL TOWN HALL(44), HEATH CENTER(47), TEENAGE SOCIETY(84) need subsidiary departments, where the members of the public go. And of course, piecemeal development of these small departments, one department at a time, can also help to generate these larger patterns gradually.