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Socio-technical theory (STT) or Socio-technical Systems (STS) is more than half a century old. It was founded by a group of researchers, social scientists, therapists, and consultants who came together at the end of Second World War and formed the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations at London in 1946 and its concept was to assist soldiers to regain their mental stability and health after the war. This was the initial focus and orientation of these members of the Tavistock institute, although they were also interested in applying their ideas to the workers in the industry (Mumford, 1985).

Enid Mumford (1985, 2006) presented an extraordinary work on socio-technical theory and in most of her work she covered the complete history of the theory along with its design aspects, and the impacts and implications of information and communication technologies. The author argued that the Tavistock pioneers believed that their research projects should not only be attempts to increase knowledge, but that they should also embrace the improvement of work situations that were unsatisfactory in human terms. This decision led them to develop an approach and methodology which they called socio-technical. This meant that technology, which, in their definition, covered both machines and the associated work organization, should not be allowed to be the controlling factor when new work systems were implemented. Also, equal attention must be given to providing a high quality and satisfying work environment for the employees. In practice, a primary objective of the socio-technical system is to ensure that both technical and human factors should, whenever possible, be given equal weight in the design process. One of the important components of socio-technical design is that employees who used the new system should be involved in determining the required quality of working-life improvements (Mumford, 2006).

Another remarkable work on socio-technical theory was done in the late 1970s by (Bostrom and Heinen, 1977). In their research work, the authors highlighted major management information systems (MIS) related problems and challenges in the organizations and how these problems can be rectified using socio-technical system. The authors argued that the socio-technical system assumes that an organization, or organizational work system, (e.g. a department), can be described as a socio-technical system. In other words, a work system is made up of two jointly independent, but correlative interacting systems i.e. the social system and the technical system. The technical system is concerned with the processes, tasks, and technology needed to transform inputs and outputs.

On the other hand, the social system is concerned with the attributes of people e.g. attitudes, skills, values etc., the relationships among people, reward systems, and authority structures. It is assumed that the outputs of the work system are the result of joint interactions between these two systems. Thus, any design or redesign of a work system must deal with both systems in an integrated form. Figure 3.1 represents these two jointly independent, but correlative interacting work systems.

Figure 3.1: The Interacting Variable Classes within the Work System (Source: Bostrom and Heinen, 1977, p.25)

Recently, Cartelli (2007) a researcher in didactics in his work also discussed these two subsystems in his own way. The author argues that socio-technical theory hypothesizes the presence of two subsystems in every organization or corporate; which are: the technical sub-system and the social sub-system. According to the author, “many researchers at the Tavistock Institute in London, while studying the resistance of the work force to innovation and especially to the introduction to the technological systems for work automation, suggested that a fit between the two sub- systems was needed for the overcoming of the workers’ difficulties and for the achievement of the expected benefits from management. The features that many scholars hypothesized for the two sub-systems were:

The technical sub-system is much more than the sum of the equipment in the organization; it can be identified with the process responsible for the conversion of system inputs into system outputs. Also, the conversion process must be continuously controlled to be sure that system goals can be achieved.

The social sub-system on the other hand, is much more than the set of technical control tasks to be performed by people. Such technical tasks are combined with individual jobs and with responsibilities assigned to groups. Any analysis and redesign of the social sub-system implies a revision of the jobs and of the corresponding social roles, for the implications they have on the technical sub-system and for the extent to which they enhance or reduce the quality of working life for the individuals and the groups involved in production” (Cartelli, 2007; Watson, 2004).

The above authors further argued that “the basis of socio-technical approach is that the fit is achieved by a design process aiming at the joint optimization of the subsystems; any organizational system maximizes performance only if the interdependency of the subsystems is explicitly recognized. Therefore, any design or a re-design must seek out the impact each subsystem has on the other, and planning must aim at the achievement of superior results by ensuring that all the subsystems are working in harmony” (Cartelli, 2007).