The New Stream of Socio-Technical Approach and Main Stream Information Systems Research

The humanistic ideals of the Tavistock Institute produced promising insight on how to combine technical capabilities and social aspects of organizations to address both organizational and employees' needs. This conceptual essay delves into this historical background of social technical approaches. Then it will turn to the early development of socio-technical approaches within the field of Information Systems (IS), and the unfortunate decline of socio-technical design. Next, the paper argues that the socio-technical principles were imported to the field of information systems by researchers like Mumford to guide the design of information systems. However, despite their desirable theoretical principles, they failed to appeal to information systems researchers and practitioners, and subsequently lost ground to emerging best-practices like BPR in the 1990s. The decline has to do with the dramatic transformation of competitive environment and also a dearth of adoptability of the socio-technical design to accommodate rising theoretical and practical needs. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Guest Editor.