Savall's insights into the complexity of organizational life were
groundbreaking, articulating the need to examine both economic and
social factors as part of the same analysis, assessing technical and
behavioral patterns through the lens of an integrated framework. As he
has argued, there is a double-loop interaction between "the quality of
functioning and economic performance," and underestimating this
socio-economic "tension" leads inevitably to reduced performance and
losses, which he refers to as "hidden costs." This approach, referred to
as the socio-economic approach to management (SEAM), has significant
potential for our thinking about organizational diagnosis and
intervention. As Savall emphasizes, the North American tendency to cast
people as human "resources" misses the essential point that human beings
cannot be considered as simply another resource at the organization's
disposal. People are free to give or withhold their energy as they
desire, depending on the quality of formal and informal contracts and
interactions they have with their organizations. As such, the SEAM
approach focuses on human "potential," underscoring the need for
managers and their organizations to create the conditions under which
people will want to maximize their talents on behalf of the
organization. Work and People focuses on the ramifications of this
reality, as dysfunctions - the difference between planned and emergent
activities and functions - can quickly lead to a series of costs that
are "hidden" from an organization's formal information systems (e.g.,
income statements, balance sheets, budgets). As his insightful work
underscores, as organizations begin to accumulate dysfunction upon
dysfunction, they inadvertently undermine their performance and create
excessive operating costs, with lower productivity and less efficiency
than they could achieve. As readers will discover, the frameworks, tools
and ways of thinking about organizations, people and management in this
volume - in essence the background to the socio-economic approach to
organizational diagnosis and intervention - continue to hold great
promise for our attempts to create truly integrative approaches to
management and organizational improvement efforts.
