Fred Emery - Summary of His Work

Summary of His Work

Emery had a prime interest in the nature of work and in particular in how people organised themselves and the machines and other resources with which they worked, to achieve their goals and maintain their ideals and values, in the face of what he recognised as often "turbulent environments". He made regular contributions to Business Review Weekly, consistently demonstrating his critical intelligence and willingness to challenge.

He knew that being ahead of one's time can be difficult: "I am inclined to agree with Max Born, the German physicist, who reckoned that the acceptance of a new quantum theory would occur only with the passing away of the old physics professors. The acceptance will await a new generation that starts off with a question mark." One story which illustrates this (and perhaps explains some of the reluctance to grant tenure at ANU) was in 1975 when Fred and Merrelyn Emery published a book which, among other things, discussed the neurological effects of television viewing (1). In response to a press article about the book in a university publication (2), six professors and heads of departments (zoology, physiology, pharmacology, psychology, neurobiology, behavioural biology) wrote a letter (3) which strongly criticised the book and abused the authors. The six professors outlined what they considered to be "the current limits of scientifically acceptable investigation of the nervous system" and after criticising the Emerys and their work concluded that the article about the Emerys' book "reflects upon the standards of brain research done in this University by those who are in it for the sake of finding out how a nervous system really works rather than for the support or refutation of a particular social issue". It would seem that the professors' case rested primarily on their collective prestige, since not only had they not read the Emerys' book, but their specific criticisms did not stand up to scrutiny (4).

The three books that perhaps best convey his thinking are Toward a Social Ecology from 1972 with Eric Trist, On purposeful systems from 1972 with Russell Ackoff, and Futures We're In from 1977. He also edited for Penguin two volumes of readings called Systems Thinking (the initial volume was reprinted six times), which will long remain a staple resource on the origins and development of open systems thinking throughout the life sciences.