Offshore democracy: launch and landfall of a socio-technical experiment

Abstract

In the 1970s a group of social scientists attempted to create a new, more democratic form of work organization aboard the Norwegian merchant ship Balao. To do so they redesigned the physical structure of the ship to facilitate the emergence of a participatory shipboard community. This paper revisits the journeys of Balao as an example of the potential and limits of experimental democracies. It describes the processes of social miniaturization implemented in the organization of Balao's work processes, the particular ergonomics of democracy that resulted from the new model layout and the vexing question of the project's landfall: its limited impact as a ‘demonstration experiment’ for a more democratic organization of production.

Keywords:

• industrial democracy
• political demonstrations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Thomas Qvale, Ragnar Johansen and Karl Rogne for sharing with me their views and memories of Balao's experimental journey. Per Gisle Galåen offered invaluable assistance in locating relevant files and documents in the archives of the Norwegian Maritime Museum, and Harry Benford generously helped me understand some key aspects of ship superstructure design. I learned most of what I know about the work of Eric Trist and other Tavistock researchers from conversations with my colleagues Ray Loveridge and Rafael Ramirez. I am also grateful to Luis Arenas, Kenny Cupers, Uriel Fogué, Ann Kelly, Noortje Marres, Helene Ratner and Fernando D. Rubio for their insightful comments on early drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Another bulk carrier, the Høeg Mistral, and a gas tanker, the Høeg Multina, began serving as experimental ships in 1970. Several of the work-planning methods that would be tried out aboard Balao were first developed and refined on those two vessels.

2. Throughout the paper I use the British term ‘rating’ to refer to the non-licensed members of the crew and ‘officer’ to describe the licensed members. I use the term ‘crew’ to refer to the total population of seafarers, the combination of officers and ratings.

3. The boatswain (or bosun) was a non-licensed member of the crew in charge of deck operations, a sort of foreman of the deck. This figure had become contentious in previous experimental ships, and in some cases was eliminated. On Balao the role was converted, after five months at sea, to that of a ‘manager of training’.

4. The assembly also agreed, according to Johansen, that ‘the six psychological work requirements would continue to be the guidelines for the developments on board’. These requirements had been formulated by Fred Emery and Einar Thorsrud in the late 1960s. A job should fulfil six basic psychological needs: it should be challenging, provide opportunities to learn, allow for a certain degree of decision-making, provide social support and recognition, offer work that the worker can relate to his social life and possibly lead to a desirable future (see Emery & Thorsrud, 1969).

5. Navigation was still, however, the province of deck officers, as they were the only ones with the required navigation certificates. Cargo and engine maintenance work were the areas where the new planning system was implemented.

6. It is worth noting the similarities between the mode of association Tavistock researchers recommended for industrial production and the model of organization they themselves adopted for their own socio-psychological practice. According to Eric Trist, by World War II the Tavistock Clinic had become the model of ‘a professional democracy’ (1993, p. 191). Researchers routinely subjected each other to the same techniques of psychotherapeutic intervention they applied to their research subjects. The division between the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations – and later, within the Institute, between the groups led by Trist and A. K. Rice – could be seen as an example of social miniaturization in search of the most effective vehicle of social scientific work. For an internal history of the Tavistock, see Dicks (1970).

7. The genealogy of this foundational assumption can be traced back to the psychotherapeutic work of the Tavistock in the inter-war period, and even more explicitly to the involvement of many of its leading researchers in different types of psychological advisory work during World War II, where they developed new insights into the constitution and role of the ‘primary group’. For a collection of representative studies from this period, see Trist and Murray (1990).

8. The semi-autonomous groups that Trist, Bamforth and others had observed in the coalfields had typically included between forty and fifty members. The total crew of Balao was never larger than thirty members.

9. ‘The term task’, Herbst had written in 1962, ‘is used to refer to a functional requirement of the socio-technical system, [while] the term activity refers to a corresponding behaviour of a person’ (1962, p. 118, fn. 1).

10. Hierarchical organizations, those in the Tavistock tradition had long argued, are built on the fragmentation of whole tasks into their most basic components, making individual workers fully interchangeable. ‘The hierarchical system’, Herbst wrote, ‘is based on the decomposition of tasks’ (1985, p. 7). This was one of their main criticisms of Taylorist modes of production. Organizing work and groups around discrete but ‘whole’ tasks – coupled to ‘whole’ or ‘primary’ groups – was thus a critical part of their counter-hierarchical strategy.

