Date of Original Version

1979

Type

Book Chapter

Published In

Assessing Organizational Change: The Rushton Quality of Work Experiment, New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1979

Abstract or Table of Contents

This book started a long time ago. In 1971 I was a visiting professor· at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. There were frequent discussions about productivity and quality of working life .. One consequence of this interest was a proposal by the School's Dean, Bob McKersie, to put together a Cornell team to develop a methodology for evaluating a series of quality of work experiments proposed by Ted Mills of the National Commission on Productivity, now at the American Center for Quality of Working Life. Mills initiated a series of experiments, conceived at the national level, to serve as demonstration projects for ways to improve productivity and the quality of working life. The Cornell team secured a grant from the Ford Foundation toward the development of an evaluation methodology for assessing these experimental projects.. Working with the Cornell team of Lee Dyer, Leo Gruenfeld, Tom Kochan, Dave Lipsky, and Bob McKersie was exciting, exhausting, and rewarding. The task was, complex, because there has not been a lot of work on organizational evaluation research, and the problem required multiple discipline inputs