# Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting

*Trist · Power & Equity · Human Relations · 1951 · Paywalled*

The founding text of sociotechnical systems theory, born from Tavistock Institute fieldwork in Durham coal mines. Trist and Bamforth documented how the introduction of mechanised longwall mining — which fragmented the self-organising small group structure of traditional short-wall working — destroyed the social substrate on which both safety and productivity depended. The paper introduced the principle that technical and social systems must be jointly optimised, neither subordinated to the other. It is the foundational argument that organisational performance is an emergent property of the relationship between the work design and the people doing it — a direct ancestor of both HOP and psychological safety.

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- **View the source paper:** https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001872675100400101
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