Fred Emery - Biography

Biography

Emery was born in Narrogin, Western Australia, as the son of a drover. He left school as Dux of Fremantle Boys' High in Western Australia, aged only fourteen. He gained his honours degree in science from the University of Western Australia in 1946, and joined the teaching staff of the Department in 1947. He subsequently spent nine years on the staff of the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, where he obtained his PhD in 1953. During 1951-52, he held a UNESCO Fellowship in social sciences and was attached to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in the UK.

A psychologist by training, his academic appointment at Melbourne University was where he made significant contributions to rural sociology, CPA, and the effects of film and television viewing.

He left Australia in 1957 and went to London to join the staff of the Tavistock Institute, where the majority of his early work was then done. He had worked with Eric Trist on the recently discovered concept of sociotechnical systems in 1951-52 when he was UNESCO Research Fellow. This was where he wished to be and he returned to the Tavistock Institute to continue to work with Trist. He subsequently published 'The Characteristics of Sociotechnical Systems' in 1959.

Constantly drawn towards testing social science theory in field settings, he and Eric Trist, one of his closest intellectual collaborators, and other colleagues, established "open socio-technical systems theory" as an alternative paradigm for organisational design - field-tested on a national scale in Norway, in partnership with Einar Thorsrud.

After his return to Australia, he set about designing a new method to bring in jointly optimized sociotechnical systems, one designed for diffusion of the concept rather than proof that there was an alternative to autocracy in the workplace. That method is called the Participative Design Workshop and has been used in Australia and many other countries since 1971. It totally replaces the old 9 step method used in Norway.

Sociotechnical systems is one part of a comprehensive theoretical framework called Open Systems Theory (OST). Two of Emery's and Trist's key publications were: "The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments" (1965) - which became a citation classic - and "Towards a Social Ecology" (1972). These publications are the groundwork on which Fred Emery developed OST.

He returned to Australia in 1969, and went to the Australian National University (ANU). He was a Senior Research Fellow there to November 1979, first in the Department of Sociology, RSSS, and then from 1974, at the Centre for Continuing Education. Fred has also been Visiting Professor in Social Systems Science at Wharton's Department of Social Systems Sciences and spent 1967-68 at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford.

He was awarded the first Elton Mayo award in 1988 by the Australian Psychological Society and received a DSc from Macquarie University in 1992.

At the ANU Emery continued his action research in industry and the public sector, and developed new tools for the diffusion of democracy in organisations and in communities. He also attended to a backlog of writing. Within the next 10 years he authored, co-authored, or edited 10 books for publication, and published around 30 papers.

In 1979 when his CCE Fellowship expired, efforts were made by some of his colleagues to find a permanent post for him at the ANU, but to no avail. Thus, long before their numbers swelled and their own association was formed, Emery became one of Australia's outstanding Independent Scholars. By 1985 he had published at least another 15 journal articles (a flow which continued to his last year), and governments, enterprises, students, universities, and many others, from this country and elsewhere, continued to seek his expertise, and later continued as a consultant. In this later period, he and Merrelyn Emery refined the Search Conference participative planning process (designed by Fred Emery and Eric Trist in 1958). In the final two years of his life, he co-edited the third and final volume of the "Tavistock anthology" being published by the University of Pennsylvania Press - The Social Engagement of Social Science.

Emery died at his home on 10 April 1997 at the age of 71 in Canberra, Australia.