Joan Woodward

Joan Woodward (* 1916, † 1971) was a British organizational and industrial sociology.

Her academic career began at the University of Liverpool. 1953-57, she led the Human Relations Research Unit at the South East Essex Technical College. From 1958 she taught and conducted research at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, where she introduced the industrial sociology as a subject. In 1970 she was appointed professor of industrial sociology. She was thus the second woman, who at that college a Chair (Full Professor ) had received.

Her work Industrial Organization ( 1965) is one of the classics of organization theory. Through this work the situational approach in organization theory received decisive impulses. He overcame the idea of ​​the " one best way " of organizational design, as it had been taught by the classical management theory of Taylor and Fayol and Max Weber's bureaucratic approach.

In their pioneering innovative research Woodward examined 100 Midland industrial companies, with the question of the relationship between production technology, manageriellem control system and economic success. The most important result was that (successful ) firms with similar production systems had similar management systems. You ordered the production techniques according to their complexity and summarized them to three main types ( small batch production, mass production, continuous or process production), which they then assigned each specific ( compatible with the production technology) forms of organization for the implementation and control of production.

Writings

• The Dockworker (1955 )
• The Sales Woman: A Study of Attitudes and Behaviour in the Retail Distribution (1960 )
• Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice (1965 )
• Industrial Organization: Behaviour and Control ( 1970)