11. Herbst later suggested that ‘[c]hanging the architectural design by itself may not be sufficient’ to achieve democracy at sea, but that ‘without this change it would not have been possible to go very far in the development of a more cooperative and equalitarian work and social organization’ (1993, p. 413).

12. Interview with Thoralf Qvale, Karl Rogne and Ragnar Johansen, Oslo, 15 September 2009.

13. These drawings represented another small revolution from traditional superstructure design. ‘One has to work more “three-dimensional”, with “feelings” for air and space’ (Schjtelein, 1983, p. 36).

14. In their 1951 study of mining work Trist and Bamforth had already employed Lewin's ‘field theory’ to explain the uncontainability of (negative) affects in the underground situation. ‘In an organization of this scale, local disturbances at specific points – resulting from the interaction of bad conditions and bad work – resonate through a relatively large social space, becoming magnified for this reason’ (Trist & Bamforth, 1951, p. 21).

15. The domesticity sought in Balao's new model interiors was the expression of a more general trend towards familial forms of interaction in the planning and conduct of work, a trend praised by the social scientists on the ship. ‘The social life on board’, Johansen wrote approvingly in 1976, when the new organizational model was largely in place, ‘seems to be more like social life within the family’ (1976, pp. 15–16).

16. The reconstitution on board Balao of a strictly domestic space also provided a further justification for the direct involvement and participation by the crew: ‘You want the crew to feel at home, and who else can define “at home”?’ (Benford, 1983, p. 55).

17. In his discussions of the ‘Foam City’ Sloterdijk describes the peculiar ‘connection between places of reunion and cooperation and places of separation and immunization (literally: of no-participation in the munera or collective obligations)’ (2004, p. 664) that characterize modern experiments in the design of political atmospheres. Whether this is peculiar to a particular era of foam sociality is unclear. ‘There is often a repetition of the individual domestic unit which leads to a strong sense of the equivalent and the communal’, writes Hodder (1990, p. 87) in his analysis of the Neolithic domus.

18. Pateman was critical of this turn to leisure, however, claiming that only work could educate individuals in forms of cooperation ‘that are “public” and intimately related to the wider society and its (economic) needs … in a way that leisure-time activities most usually do not’ (1970, p. 55).

19. In this socio-technical engineers were hardly unique. In fact, one could situate this experiment in industrial democracy within the spatialist orientation of architectural and urban design avant-gardes of the period. Busbea's description of the French spatialists’ ‘insistence on containing a complete urban repertoire of urban functions in a single massive structure and a totally self-sufficient ensemble’ (2007, p. 36) could be applied to the Balao experimenters, if we replace ‘urban’ with the more generic ‘social’. By the same token, Banham's critique of urban spatialists, his contention that in their projects ‘social spheres remain different, but instead of flat ground edge to edge they are to be piled on top of one another at the same map reference’, and that ‘simplification of architectural image, rather than any integration of life, is all that is at stake’ in their designs, could be levelled at the architecturing of Balao's ‘life space’, and specifically at the mutually exclusive juxtaposition of domains of work, social life and private habitation that characterized the project's ‘technical solution’ to the problem of work democracy (Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban futures of the recent past, quoted in Busbea, 2007, p. 45).

20. Kurt Danziger has described in detail the evolution of the category of ‘social experiment’ as it acquired a particular epistemological and methodological profile in twentieth-century psychology. ‘In former times it had been possible to speak of Utopian communities, for example, as social experiments; but by the early twentieth century an experiment meant a scientific experiment … One could not experiment on the network of indirect effects to be found in complex social institutions, in markets, in cultural products. Experimentation meant working with effects that were essentially local in character’ (Danziger, 1992, pp. 314–15).

21. More than thirty years after its conclusion, several of the researchers involved in the Balao project remembered the standard reaction of the unions to news of the ship's reorganization: ‘Yeah, okay, it works over there, because they've got extra training, extra resources, a better-equipped ship, a new superstructure, very special good leaders. But that's the project ship’ (Interview with Thoralf Qvale, Oslo, 15 September 2009).

22. In the same article, Thorsrud wrote, referring in particular to the project ships: ‘We learned too late that the projects implied frontal attacks on bureaucracy in enterprises and unions. We had not been prepared to protect them from the counterattacks that were bound to come’ (Thorsrud, 1981, p. 317, emphasis added).